Moscow Trip

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I was lucky enough to have four days in Moscow last week with work. It was pretty busy, with a couple of long days and late finishes, so the opportunities to get out and wander with the camera were limited to one brief night shooting session, plus an hour or so on my last morning. ‘Wander’ is probably overstating it: I have the worst sense of direction of anyone I know [I was amused that the Russian equivalent translates to English as ‘geographic cretinism ;o]. Add in the Cyrillic alphabet, a dollop of jetlag, and it’s a recipe for disaster. My hotel was 15 minutes to Red Square, so I went over to take a couple of long exposures, and managed to get really badly lost on the way back.

This shot of St Basil’s was probably one of the better results that I had:

This was a 20 second exposure at F18 using my 50mm at ISO 100. This next shot, looking across Lenin’s Mausoleum was 25 seconds, F10 and with my 10-22mm at 22mm:

And one final shot which was 25 seconds, again at F18 and at 14mm. If the aperture settings seem a little arbitrary it’s because I forgot to take my shutter remote, and was working with a maximum shutter speed of 30 seconds. If memory serves these were all shot on AV.

The next morning I went back to Red Square to do some bracketed exposures of St Basil’s which turned into the following HDR [a habit I’m trying to break] image:

I was just getting myself settled to take a few more series [without the folks in the foreground] and was politely told to put the tripod away by a plain clothes bloke who flashed me some ID. I’d been talking to some of the people at work and misunderstood the instructions: I thought you weren’t allowed to use what might be considered professional equipment [a bit of a stretch of the imagination for what I have] to take pictures of the Kremlin which, amongst other things, is a functioning government building. However, the restriction applies to all of Red Square.

Some other shots of the area:

  

Funny the compositional things that you notice after the fact: that poor horse seems to have sprung a leak from its head 🙂

HDR – St Pauls

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I took the train down to London this evening to take a few shots of St Pauls. The original idea was to do some long exposures at sunset, but when it started to rain I had a rapid change of plans. It was all a bit rushed but I cracked off about 70 shots, with a few bracketed exposures in the mix. Some of the better results, c/o Photomatix:

  

For both shots, I bracketed two stops either side of the original. The picture on the left was exposed at 0.8 seconds at F22, ISO 100. The second is 0.5 seconds at F18, again at ISO 100. Shame about the cab…

HDR

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I’ve had a couple of goes at Photmatix over the last few months, and thought I’d give it another whirl with one of the images from the Highgate trip. As I was working from a single image, I had to copy the original RAW image to 3 TIFFs, with one overexposed by 2 stops, one overexposed by the same amount, and then the third as shot – all pretty standard stuff.

The results are… interesting I think. The original shot has blown out highlights due to a relatively gloomy foreground, and quite a bright sky, something that would have made it an interesting candidate for a tripod based bracketed exposure:

[F8, 1/20th second, FL 15mm, ISO 200 – I managed to prop myself against an upright to get a relatively sharp result at this shutter speed]. Here is the HDR image:

It really lifts the image.