Tower of London

[martyjward]

Last Thursday we took the kids to London to see the Horrible Histories stage show and do the tour of Buckingham palace. We also took the oportunity to visit the Tower of London and look at the poppies.

Naturally I took my E-620 and took the following picture of the tower poppies.



For some reason I also decided to have a go at HDR so i set the bracketing to + / - 1 ev. I used high speed burst and used the railings as an impromptu tripod, both to minimise camera movement between shots. This is the result (merged using photoshop automated HDR processing)



C & C most welcome.....how else am I going to improve?

(The first picture is 0 ev image taken for the HDR set)

[Zuiko]

Re: Tower of London

The HDR has had a positive effect on the exposure and seems to have worked really well. For some reason it also seems to have rendered the colours warmer but this is not unpleasant. It would be interesting to work on the original image to see if you can obtain the same effect.

[martyjward]

Re: Tower of London

Spent a bit more time on the non HDR version. Played with the curves, saturation and something else. Cropped a bit more to remove the crane on the right and the chimney on the left amd a fair bit of sky. used the intelligent fill to remove the bird on the grass too.



Still not happy with it....maybe it's just the original and there's nothing more i can do.

[alfbranch]

Re: Tower of London

I would clone the crane out as the crop just shows it is not all square.
Did you shoot in RAW or JPeg?
If it is RAW I would happily have a go at an edit.

[electricbrae]

Re: Tower of London

Different compositions give you different possibilities, sure. But there's plenty that can be done with this shot. No need to bother with HDR either. A quick edit in Camera Raw to warm up the white balance a bit, auto the exposure, crop to 6x7 to eliminate the distracting left and right edges, centring the two middle towers on the left and right thirds (emphasises the path through the poppies as a lead-in line a bit more) and plop a graduated filter over the sky, I think you'll find that'll make quite a big difference. Good luck!

Edited version (let me know if you'd rather I remove it)

[martyjward]

Re: Tower of London

Think that maybe part of my "problem" forgetting I can treat the sky separately to the rest of image.

How do you stick a graduated filter over the sky? Do you need to pull it into a different layer?


And no need to remove... rather like your version.

[electricbrae]

Re: Tower of London

Thank you. (It's a tad pixelated from working from your posted jpg, but it's just for proof of concept).
Graduated filters are easier to do in Lightroom and Camera Raw than in Photoshop, in my opinion, so no need for extra layers. In the Lightroom Develop module, press M (G in Camera Raw) and draw the filter across the picture in the desired direction, then adjust to taste.