Winter is coming, and the lighting can be dramatic

Winter is approaching and the skies are getting much more animated, In particular the glimpse of strong sunlight between dark clouds so often bringing the landscape alive. Its a good time of year to always have your camera with you and not be afraid to stop and take in the wonderful lighting effects and get a few “special” shots. Both of these shots, where taken by the side of the road when I noticed a fleeting moment of great lighting. Both where shot without filters but I did use the Adjustment brush in lightroom to lift the highlights a little. The Panorama below was created with autostitch using 8 “portrait” orientated overlapping photos.

Interesting Lighting

interesting lighting, originally uploaded by imageo.
This was an experimenting with flickr's new mobile app in conjunction with the share facility on android, to both post to flickr & blogger at the same time. It certainly uploaded the photo easily, and posted the blog post but I had my phone in landscape orientation and the uploaded photo was rotated 90 degrees to what I actually wanted (on my phone I just rotated it naturalyl so I wasn't aware of this)

A dark sky, a gap in the clouds and strong side lighting does make for very interesting photos, even of a shopping center car park! I unusually didn't have either of my DSLR's handy but HDR Camera+ on my phone did a nice job and let me test out the new flickr app.

Late afternoon light from Jacob's ladder

Panoramas over time

 
A series of autostitched panoramas of the eastern & southern horizons in Mackay

Sunlight on the waves

After the Transit of Venus, the clouds obscured the sun most of the afternoon but a few sunbeams managed to light up the distant wave.

Spring Collage

Spring has arrived in vibrants colours and strong lighting. This is one of the new collage types available in picasa 3.

Nice lighting

The dusk lighting of the clouds was specataluar tonight.

Web Based Lighting Photofix

You don't have to have the latest and greatest photo editing software to get access to some good basic photo fix routines. After cropping, and straightening, improving lighting is probably the most desirable fix. However this is often a multi-step process.



This is a one step automatic automatic lighting correction called DxO lighting is available as a net based fix from the Fd's flickr toys site (which has a lot of other fun photo manipulation toys). Even if you don't have a flickr accont you can use this site, but it is flickr oriented. If you like the results and want to look at the commercial package check out the DxO site.

Big Skies

This time of year (late autumn/beginning of winter in southern Australia) you can get get skies and side lighting, which can make for wonderfull landscapes (or beach scapes as the case may be)

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