We went for a drive today and shot this on the south shore of Rutland Water. I built up the image in two stages. First I used Photomatix to make an HDR image.

Next I used the Black and White adjustments panel in Photoshop to change the tone brightness of each colour.

Finally I used a levels layer to get the tones right on the final image.

Karen took this picture in Rutland. Snow is a tricky thing for cameras. The problem is left to themselves they often turn snow grey. This is due to the auto exposure trying to balance the tones in an image. Unless you remember to overexpose you may need to do a bit of work in Photoshop later to make the snow look like snow. I used levels to retouch this image. The upper layers darken the sky slightly in the same way you might use a Graduated Filter. The third levels layer brightens the snow without losing detail in highlights.

This sunset on the north shore of Rutland Water was processed with Photomatix to produce two HDR images. I loaded these and an unprocessed image into three layers in photoshop. As all three layers are very different it is possible to get some extreme results from changing the blending modes.

This is the North shore of Rutland Water. I’ve shot this path from another angle here. The panel below shows how I have digitally developed this image in Photoshop. The Levels and Curves layers affect the whole image. The other two layers have masks applied. The Colour Balance layer only affects the ground and the Hue/Saturation layer only affects the sky.

Today I got on my bike to capture some of this crazy weather we have been experiencing. Cycling up and down icy hills is not for the fainthearted. This image was taken in a field in Hambleton which is the peninsula in the centre of Rutland Water. How to make your own world.

I took this on a family holiday to Austria in 2008. This Panorama was created from three wide angle shots. I used various blending modes to build up the image.