Why go to Torres Del Paine?

Torres Del Paine is beautiful but it is right down in the Antartic region of South America. Why go there and hike for seven days? What is the main attraction?

The main attraction are the towers - the three towers above the green lake. They are a stunning sight to see. Of course, just to get there is a 22km return hike up and down a mountain but it is well worth it. We had about an hour at the lakeside to have lunch and take photos on our last hiking day. (so did hundreds of other people...don't even get me started on the French family that managed to photo bomb nearly every person's photo. At least there were limited camera nerds). Below is my favourite photo from that adventure. It is a vertical panorama - three landscape photos stacked on top of each other. I tried putting it on a canvas but the size was just a little too tight. It belongs to a post of its own though. Tomorrow, I will share the composition challenges I had in this place, but for now, enjoy my favourite tower photo!

Canon EOS 50D f/9, 1/400, 50mm

It's not very imaginative, but I love the colours. The green in the lake, the grey, the white, and the yellow and orange that top the towers. We were lucky enough to have limited mist as well - just enough to make the shot interesting!

Rugged Patagonia Panorama

On the fourth day of our Torres Del Paine trek, my husband and I got permission from our guide to go ahead. This was so nice to be out on our own in the countryside. It was a very freeing experience. We had a chance to roam free and play in this beautiful part of the world.

Torres Del Paine is in the Patagonia region of Chile. Patagonia is stunning. It really took us by surprise how beautiful it was and inspired us to visit Antarctica one day (something by the way, I have always wanted to do!)

I took this panorama that fourth day. It was just a beautiful morning and we were able to stop whenever we liked and I just fell in love with the light, the mountains and had to stop and take this photo! I was pretty pleased with the outcome - the stitching, the composition, the colour all seem to work nicely. I love how it has the path in the foreground, the mountains in the background and the unique colours of gold and brown are prominent and stunning, albeit a little dark.

Two landscape shots stitched. Canon EOS 50D f/10, 1/400 ISO 200 32mm. 

P.S. - Panorama Spectacular - Machu Piccu

While in South America, I took many panoramas. I reiterate, many, many panoramas. Some good, some, not so good, others a little weird, but all I had to wait until I returned to my trusty laptop before I could ascertain their status. I managed to get panoramas of all the highlights. More than one of most. So, after my mammoth post on Machu Piccu, I present a post-script - panorama spectacular! (Although I warn, not all are spectacular, I just needed a word that started with S)

Ok, so this isn't Machu Piccu, but it is on the way on the  Inca trail! Also, low resolution affects quality. Ruins to the left are pre-Inca. 

I got a number of versions of this, this one being the best, other than a slight slant to the left. Pretty awesome view though.

Lesson #11: Polarizing lens filter

It's been quite a while since I've done a post about something technical. Last week I told you about that Pilbara Gem Conzinc Bay and began to tell you about my adventures with the Polarizing filter I have. It really does warrant a post to it's own because let's face it, that sucker is difficult!

I have a circular polarizing filter. Now, I am not savvy with angles with the sun or any of that technical stuff, I point and shoot what looks good. Lesson 11 is that you really should pay more attention to the technical stuff because polarizers, while brilliant, can really mess with your colours if you don't use them right. They are magnificent on the water and taking the glare out, but in the sky - especially when taking a panorama (this I don't actually recommend)  - it can be temperamental, it can make other colours dark and even unreal at times.

While on my photographic adventure in Conzinc Bay I was pretty snap happy taking panoramas. The trouble was I was on the rocks,  with a beautiful scene on each side and the sun heading pretty much well overhead. I had to keep rotating the filter so that the colours were OK. Trouble was a lot of time when the glare was completely gone from the water, the surrounds were darker, meaning I had to do a fair bit of lightening in post production. And stitching a panorama with a polarizer?  Forget it. You can do it, but it ruins the sky. I guess it would be OK if you had no sky.

I took these examples especially for this blog.

NO FILTER: Five portraits stitched. EOS 50D, f/13, 1/250, ISO 160 shutter, 18mm. Slight enhancements in photoshop

WITH FILTER: Five portraits stitched. EOS 50D, f/11, 1/160 shutter, ISO 250, 18mm.

You'll notice I adjusted the settings - I was still trying to take a good photo both times (while crouching in bare feet crawling with ants on hot rocks). Notice how you can see better colours in the water in the polarized shot, but the rocks look nicer in the non polarized shot. You can also see how half the sky is darker in the polarized shot. Just different techniques I guess. I must admit though, I love how the polarizer works on the water.

Still learning!

Pilbara Gems: Conzinc Bay

After buying kayaks or indeed, any kind of water vessel, this place really opens up. The lifestyle here is second to none. Most have the opinion of the bigger the boat the better, however we love cruising around in our kayaks. Where else can you hang out with six manta rays?

One of our regular trips is to a place call Conzinc Bay on the Burrup Peninsula. The colours on these trips are truly spectacular - turquoise, aqua contrasted with red, black rocks, white sand and brown (and green at times) spinafex.

Thanks to a dry bag I now have capacity to take my SLR with me on these adventures to take advantage of the more remote gems we visit by kayak! My husband fishes, I take photos, it's a good system!

Conzinc Bay - Canon EOS 50D, f/11, 1/100 shutter, ISO 160 18mm, manual, polarizing filter, adjustments in Adobe RAW. 

 This is only one section of the bay - it actually extends well around the rocks. Here, once again, I am clambering over hot red rocks in bare feet. I really need to remember to take appropriate footwear.

Dolphins - Canon EOS 50D, f/5.6, 1/640 shutter, ISO 250, 200mm, cropped, Vignette and colour adjustments in RAW.

Dolphins awaken in me my inner child. It makes me think of Shirley Barber's book about mermaids. Yes, I had a very innocent childhood, but these creatures are so majestic and just scream fun! I must admit though, I was a little frustrated by the shine on the tail in this photo. Everyone hopes to capture that perfect dolphin moment, jumping from the surf over a perfect sunset...yeah, I'm not into a cheesy shot like that...besides, these guys just would not jump any higher and I was in no position to chase them to do so!!

Also, now that I am posting this, I'm not sure I'm a fan of the vignette.

Betsy, f/5.6, 1/800, ISO 250, 18mm. Two landscapes stitched using Adobe RAW presets, lightened, sharpened, colour adjustment in RAW

One of the many panoramas taken that day. I did some experiments with the polarizer...before I start on that I think it probably warrants a post for itself. Standby!

Playing with Colours

A whole new world has opened up to me with editing RAW photos and playing with colour hues, gradients, balance and levels. On the one hand I feel they create a much more dynamic feel to the photo, but on the other hand other hand, some colours are lost in the process. Particularly in sunset shots. Numerous times I have edited a sunset photo, and when compared with the original, the range from orange to blue has lost its complete gamut. Still, it's an enjoyable past-time, although it is increasingly becoming apparent that proper training is required, although sometimes when you edit, you just feel your way. Most photos are over edited in my opinion anyway.

Check out this photo I took at Point Samson recently. The light was perfect - the hour before sunset, but that didn't stop me increasing the magenta hue to add a touch of purple. It's no secret that purple is a personal favourite of mine!

Canon EOS 50D, f/5, 1/32000 second shutter, ISO 500, 18mm, three shots stitched to form panorama. White balance and colour adjustment in Adobe RAW

Pirate Panoramas

Arrr, She’s at it again!

I finally have a weekend where I can sit down on a Saturday morning, drink my coffee and edit my photos. Unfortunately I haven’t been out much taking photos lately. To tell you the truth, I’m struggling to find new inspiration. There are only so many times you can climb the Karratha Hills and take photos of the sunset!

Last month I had the opportunity to go out on a charter boat to some of the islands of the Dampier Archipelago for a social function. Of course I took Betsy with me, despite the threat of rain. I must confess, I took some okay photos of the local rock art, but I am unsure of whether or not it is appropriate to post them on here. You may see those pop up in the near future, but for now I will focus on the shots I took of a place called Pirate Cove.
We climbed the rocks and there were some amazing colours. I’d wager you would be hard pressed to find these colour combinations anywhere in the world – Iron rust red, sandy yellow, ocean blue, mangrove green, black and grey all contrasting stunningly with the turquoise water. It’s spectacular.I was left behind by the group at one point (this is actually a frequent occurrence!)

This series shows some experiments – and that there are a number of ways to skin a cat.  Some are better than others. All edited in Adobe raw, with presets for the stitching, they still don’t quite fit together which is unfortunate. The sun just didn’t do as it was told! Which one is your favourite?

Also bear in mind I was clambering over unstable rocks…in bare feet. Real smart.

Canon EOS 50D (Betsy), f/3.5 1/800 sec ISO500, +1 step exposure bias, 18mm. Auto white balance, Shutter Priority mode. Five portraits stitched in Photoshop. Edited in Adobe RAW to enhance colours

Canon EOS 50D (Betsy), f/3.5, 1/8000 sec shutter, ISO 500 , +1 step exposure bias, 18mm, shutter priority. Two landscapes stitched in Photoshop. Edited in Adobe RAW to enhance colours.

Canon EOS 50D (Betsy), f/3.5, 1/8000 sec shutter, ISO 500 , +1 step exposure bias, 18mm, shutter priority. Two landscapes stitched in Photoshop. Edited in Adobe RAW to enhance colours.This is slightly crooked. Oops.

Canon EOS 50D (Betsy), f/3.5, 1/8000 sec shutter, ISO 500 , +1 step exposure bias, 18mm, shutter priority. Two landscapes stitched in Photoshop. Edited in Adobe RAW to enhance colours.This one will annoy you when you see it. I'm not going to point it out. But it's annoying. Very annoying.

Karijini the third: Panoramas

I love panoramic photography. I have done since I saw a panoramic picture my Pa took of the Back Beach in Mornington Peninsula - this was five photos placed next to each other and framed, and I just thought it was the coolest thing!

Then of course, as you grow older you soon come to realise the King of panoramic photography is Ken Duncan - Check out my favourite photo of his. Guess where?

To capture so much information, what you are seeing is a huge challenge, especially when it requires photo stitching. I started panoramic photos when I had my first digital camera - a little Kodak. I stitched them together with a free program, Arc Soft, that came with a memory card I purchased.   The results were reasonable, maybe I'll share them with you sometime, but it was clear from the start several techniques and pieces of equipment were required - tripod, a straight horizon and even lighting.

So in our recent journey to Karijini, a place where there are simply too many places to look, I had a stab at a few panoramic images. This is tricky because of the cast of light and shadow in the gorges - exposure is a hard thing to get consistent so most of the successful pieces are actually only two photos stitched together. The ones below are the picks.

Circular Pool - Dales Gorge, Karijini National Park. Canon 50D, f/3.5, 1/200 sec shutter, ISO 250, polarized lens filter, 18mm focal length, four portrait images stitched.

 Circular pool is a fantastic place to swim, and we were blessed with the lighting when we got there - the sun was reflecting off the opposite wall and onto the red rocks behind the pool creating these amazing oranges and reds! I've found with panoramas it's good to take portrait photos instead of landscape. As you can see in the image below, too many landscape photos stitched together and the image becomes quite thin. The image above is four portrait photos, below is three landscape photos.

Karijini National Park, Pilbara. Canon 50D, f/4, 1/4000 sec ISO 250, Exposure bias +2 step, 35mm focal length, three landscape images stitched

The golden hour - as we were driving home from a day of gorging the sun was setting, casting golden light on everything. The golden hour in the Pilbara is pure magic.

Mysteries of Misty Waters in Karijini

As promised, a second edition on the Karijini expedition. The jury is still out on the third. This trip was surprisingly good for water shots, despite the incredibly bright sun. Once down in the shade of the gorges, and the sun had started to disappear, water shots were so much fun to take. There is something so satisfying about setting up a shot, leaving the shutter open for a few seconds, and eagerly checking the LCD screen to see if the water is misty while the rocks are crystal clear.

Can I just say, I am so glad I do not have a film camera for water shots? Star trails - different story. I learnt so much from shot to shot - composition, timing, reducing camera shake, or in my case, tripod shake. Some of these things you just don't know with film until they are developed!

Once you have the settings done for a particular gorge, you can go from little run of water, to small waterfall, to bigger waterfalls, composing shots and taking misty water photos. I say again, it is so much fun. What would you do down those gorges without a camera I ask you?

The other thing that was really valuable from this trip is the amount I shot in RAW and had to process later. Only then did I realise I had the white balance wrong for a lot of my water shots, and it needed to be corrected in Camera RAW (a lot of my water had an odd blue tinge).

Check out some of my water shots below:

Handrail Pool, Weano Gorge Karijini NP. Canon EOS 50D (Betsy), 1 second shutter, Manual program, f/14, ISO 100, 18mm focal length. Increased contrast, vibrance, saturation in Camera Raw. Also slight warming with magenta tint.

Handrail Pool is a great spot in the park, although it is precarious going down the rail you see to the right, carrying camera gear. It's amazing this shot looks so peaceful, there were backpackers jumping off rocks on the other side! This has got to be my favourite shot of the trip. I know I said that last time about the spider, but you go to Karijini for the gorges, so this trumps a golden orb any day!

I've had people say, why not just Photoshop the rail out of the photo so it all looks natural? Well, one, that would be extremely fiddly and I think difficult (too much like hard work) and two, it's called Handrail Pool for a reason...

Dales Gorge, Karijini NP. Betsy again, with EF-S18-200mm lens set at 50mm. 1/4 sec shutter, f/25. Much the same RAW edits as above - warming and magenta tint, contrast, vibrance and saturation adjustments.

This was quite spectacular. We went down Dales Gorge hoping for some interesting light options at sunset and were rewarded with good conditions for water photos plus some really great golden reflections. I promise you, the gold has nothing to do with Photoshop. This was taken at the top of Fortescue Falls, but I thought, if I call this photo Fortescue Falls everyone is going to look at me like I'm crazy!

Knox Gorge, Karijini. Betsy once more (I only have one!) set at 18mm focal length. F/22, 2 sec shutter. Increased contrast, saturation and vibrance with a magenta tint in Camera RAW.

Just as above, the blue has not much at all to do with Photoshop (it may be slightly enhanced) - Knox Gorge really is blue in parts! This is a good example of smooth running water and gives a good indication of the terrain we were carrying camera gear over! But in all seriousness - blue rocks and purple rocks. Really impressive.

Cascades in Knox Gorge, Karijini. Canon EOS 50D with my Nifty Fifty (EF 50mm f/1.8 II), 0.8 sec shutter, f/22, ISO 100. Contrast, brightness, white balance adjustment as well as vibrance and saturation for two photos before stitching in CS4.

I realised on this trip that while the EF-S18-200mm is a brilliant all rounder lens for traveling, it does not specialise well. It's a pretty good zoom in a tight spot and the wide angle does capture a good landscape, however I do tend to miss out on those crystal clear shots. So I complemented it with my Nifty Fifty - this is literally the cheapest Canon lens you can buy. And I love it. It will take some time to master, but it's F-stop can go all the way up to 1.8. Brilliant. It doesn't give you great depth of field for landscapes usually, but I thought I would try it for some of the water photos in Knox Gorge to try and get increased sharpness. Above is the resulting photo - it's actually a panorama. I learnt to edit these RAW images by processing the first image, setting a preset of the settings so the second is processed exactly the same before stitching together.

You may have noticed a lot of talk about editing in Camera RAW in this post, and the captions on the photos indicate pretty much all my photos are edited slightly. I read once that all digital images usually require at least some tweaking in contrast and brightness. But for some purists, I may need to defend myself. When capturing a RAW image what you are actually doing is capturing a digital negative - that is, all the information collected by your camera's sensor. You then need to process them on the computer and it is not much different to developing a negative (not that I have ever done that - I'm pretty sure there are at least a few more controls...). All I really change is the contrast, brightness, vibrance and saturation. For my Karijini photos I warmed up the white balance and increased the tint to the magenta side for most photos to capture as many colours as possible. I will give you an example of what this does below:

Fortescue Falls, Dales Gorge Karijini. Betsy, at 18mm on tripod, 1/4 second, f/22, ISO 250.

This is the unedited version of this shot. One of the last I took before we headed up to the top of the gorge for the sunset. It is dark and the white balance is incorrect. Below is the processed version.

Same shot, only the colours have been corrected by adjusting the white balance and it's brighter and clearer. You particularly notice it in the water - the water has a slight blue tinge in the first shot, and is white in the second.  Could I have done this with my camera on the day I took the shot by adjusting settings? Good question. I like to think not as it was a custom white balance I set on the computer - I already have my camera set to capture slightly saturated images and as I said before, my 18-200mm lens is great at everything but a master of nothing. With more time and fiddling, I could have set a custom white balance on the camera that day, but when you are standing precariously on wet slippery rocks, with your camera pointing down this waterfall and you have to let it go for a few seconds - you want to make as little adjustments as possible!

As I understand it, it is no different than photographers who used to develop their own negatives and get all arty-farty with contrast and colour. Occasionally I mess with hues and gradients but with digital editing I have come to realise that less really is more.

Sunrise and the Dawn

For a photographer, I'm pretty lazy. I hate getting up before the sun. But to get gorgeous sunrises, you have to. So two years ago - my husband and I were still traveling around Australia - we were camped out bush at Shark Bay, WA. It was Easter Sunday and my husband roused me out of bed telling me there was a gorgeous sunset right at the door stop of our caravan. Groaning, I got out of bed and stumbled out to the most tranquil sunrise I have ever seen.

Immediately the zombie was gone and I got out Betsy and took my first panorama with my tripod. I took my time, and the result is still one of my favourite photos since I bought my camera.

To me, it is more than just a sunrise. It symbolises the resurrection, the dawn of a new era where we are reconciled with God through Christ and his sacrifice. Through him we have new life. The sacrifices we make to allow Jesus to be Lord of our lives are tiny compared with the sacrifice he made on that cross. Little sacrifices like getting up an hour earlier.

Happy Easter

The HDR Experiment #2

After discovering that, yes, putting in the time to edit RAW images before combining them into a HDR, I thought hey! that probably holds true for panorama's. I love panorama photography. I like capturing as much information as I can with Betsy - as many colours, the biggest scene, the most detail. Less is more most of the time but when you consider with sheer delight how much of the world we see with our eyes, cameras really become pretty pathetic at what they can capture, and editing them is just our attempt to improve something superficial. The master of the world has created gorgeous scenes and colours for us to enjoy every single day. Can you imagine God's computer screen? (I wonder if he operates on Apple or Microsoft...). How much fun must he have mixing all these colours!

But I digress...Panoramas with High Dynamic Range.

My attempt was fruitless. It was virtually impossible for someone as impatient as me to achieve perfect exposure for each of the RAW photos to stitch together, let alone the HDR photos on top of that...For a rainy day I think. (Given that I live in the Pilbara, I won't hold my breath). I like the idea, but I think I better concentrate on getting HDR right first. Small steps.

After my relatively disappointing efforts with HDR with this particular jaunt to Cossack I was quite down-hearted, however the lesson here is to never give up hope. I still believe it doesn't matter how much photographic skill you have, how whiz-bang your camera is, there is always chance. And by chance, I snapped this. This panorama is a combination of four Betsy churn-our JPEGs taken in portrait, with no post-shot editing other than photomerge. This is why I love Betsy...

Let me tell you this was the wrong day to wear open-toed shoes! But it was worth it.