Photo taken in the garden on one of those rare sunny days here.

A slightly long walk away from the house I found these fields ripe.

I was out with the long lens one day and captured a few shots of the sheep and their pups who were in a field behind out vet.

Hello, this is my first proper new photo in ages!! Sorry for being away for so long. Just lack of time, lack of motivation and lack of access to Photoshop CS. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a few more done before my trial runs out in 12 days time.

This was taken in the fields near my house after a we got covered in snow (for the first time in years) in February 2009. We don’t get much snow here so I made the most of it and took lots of pics.

This is just a test post. It’s for me to check that I can blog from Flickr directly into my new blog here at Squashy Frog Photography.

By the way, this is a mosaic of some of my better photos.

This is my second attempt at an HDR image. The photo shows the farmhouse at Boxham Farm in Edenbridge in Kent, UK. I took the shot while on one of my early morning walks in the local fields. As you can see it was a cold, cold morning but it’s worth it when you get such a great tree in the wonderful sunlight. Unfortunately I was only carrying my 18-50mm lens and could step any further back to get the whole of the tree in shot, so alas this won’t make it into my portfolio. But ignoring that I really like the shot and experimenting with HDR for the first time was fun. Flickr liked it too, so much so it made #11 for 22-Feb- 2008 on Explore!

The way I created this HDR (High Dynamic Range) shot was from one RAW file. I saved it out from Camera RAW to a TIFF file and created 3 images one at -2 EV, one at 0 EV and another as +2 EV (so 3 exposures, one dark, one normal and one light). I then dragged these into Photomatix, generated the HDR then tonemapped it. It took a bit of fiddling with the tonemapping settings but eventually I got the result above. The first thing I’ve noticed is that the clouds are far more dynamic but this is at the cost of a lot of added noise. I’m not sure I really like this style of HDR but it’s an interesting alternative and was fun to try. I’ll be posting a more detailed entry on how it was, so please check back soon.

The original photo is below, so please compare it.