Manchester Pride 2014

This weekend was my home city's LGBT Pride festival which I consider to be Manchester's best photo-op, not to mention a ton of fun. The festival itself takes the entirety of the August bank holiday weekend but I typically just attend the parade, which takes place on the afternoon of the Saturday. Normally I haul myself up to one of the deep window ledges that abound in the former warehouse district of the city where the parade finishes up (and I happen to live, by the gay village) but this does mean that I get the same kind of photos year-on-year so this year, since I was accompanied by a friend, I thought I'd switch it up and try and get closer in. It definitely netted some benefits and even my notoriously bad 28-300mm lens delivered some decently sharp shots. A selection are shown below but, as always, the full compliment can be found on my Flickr account.

Everest

I suppose this is the headline shot from this year's Asia trip- the summit of Mt. Everest taken from Rombak, 4km from Everest base camp (Tibet side). We were quite fortunate with the weather and had a couple of instances with clear views of the peak.
To be honest, it's not the most visually interesting mountain I've encountered- I've seen better in,say, Austria- it's fame is obviously due to its status but it does look rather nice at sunset viewed from the approach pass as it's flanked by the lower mountains.
While I'm pleased with the shot on the whole, the HDR effect is not kind to the edge of the cloud, which is unfortunate. I tried various combinations of applying the method to different exposures but with the same ultimate to varying degrees. Hopefully it's something that I can learn to overcome in future but I'm also not sure how noticeable it is to the casual viewer or if I just fixate upon it because I know it's there.

Bhutanese valley

Just a quick post with a shot from my last holiday that I thought makes a point about a notable change in my approach to photography today compared with a couple of years ago. This is a shot of a valley in Bhutan. The important thing is that it was taken on a beautiful clear day and it's just HDR and other post-processing that's sculpted this fictional brooding skyline. In truth is probably very obvious that this is the case- subtlety is clearly the next thing I need to learn with my photography- but what I take from this is that only a couple of years ago I was an out-of-the-camera purist and here I am now being happy to fundamentally alter the scene. There are pros and cons to both approaches of course, but I think that this usage probably benefits the type of photography that I most often find myself doing.