Picture of the Day - If Need Be Use Your Phone

Picture of the Day - If Need Be Use Your Phone

I know it has be a little while, so I have done this quick one just to show you that you don't need to havee your camera with you to take a good photo. I took this using my iphone while doing a wedding recce. It is on the route to the reception so we will be making a pit stop on route after the ceremony.

The picture was then run through the app snapspeed to just enhance the colours, contrast and to add the boarder.

  This one was taken on a trip to the park, I managed to catch the timing right of Caylee was her head out of the train window. Again it was adjusted through snapspeed, to crop out the train and add the boarder.

This last one was just an opportunity I couldn't miss when round at the sister-in-law's. Her dog can get a little over excited, so they just let her calm down in the conservatory. She was continually ticking her head through the cat flap. Using snapspeed I turned it black and white, added a bit of grain and a boarder.

So it just goes to show you can get some good shots on your phone.

Please lets us know what you think.

Picture of the Day - Exmouth Seafront

Today's Picture of the Day comes from Exmouth Beach, which I am pretty fond of. These pictures were taken on Saturday, we had been out for the day with our friends and children to the play park on the beach. Generally we'll take a camera along to get some shots of the littlen playing, but unlike most the camera we took was a Nikon D3s and a Nikon 28-300mm.

As we were walking back to the car and the dark clouds loomed above us, this lone boat came chugging by. I quickly picked up the camera and crossed the road. Having been in the park the camera was set in Aperture priority (Av) so I didn't really have to think also the exposure too much. Thinking more about composition I managed to capture a few frames before it sailed past us.

The D3s was set to ISO 200 and the exposure compensator was dialled in to +0.3 this is something that I do when shooting in RAW or nef format on Nikon, I also have it set to 14 bit so it will retain more information and then you can over exposure the shot up to a full stop and still pull the highlight back in RAW conversion. With the aperture set at f8 I used the full range of the lens to produce wide and close up shots.

Once I had the images on to the computer I boosted the contrast and cropped them to my desired format. I also burnt in the edges of the image slightly. I used Topaz Detail which is a plug in for Photoshop just to make the detail in the images pop.

It just goes to show that it is always good to have your camera with you as you never know what may present itself.

Please let us know what you think of our picture of the day by either liking it on our facebook page, tweet us @Serenity_Eye or leave a comment here on the blog.

Thank you for reading

Picture of the Day - Burnham-On-Sea

This picture of the day comes from the weekend just gone by. I found myself at Burnham-On-Sea on the seafront. The reason I picked these pictures to show is that I wanted to show that it doesn't have to be a nice day to go and get good pictures. The weekend weather was pretty miserable for most, but I decided to make the most of my time as Emz was on another job near by.

I decided to shoot for HDR (High Dynamic Range), this is were you take a series of the same picture at different exposures and then combine them using a program call Photomatix. There are two ways of doing the pictures for this. Firstly you can put you camera on a tripod therefore getting shots that will all be aligned correctly and then manually adjust your exposure to under and over expose the image, plus you could use the bracketting feature of your camera if it has it. This is when you can sent the camera to automatically a set number of frames.

Or if you have a camera that shoots at 5 frames a second or higher used in conjuction with the camera bracketting feature you will get very little movement bewteen the pictures. Photomatix also has a align feature built in.

Also I use the a plugin filter for photoshop made by Topaz Labs called Detail which has some selected bulti-in filters of which my favourite is bold detail. When using it I duplicate my image layer and then apply it to the upper layer. Some the effect can be pretty harsh, if this happens I reduce the opacity of the upper layer.

I also did a some none HDR shots as well

If you have any questions regarding HDR or anything that you have read please ask.

Picture of the Day - Fenit Harbour, Ireland

This shot was taken by Emz in Fenit Harbour in Southern Ireland just outside the town of Tralee. Emz and I were attending a family wedding near by and were making a long weekend of it. We were returning to where we were staying as the sky started to suddenly break into this glorious sunset. Turning from the direction of our accommodation, we headed for the harbour and got there just in time to catch the sun beams bursting over the hill. 

It was shot on a Nikon D2x with a 28-70mm on ISO 100 at f5.6 1/125th. The image fits a panoramic crop easily with a nice 50/50 reflection.

I shot the scene as well but favoured a longer Nikon 70-200mm lens. I focused in more on the boat itself with the castle ruins in the background.

Picture of the Day - Chicago

This shot was taken underneath the central train loop right that runs around the center of the city of Chicago. I was actually on my way to Willis Tower as I wanted to try and do some cityscapes from the top. I had about an an hour and a half to kill before I had to leave to catch my flight. Although I never got to shot any pictures from the top of the tower due to a very unlucky timed arrival. I just missed the start of the 20 minute video on the tower (which I didn't want to watch) so that combined with another 20 minutes watching the video I didn't have enough time to get up down and back to the hotel.

Luckily, on the way to the tower as I crossed the street I saw this scene. I loved the way the light shone down through the grid pattern of the rail track onto the road. As I jay walked across the street I stop in the middle and quickly shoot off a few frames. I love the leading line of the shadow and the metal framework that creates a natural frame in the image. Ironically had I not stop to take this I may have made to the video at Willis Tower.

What I can tell you is that it was shot on a Nikon D2x and a Nikon 28-70mm lens. I would love to give you the shooting information but sadly the original files were lost in a hard drive crash in late 2007, before I had backed it up. It just goes to show you the importance of backing up your digital files. Lesson learned the hard way!

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