Still Waters

Arnside, Kent Estuary, originally uploaded by Bay Photographic.

After driving to Warrington to buy some frames today, I returned to Arnside just as the sun was dipping below the trees in the grounds of Ashmeadow. I took a few bracketed shots along the foreshore, hoping that I could capture the way the light was glowing off the water, and the streaked clouds blowing in from the Irish Sea.
When my need for central heating outweighed my desire to take photos I returned home and processed them in Photomatix, using the 'shade' setting in white balance as well as the 'Ghosting Artefacts Reduction'. I find tonemapping is easier in version 2.5.4, which I downloaded last week. I use a strength of around 70, and saturation a little higher at 75. The tone, colour, and micro smoothing and contrast settings depend on the exact nature of the shot, but I often find that in low light shots I have to use more highlight and shadow smoothing than I would like to avoid noise in dark areas. The 'high' or 'very high' settings for light smoothing suit my subjects, and the images that come from my S2 pro, more than the lower levels which seem to create too much of a halo effect.
I then opened the image in Photoshop CS2 and used 'Transform / Distort' to pull out the top corners a little, as my Tokina 12-24 (at 12mm) had created some distortion at the edges.
Finally I tidied it up and sharpened in Digital Image Pro.
I was quite pleased with the final result of all this fumbling around, though I daresay any expert in HDR or Photoshop would scoff at my efforts.
Still, I'd rather practice being a mediocre photographer than spend another minute in IKEA.

Storm warning, seems like a heavy rain...

Arnside storm, originally uploaded by Bay Photographic.

...sang Bonnie Raitt in the only country and western song ever to have invoked any emotion whatsoever in me. The lyrics came back to me this week in Arnside as yet another flock of black, rain laden clouds swept over the town from the West.
I took this picture last year, before I discovered the delights of Photomatix and HDR, and in an effort to make the clouds more pronounced, I spent ages cutting the photograph in half along the line of the rooftops, and then increasing the contrast in the top half, and lightening the buildings in the lower half. At the time I thought this was a pretty cool way of achieving a differential exposure of the image, and that it made Arnside look like a small town in Transylvania.
On reflection, it was more like using scissors and glue to make a collage for my Dracula project at primary school.