British Landscape Photography...

[MinionZombie]

Some pics from this year's Landscape Photographer of the Year Awards.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/photos/breathtaking-british-landscapes-in-pictures-1319451406-slideshow/

Amazing stuff - some fantastic shots in there. Any keen photographers on the board here?

[AcesandEights]

Very nice pics! I love the 1st town-scape and the interior of the seaside cave. The winter- picture(trees in field) almost looks photoshopped, but I assume that's just because there's nothing else in the field to lend scale.

Is the crowd looking upward oat the bridge out for a Guy Fawkes spectacular, you think?

[MinionZombie]

Very nice pics! I love the 1st town-scape and the interior of the seaside cave. The winter- picture(trees in field) almost looks photoshopped, but I assume that's just because there's nothing else in the field to lend scale.

Is the crowd looking upward oat the bridge out for a Guy Fawkes spectacular, you think?

I'd have thought Guy Fawkes, but then again fireworks are often used during Arts Council street performances. I've filmed a few such performances in recent years and fireworks always make an appearance - gotta love a fireworks show - they can be quite an event here in the UK.

So yeah, probably Guy Fawkes ... it's an impressive picture too. Lovely framing, the natural lighting set-up helps enormously too ... yeah, there are some wonderful pictures in there. That first one of the town is very impressive - the town looks beautiful, almost like a toy town or something.

Some of the pics seem to be photoshopped, well, in terms of the colour correction and such, while others seem to be much more natural - however they're all wonderful photos.

[babomb]

Some of the ones that look "photoshopped" are likely just highly post processed. There IS a difference. Like #15, although it doesn't say it I think this is an HDR photo. HDR photos for those who don't know are done by taking multiple exposures with specific exposure values so they can be layered later in order to extend the range of exposure beyond what the camera is capable of with a single exposure. The reason is that digital cameras are sorely lacking in their ability to capture an accurate range of exposure compared to what the eye can see, even to what a real film camera is capable of. Film is light sensitive material that captures alot of subtle gradations in exposure, digital sensors use math to represent those same values so much of the subtle gradations become clipped. Doing a multi-layered HDR composition is the only way to use a digital sensor to retain all that light information that the camera throws away.
Any camera that has an exposure bracketing feature can theoretically do HDR. Although, high end cameras have a much wider range of bracketing specifically to facilitate this. Newer high end cameras can even perform the entire process "in-camera" and output a tone mapped image. Tone mapping just brings down the contrast ratio of the whole image for display on low dynamic range devices while still preserving the high dynamic range relationship between neighboring pixels.
#20 which is the title image is also an HDR photo. One of the tell tale signs of an HDR photo is blurry water.

Another use of HDR imaging is in 3D rendering. They take full 32-bit float images of an actual scene and map it to something like a sphere as an environment for the 3D models. It results in physically accurate lighting shadowing and reflections which otherwise have to be faked. ILM pioneered the technology with an image format called EXR.
Sorry for the rant here guys, I just have a big interest in this stuff.

[MinionZombie]

That makes sense babomb - I recall fellow HPOTD'er LouCipherr telling me about HDR photography.

"Photoshopped" has sort of become a lazy term now, it gets bandied about a lot regardless of accuracy.

So, anyway - beautiful photos there.

[AcesandEights]

Thanks for the heads up, babomb...inspired me to look up more info on the HDR process! Very cool stuff!

[MikePizzoff]

Some great pics. Makes me want to go out and shoot some stuff right now... but I'm too lazy.