Coombe Hill monument (Buckinghamshire) this weekend.

I guess it's time I posted something. The first of these is just to show scale and something of the composition difficulty due to the hill - hence not cleaned up for my lens's dust spots etc. The second takes advantage of the fortunate sun position and has had some extensive PP work - both taken with Tammy 17-50 at 17 and both having to be tilted and then the perspective corrected.

Lovely views from up there and only a stone's throw from Chequers.

I prefer the second image, but there's something strange about it. Have you heavily PP'd it or did you use flash?

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Peter E Smith

My flickr Photostream

I like the second one a lot - well done on the pp work

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K10D, K5 plus plenty of clueless enthusiasm.

My Flickr site link

Yes, first image was to show context only, second one an attempt to get something out. It isn't really my style and I'm not altogether sure I like itbut it is interesting - I'd come back from a night out, found that a new version of darktable had come out and fancied playing with the toys. to see what was there.

The original shot with the sun directly behind the pillar was way outside the exposure range of my K7. I didn't use exposure bracketing or HDR but just took a shot underexposing by a stop to compromise between not too badly burnt highlights and black shadows. As a result the shadows, or main face detail of the monument, are actually a stop darker than the shadowed face in the first photo.

There was a lot of PP. Detail (about four stops worth) was dug out of the shadows which were also warmed up a bit, some 'clarity' was applied to bring out the inscriptions and I grabbed the hue from the gold wreath and selectively increased saturation and luminance in a narrow band for that.

I'd had a couple of beers before this and felt a bit mischievous. So after I have been so 'anti HDR' because of the odd tone mappings it can produce I gratuitously increased tonal separation on the blue/yellow axis to distinguish between sky and monument - its the combination of this and the shadow processing giving it the 'HDR look' I think. Still not sure I entirely like it myself ...