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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…

The urge to time lapse hasn’t taken hold recently. I’ve kind of put them to one side as my camera gets a lot older and I want it to last until I can afford to replace it with a D7000 or similar. And doing 2000+ shutter clicks every 15 seconds isn’t going to help its cause much either, so to preserve my gear, I’m trying out other stuff!

That other stuff is High Dynamic Range (HDR). After my success with the Las Vegas holiday shot, the recent volcanic eruption in Chile has provided Kiwi’s with some cracker sunsets and sunrises, but these have mostly been in the South Island and haven’t really graced our skies with as much drama until last night.

I spied the sunset in my rear vision mirror as I was driving home from work. I got home and deliberated as to whether or not to head out of my usual spot for sunsets, which is an inlet in the harbour at Conifer Grove, complete with a path and lone tree – excellent foreground interest! Or should I head further south to Karaka and shoot from the Harbourside housing subdivision with more water in the foreground and less lead in lines. I stuck to what/where I know and after 20 minutes, I’d missed what I thought would have been the best part of the sunrise but I fired off enough shots to make two very decent HDR images of the sunset last night.

What I love about these images is

• Foreground interest with the path and tree
• Reflection on the Mudflats (I need to work on my ability to control tides!)
• Dramatic Skies
• Realistic looking HDR

And when I’ve processed them, I’ve tried to keep them as realistic as to what my eye saw as possible. There is nothing I hate more than an overblown HDR image. And so, I give to you (edited in Nik Efex HDR Pro, Nik Viveza and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom) the finished product!

And so there you have it – a gorgeous HDR sunset that isn’t over cooked and looks just like how I saw it last night

Taken on a Nikon D200 with Tokina AF-X 12-24mm f4 Lens with 7x Bracketed exposures per HDR.

These images are Copyright © 2011 Allie Hogg – Please do not reproduce them anywhere!

So, how did I do this?

I set up my camera, on a tripod. Don’t laugh. I connected a wired remote so that I would have zero camera shake taking the photos. I set my camera to ISO100, aperture priority mode and dialed in f16 as my desired aperture. I then set bracketing exposure to take seven exposures with 1 stop difference between -3 and +3. That way I had -3, -2, -1, 0, +1, +2, +3 in the camera. With the camera in aperture priority mode, it adjusted my shutter speeds as required for the available light and whats why you get the whispy cloud effect because if you skip through the seven exposures, the clouds are moving.

I imported the raw images into Lightroom and then exported to Nik Efex HDR pro. I selected a landscape preset. Don’t ask me which one because I can’t remember and adjusted a few sliders until I was happy with the effect.

Next I took it across to Photoshop and adjusted the levels and used the healing brush to hide the fact my sensor is so filthy it could give my mouth a run for its money. With all the dust spots gone, it was into Nik Viveza to adjust the colours. I added a few spots where I boosted the warmth, reds, saturation etc to give the finished product. And then back to Lightroom one final time for a vignette to draw you in!

Time to Shoot : About two minutes per HDR image

Time to Edit : About an hour, give or take!

I’ve always wanted to have a crack at this, but never quite got it right. Anyway, while in Las Vegas a couple of months ago (seems like a lifetime!) I rattled off 7 shots from my camera bracketed -3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3 exposure from my hotel room balcony.

Tonight, I finally sat down and gathered up the courage to make them into an HDR photograph and with a curves adjustment in Photoshop, I present to you, my first HDR effort! YAY!

The Imperial Palace, Las Vegas, Nevada!