Leigh on Sea

 A sunny and relatively warm stroll in Leigh on Sea before a visit to their Camera club. The elevated walkway over the railway is showing signs of weathering but the lines are still attractive for a few pattern images.It was high tide so not much scope for capturing the bathing pools.

Cambridge HDR with FX100

 I am still trying to decide if the in-camera HDR on the sony FX100 is worth using - it certainly does a good job on high contrast scenes but I am not convinced it is better than doing HDR from a single RAW file. Three separate exposure images recombined with HDR Pro would probably give better result but this is not an option when a tripod cannot be used as in Cambridge Colleges. The left-hand images are the best adjustments from a single image (jpeg), righthand are the HDR output from the camera. I need to do a raw image as well as the in-camera HDR.

Madingley War Cemetery

 I had never looked at the stone used to construct the Amereican War Cemetery until I visited today with David. With his interest in geology, we found some wonderful textures and objects in the Portland limestone. It invites use in montages of the views and structures at the War Cemetery. The general view was taken today and shows how easy it is to make autumn out of spring colours.

Ashridge Bluebells

 The bluebells are just about at their best at Ashridge Estate - maybe a couple more days to open the remaining buds.

Kingfisher Dive

A composite from today's kingfisher watch

Rye Meads

Male kingfisher

Female Kingfisher

 The male and female Kingfishers changed over incubating at 11 am and the female did not return during the rest of our visit (till 2pm). The male came out once and had a bath before returning to the nest hole.

Road that Never Sleeps

This is just a reminder to myself not to book anything in Smethwick during the week in future years. The journey there on Thursday afternoon took over 3 hours as opposed to under 2 hours on normal roads. So I thought I would beat the traffic on Friday by leaving at 5.30am but, as you see, there was already a traffic jam through the road works on the M6.

Reed Warblers

 Late afternoon at Fowlmere RSPB reserve - the  Reed Warblers were busy collecting nesting material.

X-Fest 2013

Some images from X-Fest at Santapod yesterday. Not as extensive as last year but the weather conditions were great. Used small flash unit to lighten the faces etc

More HDR Trials

 A few more goes with the trial HDR software - mostly as notes for future comparisons etc. The top two pairs show the 'correctly' exposed images (no compensation) adjusted as best I can in Lightroom and on the right the 3-image 2-stop compensation set combined. With fairly low tonal range images the differences are not that marked but with images with high tonal range such as inside the nail-makers workshop, the HDR Darkroom comes into its own.