Castle and Gardens

Nikon D70 @ 11mm, 1/3 to 25 secs, f/4.2, ISO 200

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Thanks for all your comments on yesterday's shot, glad you all seemed to like it.

I should perhaps explain a little more about HDR (High Dynamic Range) images for anyone who hasn't heard of them. It's quite simple really: you take a scene with a really high dynamic range - one that the camera can't cope with - and compensate by taking a variety of images with different exposures. Make sure that you expose for the highlights and the shadows, and get a few exposures in between (I don't know enough about this yet to know the optimum settings to use). You then use a program that'll combine these images and make some tone mapping adjustments. I've been using photomatix (as opposed to what I called it yesterday: photomatrix!) but I know that you can do this in PSCS2 as well.

You can check out the flickr HDR pool for a lot of shots with this effect. Most of them are overdone and completely unnatural looking, but there are the occasional phenomenal shots that make a visit definitely worthwhile.

This one is of Edinburgh casle (if you didn't already know!), taken from Princes Street. The lights on the castle are incredibly powerful, and so a normal exposure for this kind of scene is near impossible. The HDR technique allowed me to combine 7 images, with shutter speeds ranging 1/3 sec to 25 secs (in one stop increments).