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.

More Italy & San Marino pics

Contrasting views

Not a huge amount to say by way of photographic updates but I've had a couple of nice sunsets viewable from my apartment so here they are captured in HDR. The first one has an off-the-shelf filter applied beyond the HDR process whereas the second is straight-up HDR with only the usual brightness/contrast/sharpness tweaks.

Derwent Valley

I went hiking in the Upper Derwent Valley with a friend on Saturday. It's the first time I've been hiking in quite a while. Since I took up photography, in fact. I rarely have an opportunity to shoot rural landscapes so I relished the chance and got some decent photos, quite possibly some of my best, despite still suffering from lens artifacts. I'll do the usual of trying to clean up the source images before pushing it through the HDR process again and I'm going to invest in a proper camera cleaning kit (or just pay a professional to do it for me).