As a photographer, there are certain times when you might want to use a relatively slow shutter speed in order to increase exposure time. An example of such an occasion is when photographing a scene containing moving water and you want the movement of the water to be captured as a milky mist for dramatic effect.

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An interesting question recently came up in a forum regarding one of my HDR composite Buttermere landscape images,

Why choose HDR?

High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging techniques aren’t new. They’ve actually been around since the 1930s, but have only really become accessible in mainstream digital photography relatively recently with the release of HDR software aimed at the amateur and professional market.

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Imagine losing all of your photos, videos, music and documents stored on your computer

At right this very moment, your data is at risk from any number of different ways of being destroyed, lost or overwritten. In an ideal world, computer hardware would never fail, laptops would never get knocked onto the floor and burglaries would never happen in your neighbourhood. In reality, these things can and do happen, often with serious consequences.

Fortunately, making back-up copies of your important computer files is easy and having a back-up can mean the difference between days of lost work and a few minutes of restoration time.

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Up until recently, I was using an ancient copy of ACDSee I’d obtained from a magazine cover CD for browsing images on my computer. For years, ACDSee was one of the best image browsers available mainly due to the blazing speed at which it opened images for viewing. The secret was to pre-fetch the next image whilst you were looking at the current one; simple, but extremely effective.

Over the years, I’d tried various upgraded versions of ACDSee, but none ever really matched the performance of the version I already had. This was in no doubt due to ACDSee becoming bloated as more and more, some would say unnecessary, features were built into it.

Whilst this meant that my primary image browser lacked modern features such as RAW support, it didn’t really matter much to me since being able to view a large number of images very quickly was much more important especially since I wasn’t shooting in RAW.

Fast forward to almost the present day and I’m shooting almost exclusively in RAW when using my EOS 40D and having to import my photo’s into Lightroom before I’m able to view them.

Not any more…

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Photography has gone through many evolutionary stages since it was invented. Each of these stages featured technologies that pushed it forward into the next stage. Consider concepts such as:

• autofocus to take the work out of making sure your subject looks sharp,
• the digital imaging sensor which provided a non-permanent method of recording images as an alternative to burn-once silver halide film,
• the RAW image file format that allowed much tweaking of a photograph’s exposure and colour balance after it’s been taken.

Now get ready for what is likely to be the next evolutionary stage in photography…

Refocussing after a photograph has been taken!

Imagine never having another out-of-focus photograph or being able to refocus an image onto another point at any time after the shot was actually taken.

Refocus Imaging are developing a method of capturing an entire light field entering a lens and then applying computational photography to focus the image using software.

See for yourself, the results are amazing!