English Country Garden

Well if truth be told it's more like an English rural city garden but Oxford is very much a city of the countryside. This was pictured in the Botanic Gardens and though we visited there in the middle of winter, it's still a fantastic place to walk around and find a bit of peace. This is an HDR shot from 2 exposures (0,-2) and was largely post-processed in Photoshop and Nik Color Efex Pro.

As I alluded to in the comments section of the previous picture, the football result on Sunday did go my way and my team was victorious. Had an amazing day because of the result, however it's left me pretty exhausted and creatively a bit unenergetic. So this is quite a short blog today but will have plenty to talk about on Thursday, with it being a couple of days away from another exhibition of mine.

Oxfordshire

I can't remember the last time I posted a picture that wasn't an HDR and I am quite ashamed of that. It was never my intention to become just an HDR photographer and if I had a plan it was to be 50/50 HDR to single image picture ratio. I guess I just always like seeing how a scene will look in HDR and I'm intrigued how an HDR will look when you work on it for a while. I think it's the post-processing I enjoy most about HDR actually. I really enjoy working on photos with the computer and HDR lends itself to this to a great extent.

So as you can guess, this picture is not an HDR and was a single take. It is quite vague to call it Oxfordshire, but I thought it was quite a representative scene of this county. Of course, this is in the city that Oxfordshire is named after, Oxford itself. I still believe in not doing HDR for the sake of it and this picture did not scream to me that it needed the HDR touch. It was taken from inside the grounds of the magnificent Botanic Gardens in Oxford and the river you see to the right is the River Thames, the longest river in the UK. This picture was processed mainly in Lightroom but also in Photoshop CS5 and Viveza 2.