Title • Ilyushin Il-76 #3

This is the third and final shot that I'll be posting of the interior of this Ilyushin Il-76 cargo plane – a shot of the lower section at the front of the plane (visible in this shot of Jason's) – and in some ways it's my favourite of the three. As with my previous entry it's also an HDR, constructed from a bracketed sequence of 11 exposures with a 1 EV spacing using Photomatix Pro. And again, if you take a look at the original you can see the tone mapped image and small thumbnails of all 11 exposures.

Let me know which of the three you like best: this one, the shot of the cockpit, or the view from inside the tail section.

As I mentioned, while this is probably my favourite of the three it does pose a problem, as portrait format images are never easy to blog: either I post a version that's a lot smaller than my usual images (not a great solution for a detail-rich HDR image) or you need to scroll the page. Neither solution is ideal, but in this instance reducing the size didn't work well.

On a related note: as those of you who have followed me since the early days already know my switch from academia to professional photography and training was largely accidental: as my blog became popular I started getting work as a photographer, to the point whereby it became financially viable to swap careers. Along the way I've continued to treat my blog as a place to showcase my best work, experiment with different techniques, document the lives of my children, and so on. In short my blog is the primary way in which I output my images ... and it's a great venue with a wonderful audience :-)

The only negative consequence – because I take photographs with the blog in mind – is that I rarely shoot in portrait format, simply because I know that the images will be difficult to display. I guess this isn't a huge issue, but it does mean that I limit myself when I shoot, and while I don't think there's an easy solution to this I am conscious of the fact that I probably miss quite a few great shots, simply because I see and blog the world in landscape format. As I said, I don't think there's an easy solution, but if you do have any thoughts, let me know.

captured camera lens aperture shutter speed shooting mode exposure bias metering mode ISO flash image quality RAW converter image editor plugins (etc) cropped?

3.25pm on 15/3/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 15mm f/2.8 fisheye f/11.0 11 exposures (1/125 to 8s) manual n/a evaluative 100 no RAW Photomatix Pro Photoshop CS5 none minor warping