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.

Monks

The holiday I returned from a couple of weeks ago was wonderful for indulging one of my favourite photographic subjects- monks. I love photographing monks. The colours, the activities and the sense of calm makes them ideal subjects. Here's a small selection of photos I took of monks with every lens I took with me (50mm prime, 16-28 f/2.8 wide angle, 28-300mm telephoto).

More Italy & San Marino pics

Venice & San Marino

I got back from a trip to Italy (primarily Venice) and San Marino about a week ago. Plenty of photographic opportunity, particularly for my speciality of HDR urban landscape. I think I'm reaching a consistant standard in this type of photography now, time to identify the weaknesses and target some work to improve on them.

Southeast Asia photos

I struggle to know what to write about travel photos so I think it's safe to say I'll never be a travel blogger. It suffices to say that, for my Southeast Asia trip, I took in a great number of locations over three weeks and got a few dozen decent photos out of it. In lieu of a more wordy description, here's a small selection of the photos taken on that trip. The full selection and perhaps a bit more info on each shot can be found in the Flickr set.

Southeast Asia trip #1

It's been a while since I posted and at least part of the reason for this is that I spent the first part of the year touring around a large slice of Southeast Asia.

I took a huge number of photos of course (around 3000) so it's taking forever to process them. One thing I've found myself doing is taking nothing but HDR cityscape and architectural study. These do tend to be some of my stronger pieces but I do need to be mindful that I don't miss opportunities to capture other subjects better suited to different techniques.

Anyway, even the HDR ones are proving tricky, possibly because I still need to better understand my HDR software but I'll continue to plug away at it. In the meantime, here's one that's come out successfully- the view of Ho Chi Minh city (Saigon) from the bar at the Sheraton hotel. And happy New Year, everyone!


Unfortunately I had to take the shot freehand- no tripod available, which would have made it crisper but it came out well, considering.