Can't see the forest for the trees

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I walked past this standing of trees, stopped and walked back and forth about 5 times – such a awesome view with the super contrasting whites of the tree trunks with the greens and earths of the surrounds, a bit hard to portray the real view, but I think the panoramic option helps. I needed a pair of sunnies it was soo white, even tho it was overcast 🙂

D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70 @ 44mm Aperture: f9 and Shutter Speed: 1/30s
ISO: 400
out front: a Hoya CPL and a bunch of funny white trees 🙂

Unique

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After coming back from Norway, home of freaking awesome mountains, I did not think I would ever be able to look at the Blue Mountains the same way again, however whilst the blue mountains pale in terms of size when compared to say Dalsnibba (the hill that looks over Geiranger) there is a uniqueness to the Blue mountains which gives them a pretty big draw card. The sheer sandstone cliffs, the gums and the ancient history of the people that walked here before, all something which is not replicated anywhere else in teh world – after visiting just about anywhere in the mountains it leaves me thinking I am very lucky to live so close and be able to enjoy such neat scenery and it should not be under appreciated 🙂

This is a spot looking over the Jamison Valley from Narrowneck, I could basically walk 50 metres and view the Megalong Valley side (https://plus.google.com/+GerardBlacklock/posts/gDPVmCCg5dX) or this side.

Some pretty cool light on this evening too, really lit up the clouds which were honking across the valley..

D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 24mm Aperture: f11 and Shutter Speed: 2s
ISO: 100
out front: Hoya CPL and Lee Graduated Filter (0.9x)

Terrace Falls and Salote Pool

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Salote Pool - (c) Gerard Blacklock

Salote Pool – (c) Gerard Blacklock

Its been a few years since I have done this walk down to Terrace Falls, its a great little spot and quite accessible (especially when you have busted foot) without too many people, unlike some spots further up towards wennie falls and katoomba. Not much water running, however all the pools down to Picnic point have absolutely crystal clear water and lots of freshwater crayfish.

I would say view this large and zoom in, however google in their infinite wisdom have removed the ability to zoom in the newer version of google plus. So, at the very least, view it full screen 🙂

This image is an absolute bundle of shots, 21 shot panorama, its basically a 7 frame (portrait orientation) image with each frame bracketed (under, normal and over)
Now, one might wonder, why not just take a shot at 16mm and get it all in one frame ? yes you can do that, however one significant disadvantage (ignoring the resolution thing) is that when in wide angle things in distance look really small, hence in this case the small falls would have been represented as tiny tiny falls 🙂 Thats a big thing for panos, it does change the perspective alot (and for the better).
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 62mm Aperture: f13 and Shutter Speed: 10s for normal exp, 1.3s for the underexposed one and 30 sec for the over exposed, this is the one that gets the detail in those dark rock cavities 🙂
ISO: 100
out front: Hoya CPL

Minnehaha Falls

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the hidden joint

What I love about photography is the way you can arrange the composition, the elements and to an certain extent the light to suit what you want to portray, conversely you can use these to not show something. I had a few hours to burn so I plugged into google 'waterfalls and blue mountains' closed my eyes and clicked , the result was Minnehaha falls (after Leura Cascades but i choose not to go there 'cause its a bit busy)

What a cool name, apparently it comes from a Native American female name which is translated as 'waterfall' would be interesting to know why the falls are called this, probably some dude just thought it sounded cool hence the name 😉

Back to the image and the stuff about showing and not showing stuff.. I rocked up here late i the day, probably later than one should given its a 30 minute walk in and it was close to sunset, however shortly thereafter a couple turned up and sat on the edge of the pool. I thought it a little strange being so late in the day, however they came prepared with a couple of beers and a joint so all good i suppose 😉 anyway I really did not want anyone in my shot so I composed them behind the big rock on the left 🙂 and my scene was once again people free 🙂 mission accomplished.

For the record they were very polite and took their stuff out with them, so they get a big tick in my book 🙂

Exif love:
a bucketload (11) of portrait orientation shots stitched together in PS this is about a 180degree view.
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f13
Shutter Speed: 30s
ISO 200 (things were getting a bit dark down the bottom)
Out front – Hoya CPL.

Under the Radar

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on so many levels 😉

So I thought I was a little deserving of an Easter weekend sunrise particularly given the fact that daylight savings starts shortly, and also there is no one to convince me otherwise at 4:30am 😉

The conditions are pretty variable in the Blue Mountains and this particular morning they really excelled 😉 I decided to take the lazy man's option and just go to one of the Grose Valley Lookouts where I did not have to walk very far, after spending an entertaining hour or so in the car listening to some quality radio talk back it became quite apparent that there was gonna be no sunrise and I could have probably just stayed at home in bed and taken a photo thru a white sheet to get the same effect 😉

Given that I had driven over an hour to get there, i thought I better take a walk and at least have a look, kinda lucky I did, once I got to one of the little lookouts and had just set up the camera the clouds broke and the valley appeared, literally like someone had just pulled the curtain back. I madly banged off a few shots and before I knew it the cloud rolled back in and I was back under the white sheet, well that was sunrise done 😉

What was pretty cool was that the scene just looked like two completely separate parts, the valley below was completely separate to the burning sky above – talk about timing, this was about 10 minutes before the sun was meant to rise..

Exif love:
8 portrait orientation shots stitched
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 35mm Aperture: f10 and Shutter Speed: 1.3s
ISO 100
Out front – Hoya CPL and Lee Graduated Filter (0.6x)

Foggy Glen

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View large

This is from a spot which I refer to as the fair-weather photographers spot 😉 if your looking for a quiet accessible waterfall then this is your location, a short walk down some steps and there is a nice sheltered spot to setup your tripod and take in the beauty of this small final waterfall in the Leura Cascades.
I have taken photos of this waterfall a total of 3 times now and each time I have come away with differing images do the conditions but also due changes in the way I view a scene and compose it. To be honest I don't think I have necessarily improved on previous attempts, moreso just generated different images 🙂

The falls are quite small and required quite a wide angle lens, in this case, rather than run with a single image I decided to try and encapsulate the scene pretty well in its entirety, well as much as my pano format would allow! As always a scene like this, even on a rainy overcast day has quite some dynamic range in the light, as such i bracketed each shot in this panorama, this meant I had alot more control of those shadowy areas 🙂 There was quite a few portrait orientation shots (about 8) taken for this and then it was cropped fairly heavily from the top and bottom.

Techie data:
D7000 with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @ 11mm Aperture: f/8 Shutter 20, 6 & 30 seconds
ISO 160
out front – Hoya screw in circular polariser and neutral density filter (3 stops)

As always, I welcome any suggestions, comments and improvements to my photography, they are always warmly welcomed

Bums on the edge

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Flow to me
Sometimes to achieve that composition there is only one way to do it – wet feet and bum out over the edge of the next waterfall, whilst confident that a missplaced step would send me over the edge i had some comfort in the fact it was only a few feet down 😉 not like the falls below that 🙂

Anyway, itsa great little spot Leura Cascades and whilst you can go for the fair-weather positions there is plenty of scope to reach out and pull a composition of the cascades that has some originality to it 🙂

Techie data:
D7000 with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @ 11mm Aperture: f/8 Shutter 10 seconds
ISO 160 (don't ask me why 🙂 ) this was one of the first shots so the old brain was a bit fuzzy 😉
out front – Hoya screw in circular polariser and neutral density filter (3 stops)

As always, I welcome any suggestions, comments and improvements to my photography, they are always warmly welcomed

Green and Gold

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I tried a new processing technique with this one, rather than the usual one handed effort (the other hand is rocking 5.5month old tickles) – which by the way should excuse my terrible spelling and grammar 🙂
anyway,..this time i pulled out the baby carrier, or as i refer to it as..the back killer, clearly not designed for large men….and plonked tickles in it, this means i can process with two hands, spend quality time with tickles and listen to classical whilst she falls asleep…multitasking is my middle name…the other is lazy 😉

In all seriousness, this is another image from Lawson, this great set of falls permits one to easily climb up onto the rock steps and compose as one wishes, in this case I am going through a little pano waterfall phase and as such follows that theme.

3 frame pano image, each frame manually bracketed to achieve the desired dynamic range.

Techie data:
D7000 with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @ 11mm Aperture: f/8 Shutter 10, 3 & 30 seonds
out front – Hoya screw in circular polariser and neutral density filter (3 stops)

As always, I welcome any suggestions, comments and improvements to my photography, they are always warmly welcomed

The Weeping Swirls

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The beautiful thing about the Weeping Falls (or as I know them the lower Bridal Veil falls) is the amount of different perspectives on the falls, over on the left crouched between a few rocks I noticed this nice little eddy current swirling around (only after taking the first 30 second shot 🙂 )

The lush green foliage, the fog and the filtered light worked perfectly to light the scene, even at 30 seconds it was a striggle to capture all the shadow detail.

Techie data:
D7000 with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 @ 11mm Aperture: f/9.5
out front – Hoya screw in circular polariser and neutral density filter (3 stops)

As always, I welcome any suggestions, comments and improvements to my photography, they are always warmly welcomed