Andrew Macpherson

I already know from experience that I can’t cope with long dark days in winter, but visiting northern latitudes in summer is a real treat.  Particularly when the scenery is spectacular enough to attract a World Heritage site designation.

The run from Oslo to Bergen is pretty dramatic even on the fast route.  Once one decides to take the scenic trail (roads 7 and 50) the wow factor goes into overload.  There we were at 1200m with a partially ftoven lake and snow fields coming down to the water’s edge a mere 10 days from the Summer Solstice, or the 500m switchback down a precipice with the turns dug into tunnels in the cliff face…

Anyway we stopped in Aurland, and the hotel manager waxed lyrical about various viewpoints, and a not to be missed ferry trip up the Nærøyfjord leaving from the jetty at 09:15.

The day was slightly hazy to start with, but rapidly improving

By the time one has set the polarising filter on the front of the lens the resulting raw files look like HDR processing — so much so that I though you might enjoy a comparison.

Nærøyfjord Photo 1

The other photo looks extremely simmilar

Nærøyfjord Photo 2

And finally a third offering of the same image.  Which do you rate?

Nærøyfjord Photo 3

The actual information is available when you click (continue reading…)

I’ve been trying out LightRoom Beta 3 (now 3.2) and been slightly frustrated by the fact that it has a dependancy on Camera Raw 5.7, which seems to be the CS5 release version.   I had been cynically assuming that it would not be released for PhotoShop CS4 users, but last night Adobe came through and Updater popped up to offer me the download. — Thanks!

The features have been fairly well covered in the CS5 pre-publicity, see the videos on the PhotoShopUser website, and I was eager to try the noise reduction on some marginal shots taken back in the 1990s on a Minolta DimageV (640×480 pixels) and I have to say the handling of colour noise is spectacular (continue reading…)