And then there was HDR . . .

I know I'm WAAAYYYY behind the times as far as new age photographers go, but I will quite happily admit, that today, for the very first time, I have made HDR images. So I thought I'd put them here, though I don't think many people see this regularly. Its kinda nice though to at least have a place for myself to keep track of what I've been up to, with very visible dates attached. 

So it was a wonderfully stormy day today, but the storm had given way to sunshine by the time I crawled up to Mt Tolmie with my camera. All that was left of the foul weather was some wicked wind that I had to contend with, so I only took a couple photos, using my bracketing on the camera, starting off at a -0.7ex then with a +/- of a full 2 stops just to see what could be done here. So this is what I got quickly before admiting defeat against the wind and going home again. 

Facing north, with a circular polarizer and the sun at my side gives the sharpest colour. Despite the shot being at mid-day, there is more information both in the dark areas and the light.

A trickier direction to try and shoot mid-day, more or less straight a the sun, there is less colour available, and my polarizer didn't so much for me. The best part of this shot though is the contrast of the clouds glowing over the city.

Prime example with a circular polarizer of the difference that is made just by the direction you face in respect to the sun. 90 degree angles give the best results. Hard to believe really that these two shots were within a minute of each other, from more or less the same spot.

So now I`m sitting here with the Photoshop CS5 for Dummies on my lap, I borrowed it from the library, and I`m going to go explore some more photoshop features now. I still find that editing is not nearly as dynamic as in Lightroom though, and I suspect this Adobe Bridge thing can help me out, I just haven`t nailed all these things down yet.