Tom Bennett

I’ve just arrived back from a week’s holiday in Kenya. Actually, that’s a lie, I arrived back a week ago and have been too lazy to post. It was absolutely amazing. In that short week, we managed to squeeze in a day’s worth of snorkelling in the Indian Ocean, near Shimoni, and three safari game drives in Tsavo East National Park. There are a sample of some of the photos below, but check out the full Flickr set.

If anyone is looking for a great place to go, with hot weather, wonderful people, and amazing views - make it Kenya.

The Tate is currently allowing the public to contribute to an exhibition that it is currently running, How we are: Photographing Britain. You can submit your photos by joining the group How we are now. Limit of four photos per person.

I was under the impression that once the deadline has passed, 40 photos would be selected to be displayed in the Tate as an exhibition. This is quite true, but also, right up until that deadline, all the photos that are currently in the group are being displayed on 4 screens in the exhibition and on the Tate website. To quote the Tate:

The group’s photographs will be displayed on screens as part of the exhibition at Tate Britain. The photographs will also be posted and shared on Tate’s website and on the website of the exhibition’s media partner, The Observer.

In the final weeks of the exhibition, 40 photographs – 10 from each of the four themes – will be chosen by Tate to form the final display in the gallery from 6 August – 2 September 2007. A panel of curators, artists, photographers and others will select the final 40 photographs. The final 40 images will also be archived on Tate Online as part of the exhibition’s website.

Managed to take a quick screenshot of a couple of my images being displayed on the slideshow, Mucky pups and Captured moment.

The other two photos that I submitted are Stonehenge and London eye in colour.

What a great idea from the Tate, I’m certainly going to try to make the effort to get down to the exhibition over the next few weeks.

This was my first attempt at producing an HDR (high dynamic range) image, a technique that tone maps a series of normal range images to create a single high range image.

The photo above was created with a Canon EOS 350D, using it’s ‘auto exposure bracketing’ setting to take three images - all taken at ISO400, with f/7.1, f/5.6 and with f/4.5. This was lovely and simple to do, although I wish i’d taken them at ISO100 now to reduce the noise. Unfortunately, because AEB requires three photos, you need to be careful to choose a subject that isn’t going to move - rather stupidly I chose a boat. And yes, it moved (look for the blurring/ghosted images of the handrails on the front).

There are lots of tutorials out there, a couple of the simplest i’ve found are Vanilla Days’ HDR guide, and Stuck in Customs’ HDR tutorial.

Try it, it’s guaranteed to provide interesting results one way or another!