Taken two weeks ago as a handheld HDR while on a walk to the Mull of Kintyre Lighthouse. It is an amazing walk to the lighthouse, (visible on the right of the coastline), descending from the car park through 1000 feet, (300m), only to have you walk back up again. The vague coastline in the distance is Northern Ireland, about 12 miles away. I don’t often do black and white HDR, but the shape of the road seems stronger without colour distracting.

This was the dramatic sky I encountered on a visit to Tarbert last September. The range of brightness between the sky and the buildings was huge and so you could only get a correctly exposed sky or a correctly exposed street. To get both, handheld, I used auto bracketing and the impressive burst speed of the Canon 7D (7+ fps) to get three exposures with minimal movement between them. The trouble is that you then have to import the three images into “photomatix” or a similar HDR software to merge them to even out the exposures. It has only taken me 3 months or so to get round to this!

Addition:

Just for Julie, here are the three exposures used to make the HDR.

While at the conference in Oban last week I tried a quick handheld HDR image of the fire escape and inner view of the hotel we stayed in. The range of dark low down and brightness high up in the image made it difficult to get a good exposure without HDR. The beauty of the 40D is that its 6 frame per second allows you to set auto exposure bracketing and then hold the shutter long enough for 3 exposures. That takes 1/2 a second, so with a steady hand you get virtually no movement between the exposures. I blended and tonemapped them in “photomatix”. I think there’s something creepy about this?