Graham Leggate

Love the museums in London. Below is a HDR taken by balancing the camera on some stair railings. For this type of shot a wide angel lens would have been great. In any case here is my effort with a 24-70 (Nikon f/2.8) on a cropped sensor body (Nikon D90).

I eventually got around to editing a HDR Panoramic version of the National Centre for the Performing Arts. What a fantastic building!

Below is one of the images taken of the “egg” in Beijing. Also known as the National Centre for the Performing Arts, or the Opera House.  The Centre, is a dome of titanium and glass surrounded by an artificial lake. The building seats 5,452 people in three halls and is almost 12,000 m² in size, I was really surprised on how big the building is. Shooting on a cropped sensor with a 24-70 you can’t actually get the entire building in a single frame. I ended up shooting a bunch of images to stitch together, which I will do when I get some time. Below is a HDR of 3 images taken at 2 stops apart.

I have started slowly processing some images from our recent holiday, which now feels like it was ages ago (thanks to work!).The image below is taken along the Riviera Santa Maria Elisabetta. The building with the green dome is called Parrocchia Santa Maria Elisabetta, which is a Catholic church.

Matt, Kheng and I popped out today quickly at lunch to take a quick photo of an old shop in Osbourne Park. Was a little difficult to get close too, as it is all fenced off. The light was pretty harsh at lunch time today, so I wasn’t expecting to come away with anything useful. However I have an image to post. The image started out as a HDR, but then turned into the B&W… probably didn’t need to do the HDR Anyway, it took on a life of it’s own once loaded into PS.

Well, I was doing some more reading on HDR techniques and I think I have learnt some new tricks. So I thought I would post an imaging that I was playing with tonight. One of the tips I learnt tonight was that if you use Photomatrix the main controls to “play” with are Strength, Light Smoothing (keeping the radio button selected as far to the left you can go, whilst mainting a high Strength setting, gives a great effect), also the Microcontrast helps a lot too. The other useful tip I picked up tonight is to open images up in Adobe Bridge, and then from there you can open an image in Camera Raw, which is great.

Finally I got out this morning to do some photo’s. I have been pretty keen to shoot an abandoned old car in a national park near by. The idea came from a photo Matt has of it, and also recently I’ve seen some impressive HDR’s from a guy called David Constable. Well worth having a look at his gallery if you like HDR’s, he seems to have mastered the art. Anyway, I thought I would try to do a HDR of the car. I wish the sky was a little more moody, and I was thinking of making it moody in Photoshop… but I don’t have the best photoshop skills, so I thought I would leave that alone, and go out again when the right sky is around. It was a fun morning, Amelie came out with me and there were around 50 Kangaroos about, so she was really happy.

The picture below is a blend of 5 images, taken at 38mm, f13, 1/13, 1/15, 1/25, 1/40, 1/80.

I’m still sorting out my library of pictures in Aperture, so from time to time I come across pictures which I think worth showing, The image below was taken down in Esperence a few of years ago, and I had bracketed many of the shots. So I thought I would attempt another HDR. So here it is.

I decided to use a few of the bracketed shots to make a couple of HDR images and then just create a smaller panoramic with those. I think it has turned out a bit more pleasing, there is generally better contrast and the sky is less blown out. Also a tight crop seems to have helped the image.