Last Man Standing

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Apparently we (Australia) are like in the top 20 deforesting nations of the world :-/ (note there are not really any comparable countries on the list, like NZ, US etc) Its kinda embarassing when we have all these people from around the world saying that we are such a developed and innovative country and its followed up with our continual support for some pretty bad things like the deforestation and coal production and the continual bagging of wind and solar power….

As the iconic Australian saying goes.. 'not happy Jan'

It would be great to come back to this field one day when the crop is more established and the rows more defined, the sheer size of it and the lonely old tree are just a minimalist's dream, couple this with subtle pastel sunsets and I think I could be out here every weekend if I could 😉

In the past I have rarely worried about hyperfocal distance, however now being on a full frame camera and using a 14mm lens it really comes into play and you gotta be careful to make sure you do have a enough depth of field to keep everything (front to back) nice and sharp. In this image you can see the leaves at the very base of teh image are a bit out of focus, these are quite close to the camera also, possibly pushing up to f/18 might have helped a bit there.

+Landscape Photography

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Samyang 14mm f2.8 @ 14mm Aperture: f/13 and Shutter Speed: 2s
ISO 100
out front – beans..beans.. and more beans… than a tree and some sky.

Navigation at the edge

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A little Sneaky Sunday sunrise at Bradleys head, the wind was cold, the parking ticket machine ate money and gave no love, the sky uninspiring and the water cold. The company was better 😉 +Rodney Campbell and +Deb Mooney.

This is the view of Sydney that I like 🙂

Exif love:
Single image
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/16 and Shutter Speed: 186.1s (that 0.1 made all the difference)
ISO 100
out front – Lee Graduated 0.9x Filter and LEE fatstopper

The Foothills

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The great thing about cloudless skies is often you can get some lovely pastel colours as the sun retreats over the horizon. These hills in the distance are the last peaks for many kilometres and are the remnants of two volcanos from a few years back…20 million to be in a rough ballpark 🙂

This is a 3 shot panorama image with a graduated filter fitted (0.3x), capturing the fine pastel details is a challenge and getting the exposure just right can make the difference between a gaudy image and a pleasant image. In this image you can see that the sun has just gone over the horizon (behind the camera and off to the left) which leaves the horizon in the opposing direction filled with a warm glow, this only lasts a few minutes and is gradually replaced with a band of blue (sky), pink and purple (horizon).

I will post another image of this tree in a slightly different composition and a few minutes later to show what a difference even just a few minutes can make for the colours.

Exif love:
3 shot panorama, stitched in PS CC.
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 @ 44mm Aperture: f/8 and Shutter Speed: 1/20s
ISO 100
Exposure Comp -0.3EV (why i dunno 🙂 )
out front – graduated filter (LEE 0.3x) and a cool dead tree on the fence to a rather large paddock

https://blog.avernus.com.au/the-foothills/

This is Australia

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where the land rolls endlessly and the sunsets dream on.

WIndmills, these are staple item across the plains of outback Australia, in this case NSW and boy, do they make great photographic subjects 🙂

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 @ 48mm Aperture: f/7.1 and Shutter Speed: 30s
ISO 100
out front – couple of tanks and a windmill.

Silence

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The silence of silence - (c) Gerard Blacklock

the silence of silence

the silence of silence

Communication when there is is silence can be more effective than spoken words. Its what is not said that is often what is the most important.

Sunsets in the country are quite a different beast, especially when the landscape is quite flat, one moment the world is bathed in golden light then the next its a pastel wonderland, followed by a inky blackness devoid of cultural lighting (thats not a bad thing either 🙂 ). In the summer months by the sea sunrise is quite prolonged, or at least it feels that way, giving one the opportunity to take in different compositions and savour the moment, in alot of way I prefer the fast setting sun, it forces one to really focus on the task at hand, a skill that should be used across the board in life 😉 (says he who just sat and procrastinated in from of the TV with a pizza;) )

Cheers to +David Brodrick for being my chauffeur the night before allowing me to scope out some of these locations.

I had pulled up here on the dirt road after spotting this lonely tree standing amongst the bean plants and it was just about the perfect tree, it could have grown on the top of the hill, however lets not complain too much 😉 As i got out of the car there was no movement save for several kangaroos off in the distance getting a free feed on the beans, the silence was pretty well deafening, except for the calls of a small birds it was like being in a empty music / radio studio.

So after a trek up into the field across some snake infested thigh high grass, i set up and watched the sun go down over horizon off to the right, out here, crouched in the bean plants…..

…. the world seemed to be a better place.

New Order

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feral budget time, its like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow

Well, for those local to ozzie land – you now have a new Federal Budget where maternity leave is a safety net and not a salary topup 😉

A budget which is clever politics by the Liberals and a smart move but at the expense of any real significant change. I welcome the day when our politicians grow some balls and do something that is genuinely in the interest of the nation and not for their short term political gain.
As for that infamous red tape – last time I checked my industry is drowning in red tape and the government is forcing more down our throats…

anyway I digress and politics really is a boring -ass topic.

Onto the imagerry (see what i did there? 😉 ) , I have been holding on to this image just for this moment…federal budget time, its like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow 😉

This is a two image panorama to get the full wide angle view, the problem with rainbows is that they usually bring rain, couple this with a filthy sensor and this image did start from a chickenpox infested base 🙂 the healing brush got worn out on this image 🙂

Exif love:
2 images stitched in PS.
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/14 and Shutter Speed: 4s
ISO 100
out front – Hoya CPL, Lee Graduated 0.9x Filter all covered with lots of spotty rain drops 🙁

https://blog.avernus.com.au/new-order/

Graveyard

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Not a bad place to end up I supposes, a head stone beneath a tree…providing the timing is right!

I have a number of shots from this spot hidden behind a little chapel in Mount Wilson but I really struggled to present what I saw on the day in the image – I did bracket all my shots since the dynamic range was too much for the camera, however in the case of this image, after using a automated HDR technique I came back to just a single exposure shot…I just could not get that HDR image to look the way I wanted – very frustrating.

So, I ended up with this, its a two shot panorama (there was meant to be another frame to make it wider but things did not work out for that 🙁 either ) using just a single neutral exposure. Its pretty amazing the level of detail/dynamic range you can get from the D750 and a single frame..

anyways, keen to hear your thoughts, love it, hate it, ambivalent? view large

Exif love:
D750 coupled with 24-70mm f2.8 @ 24mm Aperture: f/10 and Shutter Speed: 1/2s
ISO 100
out front – Hoya CPL

https://blog.avernus.com.au/graveyard/

Tentacles

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At first, they were separated
yet still close
but as each surge of the ocean cycled through
it drew them closer
until they were side by side
and united a force that could withstand
the oncoming ocean
a relentless force and a infinite force.
Until they finally succumbed
to the inevitable destiny
of the ocean
and were pulled in
love until the end

Exif love:
loving the vertical pano style at the moment 🙂
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/16 and Shutter Speed: 2.5s
ISO 250
out front – Hoya CPL, Lee Graduated 0.6x Filter

https://blog.avernus.com.au/tentacles/

Fishing

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I am not quite sure who was more silly, me for standing in the waves taking a photo of the fisherman, or the dude standing in the waves fishing 🙂

I did like the way the surf created the line up the coast.

Exif love:
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/16 and Shutter Speed: 2s
ISO 100
out front – Hoya CPL, Lee Graduated 0.6 Filter all covered with lots of spotty rain drops 🙁

Katoomba Falls

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find the person

from a ball hugging 270 metres above the ground in some crazy designers idea of a joke, a glass bottomed cable car 😉

Well it was not that bad i suppose, but whilst I would not call myself one afraid of heights, this kind of thing still gives me pause for thought:) oddly enough i do not have the same thought when cruising at a few thousand feet above a airport in a dinky little plane, bizarre, i am sure you could write volumes on the psychology of that..

So.. our friendly cable car / skyway guide says to us, "so anyone afraid of heights?", followed quickly by;
"well its too late.. here we go"
this was then backed up with" you are now 270 metres above the valley floor, twice the height of the Sydney Harbour bridge"
but this was the kicker comment
"it would only take the cable car 6 seconds to get to the bottom if it broke" (or something close to that)..

righto..thankyou for that mister optimistic 🙁

Nonetheless the view is nice, the falls are pleasant and the view out the bottom is.. well feels like your looking straight down 😉 We were fortunate enough to get a break in the weather as we went across so I thought i would get a shot of the falls from a different perspective, different in the sense that most of my waterfall images are from the base of waterfalls and involve some trekking and a tripod + filter.

This one is a single shot, not filters, no tripod and while hanging the camera half out the cable car as we trundled across on one of Austria's best products..the cable car. I guess if ya gonna trust your rear end in a cable car, then one built by those who build the ones in the french and Austrian alps, then this would be a good bet.

check out the person at the top of the falls for a bit of scale..

Exif love:
D750 coupled with 24-70mm f2.8 @ 24mm Aperture: f/8 and Shutter Speed: 1/125s
ISO 400
out front – fresh air and 270 metres straight down.

https://blog.avernus.com.au/katoomba-falls/

The Penetrator

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I always wanted to use that title 🙂 and I think this building is the perfect subject for it.

One significant difference between the D7000 and the nikon D750 cameras which becomes quite apparent in shots like this is the noise and sensor hotspots. Previously when doing exposures like this on the D7000 there would be a barrel load of hot pixels and more noise (for lack of a better term). The D750, in this case has none, yep.. thats right.. zero hotspots and the resulting long exposure is much cleaner (read less noise) – this is to be expected given different sizes of sensors and the pixel density i suppose.

anyway enough of all that boring stuff, back to the picture, this image is taken with the B+W ND1000 filter, which was the second ND filter I purchased, the first was a 3 stop hoya one, just for waterfalls), the B+W was my first introduction into super long exposures and even after the first use I was really pleased with the results, the only drawback, and it is a significant one is that its a screw filter, meaning it can be quite time consuming to get a single shot, ie one must firstly compose, focus, then screw the filter on and then take shot (after putting your DK-15 eyepiece cover on – dont forget that 🙁 )
After sometime of using this filter I did get the Lee bigstopper which is a slide in filter, hence is by far more convenient, however a completely different colour cast and in my opinion less nice than the B+W – that is however based on nothing but my grand opinion. And in case when it goes to a black and white, who gives a rats bum.

back to the penetrator… no fake clouds here – these are all real, yep every single one of them, admittingly I did clone out a bit of another building up on the top left, but it was tiny.. 🙂

Exif love:
D750 coupled with 24-70mm f2.8 @ 62mm Aperture: f/18 and Shutter Speed: a mere 127.3s
ISO 100
out front – ND1000 B+W Neutral Density (ND) – Schneider Optics

https://blog.avernus.com.au/the-penetrator/

Watching, waiting

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We have had some pretty bizarre storms in Sydney in the last week, from gale force winds and wet season style rainfall to hail, we have had it all.
Yesterday, about 30 minutes after this image was taken myself and the girls drove home through some streets covered in ankle deep hail stones to find our place had been turned into a winter wonderland (without any leaves or foliage left 🙁 ).
No need for that thredbo visit this year 😉 we got our snowman built in the backyard and ice slide (albeit only big enough for a kid) in the front yard.

As we climbed to the top of the hill at the park amongst growing darkness and increasing lightning, Chaos rightly stated that we should not hang around due to the lightning, luckily she mentioned it when she did, since we pulled the pin on our regular park bash and just as we got to the car it started raining.

I processed this image a few times and then realised, it looked best straight out of the camera. Thus the only PP on this image was the stitching of the frames into a panorama. This will make all ya lovers happy 😉

I hope ya'all survived the weather.

13 shot panorama (portrait orientation)

Exif/setup:
D750 coupled with 85mm f1.4 @ 85mm Aperture: f/2.8 and Shutter Speed: 1/4000s
EV:-0.3
ISO 200

https://blog.avernus.com.au/watching-waiting/

Waiting for dawn

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watching

As Sydney comes out the other end of some wicked weather, it seems only appropriate to post this image.

Here it is, the dawn of the end of the wild weather. I hope ya'all made it through OK – my thoughts go out to the families of those who lost their lives in the floods/storms.

Exif love:
D750 (yeah i know the embedded exif says D610 🙂 ) coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/13 and Shutter Speed: 1.6s
ISO 400
out front – Hoya CPL and Lee Graduated Filter 0.9x

https://blog.avernus.com.au/waiting-for-dawn/

Waterfall Reserve

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hidden deep in the gulley away from the blue sky, a trickle quietly creeps over the rocks

Its pretty cool when you can get to 30 second shutter speeds without filters and its 10am in the morning. Mount Wilson is well known for a few serious canyoning routes, this is not one of them 😉 however you can certainly see how the area is well suited to it. The walk down is pretty mild and access to the various little falls is easy and there is plenty to see and photograph, but what I did like was the sweet greenness of the rocks contrasting with the deep black of the rocks – fav combo right there so i forgive the falls for being only a trickle.

single frame, no gimmicks 😉 just alot of green rough balls..

Exif love:
D750 (yeah i know the embedded exif says D610 🙂 ) coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/16 and Shutter Speed: 30s
ISO 100
out front – Hoya CPL

https://blog.avernus.com.au/waterfall-reserve/