Manchester based professional photographer | Neil Downie

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More from Malta 2

Typical street scene in Victoria on the Island of Gozo, Malta (click for larger)

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Once again the top image is a hand-held 5 frame HDR. (See this post for more info) I'd seen this little boy playing in the street, popping in and out of the scene. I guess he was playing with some friends on the street to the left, and I thought his green outfit would add a sufficient accent to this scene to make it a little more appealing to the eye. He was running around a lot, and there was no way he was going to stand still long enough for me to get 5 frames of him that would merge without any ghosting. He didn't. He's static in the first 2 of the sequence and then disappeared out in the remainder. Fortunately the last two were the shadow captures of the sequence (I.E. +1 and +2 stops in order to capture detail in the shadows), so with some careful masking in Photoshop using the first frame of the sequence (the "correctly" exposed one) as a layer on top of the Photomatix output, I managed to get him nicely back into the final image.

FISHING BOATS IN BIRZEBUGGIA HARBOUR, MALTA (Click for larger)

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This frame was taken at dawn in the harbour at Birzebuggia with the Tamron 70-200 F2.8 out at 150mm. A 7 frame tripod mounted sequence with my ISO pumped up to 800. I did this as even though my camera was static enough to get a solid series, the boats were bobbing around in the water sufficiently to blur in the -3 stop frame, which at 200 ISO would have been around 1/2 second. Cranking my ISO up by 3 stops, meant that the slowest frame of the series was 1/15 second which was just enough to freeze the motion of the bobbing boats. It also meant that I could fire off the 7 frames in under a second producing as little ghosting as possible.