HDR

   By taking three photographs below, I was able to combine them and create a HDR photograph that showed detail in both the foreground, background, land, sea, and sky.  This technique is a unique one, and as the saying goes, you either love it or you hate it;  This is because it gives your photographs a very potent look when finished.  This look is either very effective, or a complete fail, there is no room in the middle for compromise.

Combined with:

And also:

To achieve this look:

Personally, I think that the original photograph I took looked better quality of image, as it wasn't as raw and as harsh to look at.  Even so, the effect is clearly displayed and has a punchy feeling to it.

  This was some work in progress.  as you can see, when you use the sliders to adjust you photographs look, the image changes, and it's about getting the correct balance between the lighting and the detail.  As seen below, I had put the slider towards the darker side of things, giving the photograph you can see.  I then adjusted this to give the effect the image has above.

Focus Points

  With the use of the focus points on my camera, I was able to select the area within the view finder that I wanted to keep on focus, and the rest to be blurred. The use of this mode is very effective as it gives you free reign over your macro and tilt shift shots.

  Some examples of these points of focus in actions are below.  From here we see that the focus points are towards the bottom of the photograph.  As you look further down the post, you see that I changed the focus points to higher positions within the view finder.  This shifted the focus to other parts of the photograph.

  This photograph below shows the photograph when I left the focus points untouched;  You can see that the photograph is more in focus on the whole that the others.  This is because the focus was spread out around 15 different points of focus.

  The Focus point in this photograph is blatantly obvious, and it just shows how much using these focus points can help you take stunning macro shots.

  With this one I switched the focus points to the left hand side instead to get a different perspective on the scenery.

  Going back to the same idea with having everything in focus, I left the focus points untouched, and by doing so, I was able to capture this photograph which is all in focus;  Not just a small sections of it.