On Saturday, a group of us took a trip up to Buttermere, a stretch of water in the north-west of The Lake District. As we arrived at Saturday lunchtime and the weather was looking a bit gloomy, we stopped for lunch at The Fish Hotel before setting off for a leisurely walk around the lake.

The clouds started to break as we started walking which provided ideal conditions for some landscape photos as patches of sun were rolling over the surrounding mountains. The very bright sky presented a problem in so much it made getting a suitable exposure to preserve all of the visible detail impossible with my 40D and a single exposure. So I set up my tripod and 40D to auto-bracket with the intention of capturing the highlights, mid-tones and low-lights separately so that I could combine them later on using HDR techniques.

Most of my scenic shots were taken with a Canon EF-S 10-22mm and a circular polariser. The depth of the polariser filter meant that there was some vignetting in shots taken at the 10mm end, but these were easily cropped out.

Here are a couple of my favourite HDR images from the day, blended in Photomatix and retouched in Photoshop:

The whole day was fantastic and definitely worth another visit in the future with the aim of getting higher up for a different perspective.