Take 2







A few tweaks in LR4

Thanks for all the comments.

CMW I see what you mean about the background buildings. This was my first 'real' attempt at a bracketed image and photomatrix. I need a bit more practice with those sliders.

K10D. I was in two minds about the overhead bridge but cropping it off didn't really produce a better balanced image. I felt 'with' slightly pipped 'without'.
I do like strong HDR images sometimes. In this case the natural light meant that three was very little colour in the overall scene and so I tried to reproduce a 'closer to actual' image whilst enhancing the colours a bit. Also I found that too strong a setting and the colours of the background 'lost' the boats in the overall image.

Fritzthedog. You are right about the background. As I stood there the wind picked up quite a bit and some of the exposures were close to 30 seconds. Even though my tripod is pretty robust I'm sure there would had been enough movement to take the edge off the sharpness.

Blueforever. I'll have a word with Brentford council and see if we can get the bulldozers in

David. Fair comment. I don't know if its the way I did it but they seem to have lost some contrast in the move from photomatrix to elements. I now have LR4 so I'll see if the same thing happens.

Stuey. Glad you like the minimal HDR. That was my aim.

Stan and Alan. I'm glad you like them.

I have been taking pictures for nearly 40 years and this is the first time I have even put any on display to incite comment. Thanks for being so gentle with me

PM sent re: the flash

I work away from home during the week, in Brentford, and don't have much opportunity to 'play'. Having recently bought my new shiny pentax I have been desperately waiting for a chance to try it out.

These were taken after the sun had left the sky on the river just at the back of my hotel.

Nothing too inspiring but it gave me the chance to try the camera and tripod. All were taken with a K5iis and DA* 16-50. I used a 5 shot bracketing and merged the results in Protomatrix.

I'm still learning and paying so any comments are welcome.

Colin
Is this flash still for sale?

Just to add that I have bought the advertised flash from LennyBloke and it arrived this morning.
It is in excellent condition.
I can certainly recommend him as someone to do business with.
Cheers
Ralph

Algi
Thanks for that link.
The lapel mics look good and combined with the Zoom H2 looks like it could be the ideal combination for my needs.
Cheers
Ralph

Ken
Thanks for that. The small Sony mounted on the camera would be used just fo ambient background noise (ie.g. walking along a street, in a restaurant, etc) and so camera noise and me coughing and spluttering behind it shouldn't be that much of a problem. The clip length would be quite short so I could always overlay a bit of the soundtrack without the interference.

Japers45
Thanks for the link. I hadn't seen the H2. The additional cost isn't a problem as I am more interested in the quality rather than sticking to a tight budget.
I have also thought about a belt mounted option to use with a lapel mic for doing documentary style videos. At a quick glance it looks like this will take an external mic/line in. So this could be a very good option.

gwing
The more questions the merrier. Hopefully we can teeze out some good recommendations.



Cheers
Ralph

Steven

Thanks for the response. Your point is well made and I agree that the better the mic the better the sound.

I intend to use the video function for capturing scenes during our driving holidays. The idea of the small sony was to be as unobtrusive as possible whilst filming in a street or public space. To be honest most of the sounds will be replaced by music in the end video.

The Zoom (or other alternative) would be for more formal recording such as these, on my website:

Video tour of storage setup

You can clearly hear how the internal microphone has suffered from wind buffeting. The Zoom H1 seems like a reasonably cheap option which does get good reviews. However I am open to other ideas .

There has been some discussion in another thread regarding video editing. Sometimes the comments made can be 'lost' in the conversation so I thought I would start a topic to share experiences with the different packages available.

I have used Windows Movie Maker on a PC and imovie on my mac. Both are 'bundled' with the respective OS on new machines (well Win 7 anyway) or can be bought cheaply or downloaded free.

I found them both to provide basic editing functions and a simple 'film' could be produced from several clips with a music or commentary soundtrack.

I converted to mac and I do find that imovie definitely has the edge in functionality.

For anyone starting out (that still includes me!) I would recommend these packages as they provide a basic introduction before moving to something more powerful.

I have also used Adobe Premier Elements (available for mac and PC) which is a very good package and can be bought for around £70. With this you can produce some very professional results.

However I now use Final Cut Pro X (mac only) which is a full pro package (although some pro's may disagree). This does cost £199 but provides some fabulous functions and is fairly intuitive to use.

I'm sure others will be along to mention other packages.

One word of caution with video editing is that it is very, very, very memory and processor intensive. I have 16Gb Ram in my MacBook and you can still hear the poor thing grunting as it tries to render some of the video. And I haven't done much HD yet!!