Moved house...

Hi, as you are reading this the mrs and i will have moved into our new home back up north. 

this post has  been written few weeks ago as i know right now i will not have the internet yet set up and i have million and one things to do... ill probably be head deep in boxes sorting our lives out. 

I hope that you are having a good weekend :)

If you live in the Lytham St Anne's area i found some info on Wikipedia about Ansdell which i found interesting. 

"Ansdell is a small village between Lytham and St Annes, on the landward side of the railway line. It has its own railway station (shared with Fairhaven), the "Ansdell Institute" club and a public Library  is famous because of Richard Ansdell RA, an artist who lived in the area and painted a large number of oils depicting hunting scenes. In fact, Ansdell enjoys the distinction of being the only place in England to be named after an artist.

Ansdell hosts the largest school in Lancashire, Lytham St. Annes High Technology College, with over 2000 students, a dedicated technology and IT department, and an integrated A-Level College. Ansdell also encompasses the southern end of Royal Lytham & St Annes Golf Club. Ansdell is also the home ofFylde Rugby Club, established in May 1920, later to be closed during the war effort, and re-opened in 1946. FRC has reared many eminent players, notably Malcolm Phillips (a former President of the club) who earned 25 England caps, and Bill Beaumont who earned 34 caps before retiring in 1982.

Polarising Filter.

 Hi,
Today is just a quick post, but wanted to try and show the importance of using a circular polarising filter. Here you can see from a shot of London from the View at the Shard i had to shoot through a window.

This image you can see the reflections in the glass from inside of the building. 

By using a polarising filter, it is not perfect, but seriously cuts out the reflections and so saves you much more time having to edit less :0)

At the moment I'm using a cheap circular screw on filter, but will be soon ordering a square shaped, circular filter by LEE filters as the quality will be much greater. I look forward to post when i have images to show.

Like always if you have any questions please feel free to post in the comments. 

Hope that you enjoy the rest of your Sunday... 

Lee

The view from the Shard London HDR image break down.

Hi, hope your keeping well and have had a good weekend. 

Here are some images from the previous London landscape image that i have posted. 

I wanted to show the images used to create the final image. 

I clamped the camera down to the handrail using the Manfrotto Magic arm and using a cable release i rattled a few bracketed frames. 

I have included the metadata on each image, but other then converting to jpg, they are straight from the camera and in the order the camera took them and i added to Nik softwares HDR efex pro 2.

Here is the first base image. In face i quite like this exposure but i personally prefer having the extra range to play with. 

The View at The Shard London.

Hi, how are you? 

I hope that you are well, while I'm stuck out at work on the rig for a month....

Last week for the Mrs's birthday we took a trip to the new viewing platform in the Shard building- London.
72 floors high you get an incredible view of London.
You have to book in advance, and pick your time slot, i was particular in that i wanted sunset to dark.
After googling the timings i was happy that we would catch the setting sun, but just had to have our fingers crossed for the weather :0)

Pregnancy.

Hello... 

I hope that you are well and have had  a great weekend.

The Mrs and i are extremely happy to announce that there will be a little person with us soon :0)

Pregnancy - Amanda and Rikki.

Here are some images from a recent shoot of my Cousin Rikki and his Girl friend Amanda, who are now the proud parents to a wonderful little son called Harvey.

Amsterdam by boat.

As alot of followers of this blog will know i head over to Amsterdam at least twice a year,

It is such an amazing city, spilling out at the seams with art and design. 

My favourite way to view this city has to be on the canals by boat. Im very lucky that my cousin and her fella have their own boat. 

Grab some beers, head out and enjoy the diverse and interesting sites of Amsterdam!

Carcassonne Castle edit.

Happy Sunday... 

Here i wanted to show how i got to this final image of Carcassonne. 

This is made up of 3 different exposure images. 

It is technically a HDR image, but it has not been tone mapped, i used the exposures as different layers and masked them in. 

Here is the base image as it was out of the camera, 

Adding Leaves to an image...

Happy New Year!

I wanted to show a subtle part of the above image.
I felt when looking at this scene, the background just behind Myself and the Mrs, was to similar to our clothing and wanted to break it up abit.
With large piles of fallen leaves on the ground,  it would be good fun to add some of these.

Here is the in camera image,
Lots of distractions, sign posts and rubbish on the ground.
Where our dark tops are, they blend in with the background around us.

With the camera set on a trip pod, i got the Mrs to throw some leaves in the air.

Another shot of some leaves.
As the camera is on a tripod, it makes editing much easier.

As im now using the Nikon D800 camera, the file sizes are crazy large, and so instead of importing every image as layers into the one file, I simply made selections of just the leaves that i wanted and moved them onto the final image.

As always, if you have any comments or questions, id love to hear from you.

Thanks

Lee

The Edit of the Tash image.

Following this image, i thought i would post on how i got to this final image from the out of camera shot below. I have included many screen grabs to try and explain how i got to the finished image. 

Here is the original image, taken in my front room. You can see the TV on the left, but knowing that i wanted to do a cut out, i placed a piece of white card behind me to make life easier later on in photoshop.