It’s seems like an age since I bought my Canon 400D, but it’s only been about 6 months.  Due to other, more pressing matters though, I’ve not really used it very much.

A subscription to Digital Photo magazine has given me lots of food for thought on the ideas for things to try out when I do get time to give it a proper test drive.

One thing which caught my eye, was a technique to jazz up your pictures which were taken on overcast days.  As hard as it is to believe, we have a few of those each year up here in Scotland so I thought I would try it out with a picture of my own rather than using their templates.

So, with the weather perfect for this, I headed out to take a picture of a local scene.  I ended up with a pretty drab picture of a landscape showing Murray’s Monument outlined against a rather uninteresting sky.

Due to the brightness of the sky, it meant the camera tried to compensate and ended up darkening the foreground to such a degree that almost all detail was lost.

A bit of work in Photoshop Elements should sort all that out though, by switching to black and white, then brightening up the foreground and darkening down the sky a bit to introduce more detail in all areas of the picture.

Without going into too much detail, this is how it ended up :

It amazes me just how much of a difference can be made without a huge amount of knowledge or effort, and while it’s perhaps still not much of a picture, I’m still pretty chuffed with the result.