I go camping every year with some friends, and we found a gorgeous campsite near Chepstow, right next to Offa’s Dyke, a great frontier earthwork built by Offa, King of Mercia from 757 to 796 A.D.
It’s a splendid campsite with an honesty box, looking out over a gorgeous wooded valley. I wouldn’t be surprised if we return next year.
We had a great time, and I earned the mockery of my campmates by taking my camera along and getting up at dawn with my tripod to take pictures of the site.
Later on, I redeemed myself by getting this picture of Little Dave failing to catch a ball in quite a spectacular fashion:
Pic 1 Technical info: iso 200, f/11, tripod, 3 shot HDR processed in photomatix pro
Pic 2 Technical info: iso 200, f/4.5, 1/800s, handheld
6 Responses
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Great picture!
How can you keep this picture so sharp for 3 different shots?
Thanks.
John
In my case, a tripod and an infra-red remote (costs about £20 - cannon RC-2) - but you could do it with the AEB setting on the camera and the timer function.
Ta!
Thanks, Dan. One more question regarding HDR in general. Do you normally touch up the three original images thru Photoshop before sending to Photomatix? (or is this step needed?)
John
Hi again
No - I’m not even sure if it’s possible because they are raw images (.CR2 format from my 450d). I pull them straight into photomatix, and then afterwards twiddle with the settings a bit in GIMP (a freeware photoshop-alike) to remove dust spots etc, and sometimes mess about with contrast/saturation.
Thanks, Dan.
One more question again for HDR in general. How do you handle “auto white balance” when taking HDR images? Do you normally turn it off (and how do you set it manually)?
John
White balance doesn’t matter so much with raws - you can do it all in post processing, without losing quality. With a normal raw, I’ll tweak it in my raw softwhere when converting to JPG, but with a HDR, you can tweak it in photomatix.
It’s on the first big window that opens, at the bottom. You can chose a setting, then choose a raw to preview the results. If none of the default settings will do, “custom” allows you to bang in a number so you can set it however you want.
I must admit, I rarely bother doing anything with it, though. I’ll experiment with paying a bit more attention to it and see what happens