The main shot above (a bigger version of which can be found here) was taken at a little waterfall at the foot of Buachaille Etive Mhor. I’ve been to this spot a few times in the past (for example, see here and here) but was amazed to see it completely frozen over (although, in retrospect, I guess I shouldn’t really have been surprised given how cold it was and has been).

I couldn’t expose the foreground and the sky with one exposure so bracketed 5 shots at +/- 1 stop. I then created an HDR image using Photomatix and used this to darken (not lighten) the sky of my best overall exposed image (i.e. the HDR image wasn’t my base image). The same HDR image was then used to lighten, by 50%, the foreground. A few more tweaks, colour correction and sharpening and voilla!

Hopefully this method makes sense, but if not I’ll be posting a quick tutorial on the technique (if you can call it that at all) soon. The main benefit of this is to allow you to increase the dynamic range of your images without them looking like the very surreal HDR images you quite often see on the net (which you either love or hate).

Here’s a few more images from today…

From left to right, the shots above are:

1. Blackrock cottage.
2. Loch Na h-Achlaise I.
3. Loch Na h-Achlaise II.
4. A peculiar wannabe ice skater I stumbled across – I think you’ll agree that she’ll go far with the excellent technique she is displaying.
5. Me! (taken with the Panasonic Lumix LX3).