Sunsets and Stormclouds

The Pilbara is a marvelously inspiring place to shoot. I feel privileged I can experiment with photography and attempt to take it to a new level with this region on my backyard. Surely this is God's canvas.

Firstly, I promise not to bombard the blog with three posts at once - I just had a little catching up to do! This is current...

Yesterday, still reeling from my lack of photographer's intuition when it comes to storms and lightening, I decided to walk up the hill to take some test shots to really nut out this whole RAW thing, and even venture into some High Dynamic Range (HDR) territory.

To explain, Karratha is a long and skinny town. It's kind of shaped like a peanut. On one side is Nickol Bay and the Burrup Peninsula, on the other are some hills covered in iron-ore coloured rocks and spinafex. At this time of year a storm brews to the east most afternoons. Not many come our way like last week (unfortunately for those like me who missed that opportunity) but the thing to do in Karratha when there is a storm, is to take your 4WD up the hill to capture the storm, enjoy the wind and watch the dust decend (see image below). Luckily for me I can walk, although this does pose the problem of gear getting wet/dusty if the storm turns.

Let me tell you, this vastness and the richness of the rocks makes a stunning gamut of colour. Especially at sunset. Especially when storm clouds are brewing in the East, while the sun is setting in the West.

So here's me, with my $30 tripod on top of a small hill overlooking Karratha, constantly spinning my tripod head between the storm cloud and the sunset. Prime lighting for the stormcloud as the sunset was acting as a fill light for the rocks, hills and spinafex in the foreground leaving me with plenty of wriggle room to expose correctly for the clouds.

Here is where two key lessons (well, three now) were learnt when it comes to processing images:

1) You can overedit, especially when trying to lighten underexposed areas. These sunset photos - most of them are ruined because they are grainy due to too much fill light/exposure/brightness adjustments. I'm not happy with them, but decided to put them here anyway, so you can see what I am talking about.

2) HDR requires sepparate shots - I attempted a couple using a single shot with different exposures, but found they came out grainy and overexposed anyway. I need to perfect this technique. Now, I have sepparate shots, using the exposure bracketing feature on Betsy, I just haven't had time to combine them, focusing on the actual editing.

3) Looking at the photos now, at 10:45pm with no reflective light behind me, they appear worse. I think this warrents more research for my screen and ensuring that when I edit photos, there are no competing reflections and the screen is tilted optimally.