HDR again (on my own...la..la)

the rain comes, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Another good weekend,

Off to Loch Scardroy in the Highlands on Saturday, the weather was incredibly changeable, heavy showers, wind and occasional bursts of sunlight. This made for great, moody shots of the loch – what a change from last weekend which was amazing.

The shot above was a HDR, exposed from a single RAW with 5 jpegs running from -2EV to +2EV blended in the brilliant Photomatix. The workflow from Lightroom 2 into Photomatix is really easy and the versatility you get once into Photomatix is fantastic. After a year of looking at HDRs, I’m leaning more towards a ‘realistic’ type of tone-mapping rather than the crazy ‘surrealistic’ HDRs. Whilst I get less plaudits on flickr for a more realistic shot, that’s just where I am right now…

Interestingly, it was a black and white shot, entitled ‘post’ that went down most successfully with the flickr population, getting more buzz than the shot above. That’s the first time I’ve posted one HDR and one B&W shot, shared them with similar groups and the less processed shot has been seen as ‘better’ than the fancy HDR image. Admittedly, I only get this level of granularity from the flickr pro membership which I’ve only had a week…ach I digress.

In other news, I’ve been looking at the Pentax K7, it looks a lovely camera and the main feature I was interested in was the integrated HDR functionality. It looks cool, but I’ve opted out and am sticking with Olympus. My main issue with the K7’s HDR function is that it appears to output the HDR as a jpeg file…which is a turn off for me because I’d like to see a blended RAW or several RAW files to edit. Despite this, if I didn’t have an SLR, I’d probably go for this camera, it looks innovative and has a very complete feature-set…certainly setting the bar in the mid range SLRs at the moment.

This weekend doesn’t bode well for photography, family dinners and not much planned…still I’ll hopefully get down to the beach or around the river to shoot something....photo's I mean...