Walking Season

The sun is shining, the sunsets have a warm glow, interesting shadows abound. At last, summer. Apparently we skipped spring after a 6 month winter this year (it snowed at some time in every month in West Lothian from November 2009 to April 2010!). I dont remember that happenning before.

But here we are, it's time to get the hiking boots on and start yomping about the countryside, looking for new locations. To make it even more fun, I bought a dog over the winter (for about the cost of two lenses - did I do the right thing!!). So, as I hadn't seen my trusty native guide, TB, in quite a while and she was keen to see the new pup, I asked her to show me a part of Edinburgh that I've always wanted to visit but had never found the way into - the Cammo Estate.

You've probably seen it if you've driven from Newbridge to Barnton. The big tower on the left with no apparent purpose. I've always found it curious and wondered if Rapunzel was up there waiting for me to give her hair a wee tug. So, font of all geographic and historical knowledge TB came to the rescue - she's been hiking round there for years.

Cammo is an ancient estate that was deliberately run down to ruins by the last owner before being set on fire by vandals in the 1970s. It was a huge estate with many ancient building, the grounds were the first landscaped gardens in Scotland and the great tower I had seen from the road was a water tower. Only the tower remains in it's former glory, the rest has been reclaimed by nature and dog walkers. We had a good walk around the place, with the wee pup, Oscar having a whale of a time bounding throughthe long grass an dpretending to be brave. TB told me that the place was supposed to be haunted buut would tell me no more. Consider my interest piqued! On the way round I spotted 3 angles that though would make good images (no camera with me!!!!) and decided I would return soon.

3 days later, having read up on the ghost stories (masochist!) off I set, sans dog, avec camera. No sign of the white lady, the man in the top hat or the phantom dogs, but I did jump at every rustle in the bushes and tried to laugh at myself. It can be a lonely and spooky feeling place! First up was the main shot the classic scene of the tower itself. I was lucky and found some tractor tyre lines through the crops to act as lead in lines and was torn between a slow shutter speed to blur the wind blown crops and clouds scudding in the sky or a fast shutter to freeze the detail of the foreground crop leaves. So, this is a digital world and shots are free - I took both. In the end I went somewhere in the middle and got a little movement in the crops and some pretty nice clouds. Very pleased with the shot in the end.

Next I struck out for the tree covered hill, aiming to use a couple of low hanging branches and tree trunks to frame the tower. Hmmm... didn't work out as I had envisaged it. Never mind. I reckon a summer early morning could be good though if you could get some mist shrouding the tower. On the way back I thought about an arty shot, using the wide angled lens to curve the tower round the trees on the hill. It needed to be HDR though to get the detail in the stone. It works quite well but I thought it was a wee bit cheesy. Still, a keeper.

Last shot was back down by the car park where there is a meadow with some ancient and impressive trees. The sun was nice and low by now, kissing the leaves of the trees with bright warm light and I rattled off quite a few shots from different angles. Finally, when I was happy with the composition, I decided to counteract the strong contrast of the late sun by taking another HDR shot (or seven shots to be precise). There was a little wind and this, combined with the movement of the clouds gave the whole seen a slightly soft but pleasing feel. I often use the minor movements between HDR shots to give a softened other-worldly feel to an image. Not what HDR is designed for, but I like it! another shot that I was pleased with.

So I went for three shots, got two of them and a new one and all good enough to sell on my website PhotoForMyWall.com. That's a pretty good strike rate and really brings home the value of walking the scene and envisaging your shots ahead of photographing them. In all, the whole shoot took less than an hour, which is incredibly fast work.

I liked Cammo. Me and the dog will be back, again, without the camera.

HDR - a simple walk through

HDR... tremble, quake. Have you heard of it? It sounds terribly complicated and most beginner photographers I know think this is something far beyond them. Google it and you will find out all about dynamic ranges, optics, RGB, CMYK, computer algorithms and a hundred other big poncy words. Look at the images - some are stunning, most are just plain wierd and apocolyptic looking, overly saturated and almost cartoonised.

HDR is one of my favourite techniques, but it gets a lot of bad press for being "cheating" and is often rediculously overdone. Actually anyone can do it with any digital camera and it is really easy! Here is my quick guide to doing it.

First of all, how does it work,... actually I don't care. If you do, then feel free to bore yourself for hours on the internet without getting any better images. It is NOT a cure all for a lack of talent or patience. In fact to get a good quality HDR image, you really need to be extra careful about composition as you are drawing attention to everything in the image.

So why use it? Very basically, a camera cannot differentiate shadows and highlights like the human eye can, using HDR letes you show up all the detail you could actually see, without worrying about the limitations of your camera. It lets you make very detailed images, correctly exposed at all areas of the image and with as rich or pale colours as you like. Use it when you have no access to filters and there is a strong difference in light between the brightest and darkest parts of the image. The main use is in landscapes.

How do you do it? OK forget all the techy explanations you saw when you were boring yourself on the internet earlier. This is how to do it. Set up your camera on a tripod. You are going to take multiple pictures but the camera MUST not move at all between images. Not even a tiny bit. There's no getting round it, you need tripod and preferably zero to no wind.

1. Set up the tripod, compose your image carefully, everything will be visible in the final image so pay attention to everything in the frame, whether it is shadow or not.
2. Set a small aperture and focus close by (perhaps even use hyperfocal depth of field). You want everything to be adequately in focus.
3. Expose for the mid tones or just let the camera automatically set the exposure
4. Lock your exposure and focal setting (you could just use manual for this)
5. Digital camears wil allow you to adjust the exposure by 1/3rd of a stop increments to a maximum of 2 stops dark and 2 stops light This is normally represented as the bar across the botton of the viewfinder that looks like \...\...\...\...\...\...\ and is called exposure compensation (look up you camera manual if this is news to you). Set the camera to the darkest of these settings and take the image. It will be pretty black but the brightest highlights will have been captured without being burned out.
6. Do NOT move the camera or tripod, but adjust the exposure compensation brighter by 2/3rds of a stop and retake.
7. Repeat this until you are at the brightest setting and everything is burnt out except the darkest shadows, which should now be exposed well.
8. You should now have 6 or 7 images of varying exposures. Load them to your PC.
9. Now you need to use some special but fairly cheap HDR software. I have found Photomatix to be very easy to use. Load all 7 exposures to the software where they will be blended.

You can adjust the relative exposures and contrasts in the software. My tip is to try to make things look natural, do not overdo it or it will be painfully obvious.

That's it you now have an image where EVERY element is exposed correctly, he colours will be fairly rich and you should have a high impact image. Import it to photoshop to carry out any fine tuning, cloning, dodging and burning as necessary, like you would with any image. What makes a great HDR image? Well each to their own, but here is one I think is not overdone but I just could not have done without this technique.

Also remember that while most HDR's tend to be supersaturated, this image technique can be used with muted colours and even mono's - it's about the exposures, not the colours.

It's also a lot of fun - go on, get a free trial of some HDR software and have a go!