I was home a bit earlier this evening, and the sky had some lovely golden tones, so I thought I’d do an evening shot instead of a silhouette in case my sunsets were boring! As always at this time of day, I had my trusty tripod, and took bracketed shots which I processed in Aurora HDR (which is in my humble opinion THE best HDR software I’ve used.)
So this is the shot I went to get
which turned out quite well I think, but then I decided to focus on the gold, and do a close up for a change…
That’ll do I thought, packed up my things and started for home. As I looked back I saw that this had happened!!
So ran back and set up to take some more shots 🙂
and finally, my favourite happened and it was glorious!
apologies for so many sunsets, after tomorrow I’ll be back to shooting in the day so might get a bit of diversity!
It was Phils birthday this week on Monday and I had to work, but in the evening we went to Phil’s model club, as one of the modellers, Dave, who runs AFV magazine was doing a talk on photographing models and I wanted to go along. (By the way we are talking model tanks/planes/ships etc, not ladies or gentlemen models.) It was a good night, we went into Newcastle on the metro and I took a shot of Central Station, which is a beautiful building.
Central Station Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (iPhone6)
Dave’s talk was really interesting and I loved seeing his set up, he has a Nikon D800 and some cool gear.
Dave showing his skills (Iphone6)
Afterwards there was chatting and tea drinking, and a fab night for me as I’d never been to the club before, inspite of being an honorary member, (I run the Faceache page for the club and used to do model figures).
The club
Did not take any photo’s on my travels this week, but did make a panorama of my shots of County Durham
County Durham pano
and my blogger friend Francis post gave me the idea to do it portrait, before then I’d always tried pano’s in landscape mode duh!!
I saw one of those pithy sayings over on Faceache, “I love being over 50, I learn something new every day, and forget 5 other things.” That’s me and Phil 🙂 I forgot to post a couple of my faffing about shots in my last Faffing report so here they are:-
Original shotEucalyptus 1Eucalyptus 2
and I orbed one of my other faffs which I also forgot to post.
Fraggled flowers Orb
Today I’ve been doing a HDR for my Sunday Challenge, of Phil’s hairdresser car 😉 and we had a traumatic journey to get it to the carwash as Phil didn’t want me to take a shot of it being mucky. We had to go to B&Q to replace a bulb on the way, actually to return a bulb already purchased by Phil a couple of days beforehand, but he’d forgot to check the size and bought the wrong one. So we got to B&Q and did the swap, Phil nearly had a heart attack at the cost of the bulb, £15!!! I bought a new orchid whilst I was there, its spotty, (polaroid in SX70 section) and then we went off to the carwash. Except we nearly didn’t as Phil took the wrong road on the way home. Phil has lived in this area for 50 ++++ years, and B&Q is only 4.6 miles up the road, and we’ve been there many many times, but the way home is one of the 5 things he forgot for today I guess. Anyway we did make it to the car wash, except we went in the wrong entrance , but managed to get to it through the petrol station.
car wash
After we went through the washing machine Phil remembered (yay) he needed to put some air in the tyre, so back round we went and this time got stuck behind all the people putting petrol in their cars. Of course we were stuck behind a slow old person who was filling up a huge 4×4 and took forever to pay at the pump. Luckily one of the other lanes opened up and Phil manoeuvred round to get to the air pump just as another guy slipped in before him. I think we must have been about an hour at the car wash altogether!! Anyway we got home and the replacement bulb doesn’t work 😀 :D, Phil will have to take it back on his own next time, I may never see him again.
Anyway here is the cleaned car in glorious technicolour HDR’d before I forget……
Tomorrow I’m off out on a photography trip with my pal Sophie, it’s been ages since we did one and am really looking forward to it, keeping fingers xt for good weather.
I really can’t be arsed to piddle about taking many exposures of the same thing to download into an HDR program as in Photomatix or Nik HDR, most of the time I don’t have a tripod with me anyway, and the whole thing just eats up time when life is too short! I do however like the faux HDR effect that can be got by using Nik color FX pro, which this top photo was faffed on with, not too shabby I think. I use several filters, all manipulatable (that’s not a real word is it?) then pulled into Lightroom for further tweaking to denoise it. In retrospect I should have brought the red’s down a little, but hey ho, next time. 🙂
I spend a lot of time in my car, do on average 130 miles a day around the North East, in my battered old Rav 4. It doesn’t look much but it is AWESOME! When Phil was snowed in a couple of years ago and couldn’t get his hairdresser car out of the estate ( 🙂 ) I took him to work and back every day, over the snow and ice, up the kerbs and around the stranded BMW’s. We’ve not had many mechanical problems, and it passed it’s 10 year MOT without any work needed, as it had it’s previous 7. Today it surpassed itself. I went to work seeing clients down in the Middlesborough area again ( past Boob Hill again 🙂 ) and when I got to Guisborough the petrol light came on. No worries, next garage I thought. Checked my purse was in my bag, and it fell open to show a glaring space where my debit card should have been. Bugger, I though, I left it at home when I was doing internet banking yesterday. No worries, I’ll use the change in my purse, a sum total of…. 98 pence! argh!!! The short version of this story is, it got me 47 miles to right outside my house on the warning light, then to the petrol station when I picked up my card.
So this is my homage to my 2003, 3 door Toyota Rav4, HDR’d to give it some bling in Nik FX HDR PRO, ❤ my Rav XX
fraggle ~ rocking a camera across the Universe 
You must be logged in to post a comment.