Sunset at Port Sutton Bridge

I wanted to try out HDR.

After approx 4 years of practicing photography i had never created a HDR image.

HDR or High Dynamic Range images are typically created by merging 3 or more photos together. In order to the create the images attached and HDR images in general;

I took the first photo exposing the light parts of the photo such as the sky, doing this leaves the darker parts such as the foreground or subject underexposed/dark, if this photo was the finished image it would be a silhouette

The 2nd photo was exposed for the darker elements of the photo, in the images attached this would of been the river, river bank etc doing this over exposes the sky to an usable level (this is known as blown out)

The 3rd photo taken was exposed in the middle for both light and dark parts of the scene.

The composition was the original purpose for the image; i wanted capture the port, bridge and power station  in one scene.

I love the sky and how it and the cranes are reflected in the water.

I hope you enjoy.

A Holga, Halo and Hunstanton all in one day

Picture a cold, very cold, Saturday afternoon on the deserted Norfolk coast of England, now picture a setting sun and a cold face, you've now got the gist of this post.

I decided to limit myself to using my Holga Lens.

A Holga lens with a Canon EF mount gives my modern digital SLR the ability to create images of a 50 year old Chinese camera.

Holga's have a cult following due to the quality of the images; soft focus, dark corners and lens flare, which are all attributes photographers usually do not want but with the popularity of phone photography and apps such as Instagram, Holga's and other 'toy' camera's are now proving to be popular.

I picked up my Holga lens before the summer (you might of missed the summer if you blinked) for around 8GBP and although it proves to be a bit of a novelty it comes out of the camera bag every now and then.

Back to Hunstanton.

The sun was starting to come down and walking along the beach, i thought i could finally attempt to shoot into the sunlight to create a halo around the subject; Laura in this case, by placing Laura directly in front of the camera, effectively blocking the sunlight light entering my lens. Firstly this creates a silhouette, although silhouettes can be cool, this is not entirely what i wanted. To solve this i used the built in flash to create some fill flash, balancing the ambient light of the scene with Laura's face lit by the flash.

Another image taken on the day.

I slightly softened/lightened the Vignetting (darkening of corners) at the top right corner due to it being overpowering and looking odd opposite the sun in the top left corner.

Thanks for looking.