HDR and Fisheye Experimenting

When my new camera came, I wanted to get stuck in straight away. Unfortunately, I can't drive, and didn't really have the time to get a bus anywhere because I was going out later that day, so I ended up going for a walk down by the canal as usual. I previously hadn't had the chance to use my fish-eye lens, because it arrived after my old camera broke, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

I also wanted to have a go at real HDR, so I brought along my dad's old deathtrap tripod. What I mean by 'real' is that most of the HDR photos of mine aren't actually made up of 3 or more bracketed exposures. They're the original RAW file simply made into a pseudo-HDR image automatically with Photomatix Pro, or I have manually adjusted the exposures of an image and saved them as separate files to create the effect of bracketing. To be honest, this time I didn't see much difference from pseudo-HDR, which I was quite disappointed with.

As for the fish-eye, it works well as a cheap alternative to a wide angle lens, however I did seem to get a lot of distortion around the edges of the frame. Also some vignetting occurs when you have it at its widest, so I would much prefer wide angle. I suppose that's what you get for trying to do things the cheap way.

Anyway, if you didn't understand a word of that, here are the photos I took. The scenery isn't particularly brilliant in Barnsley by the way, it's like the closer you get to ASDA, the rougher it looks. This is the closest bit of nature to my house.