robnunnphoto.com

When you're a budding, beginner Photographer like myself, sometimes it can be difficult to come up with ideas of where to shoot and practice your photography. One idea is to take pictures while doing another activity, and one that is very photo friendly, especially for landscape practice, is Geocaching.

So I found a local Geocache, packed up my camera bag, and headed out for a long morning stroll....









So here are the pics. On this Photowalk I used my Cokin A Polarizer on every shot, and I think it really shows in the cloud detail, and look out for the water in some of the shots, the filter makes it transparent. As usual, click on the images to go to Flickr and see the bigger versions.



Don't look too close at this one! A handheld HDR (never a good idea) if you look at the large version of this photo you'll see the electricity pylon and the edges of the trees have ghosting artifacts, where Photomatix has had a little trouble lining up the slightly different images. With most handheld HDR's, as long as your shutter speed is high enough, you can get away with it, but in this case I didn't use auto-bracketing on my camera (I wasn't planning a HDR) so I was just lucky that I had two similar shots with different exposures that I could use. Lesson: always shoot an exposure bracketed shot, with a tripod, if you think there's a possibility of getting a nice HDR image out of the scene in post processing.



This one was a challenge in Photoshop. The dandelion was on the edge of the water, so I was shooting in the general direction of the Sun, meaning the subject was back lit, making it darker than I wanted, but the clouds looked good. I scratched my head for awhile thinking about how I could lighten the plant without it being obvious, and in the end I used a gradient adjustment layer, but in the radial mode. I dragged the gradient over to the flower, made the style white to transparent, then played around with the size until it looked like it would cover just the flower. In the layer blend mode menu and changed the blend to soft light, and it gave a natural lightening effect.



This one's got a few problems. I'm not close enough to the main subject, and a crop that isolates the boat is too thin. In Photoshop I don't think I've done a good job, it all looks a little grey, when I really wanted to bring out the reflections of the clouds in the water. Worth a rework.



He He! I went over the top with this HDR. It suffers from the main subjects being too far away (and there being no main subject), and I gave it the full "kelby" treatment - loads of contrast, lab colour, etc. When you look at it big its better, but I think I went too far, definitely not a "natural" look!



Bit of a HDR theme on this Photowalk! I liked the lines of the ally, and thought it was worth putting the images through Photomatix to see what it could do with the man walking down the alley. Its another handheld, so there's obvious ghosting in the big version, and the colours are very loud. More subtlety required!



At last, a normal photo! When I look at this shot of a strange house, edited in Elements, it reminds me that you don't have to go HDR for dramatic skies. I played around with the hue / saturation to take interest away from the bright car, bin and left-hand wall.



Photomatix did some odd things with the swirl traces in the water in this one. I like the sky, nice and dramatic. I like the reflection. The subject is ok. But its missing something - I should have moved around a bit and got a more interesting angle, diagonals are more dynamic, and maybe framed the picture using the bridge a few yards away. I could have set up my tripod and made a really nice HDR (or normal image) with just that extra bit of thought.



A HDR given a black and white and sepia treatment. What would have made this loads better would have been if I had backed up a bit, and used another park bench as my foreground interest. Maybe if I had also stood up instead of kneeling, so you could see over the railings and into the water better.



A curiosity shot more than anything, obviously using the thirds principle. I include it because I again used a radial gradient adjustment layer, this time to go white to black, to lighten the subject and darken everything else. My favourite new technique!



I wanted to give the impression of all these paths I'd been walking down, and the fact that my feet were killing me, but this has turned into a very green / brown HDR.



Hmmm. A very mixed bag of images. With a few of them, I'm thinking "I've done this before. Whats new?" This Photowalk has been a watershed. I know that I can walk around and take OK pictures, you know, snapshots, but that if I want my photo's to be a lot better, I need to do three things:
1) Use my tripod more.
2) Search for those unusual angles / lines / subjects, and not settle for the first composition.
3) Use a much more natural approach to post-processing.

I have to admit it though, this Photowalk was a bit of a slog. The GPS, my Garmin Etrex H, did a great job of finding the Geocache, but I should have taken into account the harbour being in the way, and not relying on the "as the crow flys" distance!

Thanks, Rob.