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I did this last year and got a handful of most excellent shots, and so the opportunity came up again this year to go on a walk. I decided on the walk at the viaduct again because I got some great shots last year and since then the ‘tank farm’ area has undergone extensive redevelopment – from industrial tank farm to large inner-city park and dining precinct.

And for this walk, I’d managed to convince underwater photographer, Tara, to join me. And being women who march to their own beat, we did the walk backwards!

Because the Oval Ball World Cup is being held in New Zealand, the Wynyard Quarter (as the redeveloped Tank Farm is now called) was buzzing with fans and the general population even on a grey and slightly miserable day.

As walkers, we photographed marching bagpipe and drum bands and Clydesdale horses! And when the weather turned bad, Tara decided that we should head inside and play with our food instead.

I’m personally happy – I had a tiny wee play with my ND filters. Instead of carrying a tripod, I had packed a small wheat bag (obtained from any physio/pharmacy/supermarket) to keep the camera still and steady.

Working in lightroom will keep me occupied for some time and I hope to have something to enter for camera club in less than a fortnight and something to enter into WWPWD competition as well!

• My WWPWD Set on Flickr
• Tara’s WWPWD Set on Flickr

It was also decided that we will do this again and not wait another 12 months for Photo Walk Day

Lately I’ve noticed I’m sliding beyond the point of no return. The first time this happened, I was watching the royal wedding and I saw the cathedral and I had two thoughts: what an awesome location and what awesome light.

It happened again on Tuesday night. Twice. Once at camera club where I saw an image and thought if it was composed differently, with an ND filter to slow the motion of passing people, converted to black and white and with a high grain, you’d have a completely different shot you’d think was shot in some exotic location overseas. I’m going to try that shot, so this paragraph is just to tease you all of what I’ve got planned.

And then again on Tuesday night I saw the awesome light at the train station in the misty rain with just the lights above the platform and the blur of a passing train. I will need to go back there and take some security (refer: husband) as I don’t feel safe shooting in that area by myself. I also saw a heavily tagged shop front and a dark figure out front and thought that yes, I could do something what that too.

Tuesday night gave me three potential locations in the city, two within a short drive from home.

And I bombed on Tuesday night at Club so the less said about that, the better.

We had a workshop on Tuesday night as well – bracketing exposure for HDR. If you’ve read some of my earlier posts, you know I’m no longer a stranger to HDR photography. I’m even picking good times/places to do HDR now as well. But I digress.

Bracketing exposure. Great to do when shooting anything yellow, orange or red. Also for stuff that can blow out easily like crystal or glass. I got bored pretty quickly so I got out the lens baby muse and prompted a whole lot of ‘OMG shes shooting so close’ and ‘what the hell is on her camera!’ comments from everyone.

This post is going to suck because I keep jumping around. Hang on, I’m getting somewhere with all this.

I bracketed 3 exposures for each of these two photos and combined them in Nik HDR Efex. One of which I then adjusted with a lightroom preset of mine usually reserved for fashion shoots and the other I tweaked in fractalius and photoshop.

And for the one done in Fractalius and Photoshop:

This effect was done with two layers of the original image. The bottom layer was ‘fractalius’ to my liking. Pretty damn similar to what you see here, but then with the top layer, I set it to overlay at around 75% and then masked out the background so that the only part being overlayed was the marbles themselves.

I’m not a fan of fractalius by any stretch of the imagination, I’ve seen it overused and abused by the advance grade peeps at camera club, but I think I have found a happy balance and this might appear in the intermediate grade in the near future…

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