Going Postal

posts, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

What a great weekend,

A terrible Friday…my first really bad day at work for about a year resulted in me feeling stressed, dejected and generally useless.

But, the sun was (and is) shining, bringing insanely hot weather to the Scottish highlands, I’ve been in Nairn for a good few years and have never known it to be this hot. As a result we went to the beach for most of the weekend and spent a lazy, sunny couple of days, chilling out and enjoying the amazing weather. Photography with your shirt off is the best way to de-stress!

I got a good few shots, the best of which you can see on my flickr stream. I took the advice from Photofocus of always working at -0.3 on the exposure compensation which worked like a charm, and helped preserve most of the highlights in the shot above. I’ve also got hold of Nik Colour Effects Pro plug in for Photoshop, which is an awesome tool and I’ve had great fun playing with some of the effects. When you combine a HDR with the 'polaroid' output from Nik, some curves, blur and saturation, you get the shot above...which I'm quite pleased with.

I also took the plunge and went pro on Flickr….best $25 I’ve ever spent – I was nearing the 200 shot limit of my free subscription and I’m loving the stats…nearly 5,000 views on my Flicrk photostream…wow.

London (again) this week and then hopefully some fishing at the weekend. Definate camera fodder.

Oh…and if you get time, check out the Pentax K7 preview on dpreview…integrated HDR and movies? Looks interesting and sets the bar high for the Olympus’s E-3 successor which is allegedly in development.