St Brides Cottage, Monochrome

Photographed at St Brides in Wales’s Pembrokeshire National Park.

Canon 10D
1/125th Sec at f 14
35-135mm at 35mm
ISO 100

HDR treatment:

My aim was to make the sky more three dimensional, and it required different contrast curves to the foreground. I used a ‘faux’, fairly subtle HDR treatment – the difference between the original image and this is very slight. (I’m not a great fan of unrealistic HDR; if the picture looks false – and many do – then it can often be because of heavy-handed HDR. I believe in a light touch.)

In Photoshop I duplicated the image to a second layer
worked on sky highlights (select tonal range)
deleted mids and darks and foreground
merged layers
final tweaks to curves,
dodge, burn cetrain details with a light touch
flattened image
Total time, ± 3 minutes