Well, it’s been a crappy week.  I’m optomistic that it will get better, but you never know.

In the meantime, my little camera friend is keeping me busy.  I went out with Neal and his father in hopes that we could get some nice sunset shots of the QE II bridge.  I’m not really one to get overly excited about bridges, but Neal offered to drive and I needed to get out of the house, so here we are.

The first two are HDR images and the third is done with a single off camera flash & shoot through umbrella. Nothing too exciting here.

I’ve wanted to get out and take a few shots of The Gherkin for a while now and finally got off my ass and made it happen.  Unfortunately, I had forgotten how much lighter it is in the evenings and didn’t leave myself enough time to wait for dusk, so there aren’t enough lights on for my liking.  Fortunately, it’s only about a 20 minute walk from home so I can always go back and try again!

Anyways, here are a few photos and the rest are in the gallery.

I picked up a JOBO PhotoGPS last week as part of the selection of new kit I’m picking up for my holiday in April (all that remains now is a portable hard drive and a new camera bag, and maybe some new filters…)

The idea behind Geotagging is to record the GPS locaiton into the EXIF information of an image.  You can then link the images to google maps at the (roughly) exact point you were when you clicked the shutter.  I’ve still got a few kinks in my workflow to iron out as well as figuring out how to do the linking, but we’ll get there in the end.

Anyways, as part of my testing I was out last night taking a few images.  Unfortunately, somewhere between photomatix, lightroom and photoshop the gps information was stripped out of the exifs so you’ll just have to take my word for it that these were taken in London.

I think the images will back me up.

These are with my other Tower Bridge HDR images in the gallery.

I’ve been meaning to get a few more shots of Tower Bridge in since it’s so close to home but the cold weather has been holding me up.  Fortunately, things warmed up this weekend so I managed to get out and take a few shots.

As you can probably tell, these are all HDR images.  7 exposures at 1 & 1/3rd stop increments merged in Photomatix and then adjusted in Photoshop.  I pushed these further than I normally would to sort of go for a cartoony feel.  I like them, but I’ve been staring at them all for a few hours now so it’s hard to say how I’ll feel about them in the future.

Just three images so far, so no need to go digging in the gallery for more.