What a Difference A Day Makes

It amazes me how quickly you can sense a change in the weather - one minute we were being warned about another freezing and snowing week and then a thaw set in and was quickly noticeable. When I cycled on Saturday I found the roads and tracks I cycled on really challenging and even with concentration I "fell off" - although onto my feet. In fact it was bad enough that I was put off from cycling on Sunday. This morning loads of the snow had gone. I had calls in the morning and late afternoon evening so I decided to pop out for a lunchtime ride. Given all the food I have consumed over Christmas it as the healthy and needed option.

It was a quick ride around the Fens and along some of the droves. Here is the same stretch of pavement/cycle path between Lode and Swaffham Bulbeck. The picture on the left was taken on Saturday the one on the right today at Lunchtime. Although it was warmer the sky was gloomy though.

As part of my HDR photograph experiments I took a picture from the bridge crossing the Swaffham Bulbeck Lode - it was quite dull and so I was interested to see if HDR would lift the picture or not. I took this with a 7 shot bracket holding the camera against the frame of the bridge. It has produced a better result than I expected.

I am still using the trial copy as you can see the Photomatix watermark - but I will probably buy it tomorrow. There also appear to be websites offering 15% off coupons. Apparently people who work for Adobe and Apple can get a copy for free. NO LONGER USING THE TRIAL COPY - watermarks removed.

This was taken from the same bridge but looking down the other way. It appears that the burnt out car has not been moved. It is nicely atmospheric though. The one problem that I can deal with in Photoshop Elements is the vignetting - you can see darker bits at the corners. Updated - I have used PSE to lighten the corners using the "clone" tool. The Vignetting fix did not have the degree of control I needed.

The other lessons learnt are that it is quite hard hand-holding the camera whilst it takes 7 pictures. At the moment I am taking each picture as the maximum resolution JPG and RAW formats and sometimes the data takes so long to write to the memory card that it stalls taking more pictures in the sequence. The other challenge is that with the wind some objects move around and so blur in the pictures. The middle picture also had some swans in it but they seem to have been processed out.