Yesterday I was at the Stop the War protest in Liverpool for Condi Rice’s visit. It was my first real war rally. I arrived at about 4:30ish, an hour before it started, so I could get a parking spot. There was already a line of police and about 40 protestors. I started getting some shots and testing out the conditions. Overcast skies, boo. So I put the flash on and experimented with the aperature. I wanted to try and capture the moody sky and the protestors to add to the drama. It was a good lesson in flash photography. I quickly learned that I should be using the flash whenever I’m outdoors just so I can compensate and get a balanced exposure. I know its obvious but when you don’t do enough outdoor photography you forget these things. As you can probably tell this isn’t exactly clever flash usage. Its a HDR styled image from 1 raw file. The settings I used were -1.2 exposure, 0 exposure and +1.2 exposure from Raw Shooter. I then used Photomatrix Pro to generate a HDR shot and tweaked the tones. Then I loaded it into Photoshop and applied some processing to it to get this final shot.

I will be putting up more of these images over the next few days. Some might be HDR style, some might not.