My first HDR

Stephansdom HDR, originally uploaded by max.pfandl.

Yesterday I've tried to create my first HDR Picture and went therefore to the Stephansdom in Vienna, which I thought would give me a nice chance to do so.

I didn't do it very professional: I just adjusted the exposure bracketing to -1 and +1 and shot the series. Unfortunately a friend of mine already told me, that you're not allowed to make pictures with tripods in there, so I had to make it handheld which of course made me to use a low aperture and this made it a bit blurry in the out of focus range.

Nevertheless: its my first try and I just wanted to play around with it: the Stephansdom will still be there, when I know what I'm actually doing ;)

For creating the HDR I used Photomatix which is able to work with the Canon RAW Format. It has quite some presets to choose from (from the more "creative" edge to the realistic side) and I just picked the default one.

Unfortunately I used a Version which had some nasty bug and destroyed my EXIF-Information. This should be fixed in the newest version now.

This is the result: hope you like it, but I'm quite shure I can do better than that :)

Canon EOS 550D: First Impressions

Some Pics from the first day out with the Canon 550D incl. a 18-55m and a 55-250mm standard lens kit. Mainly just playing around with the manual settings and not using the RAW-Format yet.

Buying a DSLR

For some time now, I play with the thought to buy myself a descent DSLR. Of course there is a very wide range of products on the market and it seems to be quite impossible to decide here.