tgif tomorrow 🙂
I love the way the logs have just fallen here, with alittle mad scrambling and contortionist moves i was able to get this view, the view is almost 180 degree view, i had to clone out my foot at the bottom 🙂
Exif love:
4 wide angle portrait orientation images stitched together to make a mammoth vertical pano, then cropped back a bit 😉
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f16 and Shutter Speed: 13s
ISO 100
Out front – CPL only, some logs and a few falls
ya gotta view it large, seriously, money back guarantee 😉
Exif love:
a bucketload of landscape orientation shots stitched together in PS this is about a 180degree view.
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f14
Shutter Speed: 13s
ISO 100
Out front – Hoya CPL.
Valley of the Waters
I really love this walk, I love it even more early in the morning, like just after the crack of dawn, its a very popular walk and thats a great thing for sure, however sometimes you just want a bit of space and not run into someone every 10 steps, hence thats where the early morning start comes in.
I trekked down to these falls shortly after sunrise, passing Empress falls on the way and passed two people, one was a fairly elderly lady coming up the valley, which meant she had probably walked all the way round from wennie falls – which is not a stroll in the park, the second was a chap about my age (thats young btw 😉 ) who was jogging, yes, you read that right.. jogging down the walk. I did not really know what to say to him, so 'gday mate' was about it, with a bit of disbelief admiration 🙂
Anyway's, the Sylvia Falls is a very popular photographic spot too, super easy to compose and most people go for the vertical, i did too when I first visited 🙂 however this time, and its kinda a phase I am going thru, i want to capture a pano of the falls, giving a bit of texture and context to the scene, showing the falls (which are very cool on the black rocks ), the drop to the right and also the sharp incline on the left where the path is cut in.
Strangely enough panoramas are actually quite easy to compose and in my opinion much more forgiving than say the standard 6:4 format, I say this since the brain reads from left to right (in most languages anyway), thus the image taker has already the advantage that the viewer will natural flow thru image when looking at it, that said, its also very easy in panos to create that dreaded 'big empty space' so getting right up close and personal can often work much better – see the next image from this same spot for an example…
There is one key flaw in this image and I blame photoshop 🙂 I cloned out / content aware filled the hand rail on the left, but by geez it did a rubbish job and I did not notice until the very end, I really should go back and fix that…
Exif love:
7 landscape orientation shots stitched together in PS
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 28mm Aperture: f16 and Shutter Speed: 5s to 13s (note I changed the shutter speed as i took them to control teh exposure as I went around)
ISO 100
Out front – Hoya CPL.
on rocks lined with gold
Exif love:
4 portrait orientation images stitched together to make a mammoth vertical pano
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f14 and Shutter Speed: 30s
ISO 100
Out front – CPL only and a misty waterfall
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)
10 years ago you would not have seen this, however out here where its like 80% sunshine you do not have to be a rocket scientist to realise that solar energy is the way to go now that its available and compared to initial uptake prices…dirt cheap.
Exif love:
5 horizontal frames taken in the searing heat..
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 40mm Aperture: f10 and Shutter Speed: 1/125s
ISO 100
Out front – Hoya CPL and one lonely shed and silo
Hole.
Hole – (c) Gerard Blacklock
All this talk about compositing images and dropping skies in has done only two things for me 🙂 1) made me try it, and 2) convinced me it ain’t that hard 🙂
I guess its for some – but the wholesale dropping in of the sky – as I have done here, opens a new door to image creation but also another level of complexity of trying to create and capture images..
Anyway, for complete disclosure, which it what seems to be the key outcome of most discussions, this image is made from two completely separate images from completely different locations.
The processing was as simple as 4 layers in PS, a graduated mask and a duplicate mask to cleanup a few spots on the hill.
The impossible light
Sometimes I see a shot and think that would be awesome, but achieving it from a technical stand point can be a bit of barrier, i suppose more correctly its probably a effort barrier now more than technical, i think this image sums that comment up nicely.
Its a 3 frame wide panorama and as you can probably imagine with the sun on one side and detail trees in the middle its a pretty high dynamic range scene, one that the human eyes sees and goes, 'wow sweet' 🙂 well mine do any way 🙂 but the poor old camera (even with its whizz bang technology) goes 'arrghh too much light and shadow whatcha doing to me? ' 🙂
So to help out the poor camera and in all honesty I did not really expect this shot to work out (to a level worth pursuing), I bracketed each shot, this left me with a 9 shot picture (3 frames bracketed (-3ev, 0, +3ev). I stitched up the panorama with the brackets as separate layers and then manually masked the bright and dark areas to increase the dynamic range, by this stage i was thinking the amount of effort is not quite proportional to the outcome, especially when comparing to the long exposure shot I took a few minutes afterwards (see here: https://plus.google.com/+GerardBlacklock/posts/dUNKtPoh1Ay) the actually effort at the scene and also at the computer was significantly less for the linked image 🙂
anyway, it did all work to a level that at the very least deserved to be posted here on gplus 🙂
Exif love:
3 shot panorama (each frame bracketed)
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35 mm f4 @ 24mm Aperture: f18 and Shutter Speed: 18s (over exp) 5s (normal exp) 1s (under exp)
ISO 100
Out front – LEE GND (0.6x)
and yep, no dudes with umbrella's cloned in here 🙂
It is however a blend of two exposures, i basically had a short exposure to freeze any movement in the two umbrella dudes and a second exposure of long shutter speed to enable the detail in teh sky and the little gully to be brought out.
fyi the record that little patch of rock right at the bottom of the frame.. is slippery.. slippery like bum over head slippery 😉
Exif love ('cause I know your just hanging for it 🙂 )
2 shots, one for the dudes and one for the shadow details…
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f16 and Shutter Speed: 4s (for the dudes) and 10s for the foreground
ISO 100
Welcome to the spray, where it is micro-fibre cloth vs nature 🙂
Exif love:
6 frames stitched together
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35m f4 @ 70mm Aperture: f16 and Shutter Speed: 1s
ISO 400
Out front – CPL only
I had to really beat this one over the head to get it to stitch properly, its 5 shots with quite a lot of overlap, but no matter i did the road lines would just not line up in the stitch, so I had to resort to some clone sorcery to bring them back together 🙂
Exif love:
5 landscape orientation images stitched in +Adobe Photoshop
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 24mm Aperture: f13 and Shutter Speed: 1/160s
ISO 100
Out front – a long ass road 🙂
so clouds.. you guys hang around here much?
A different take on a new favourite tree of mine, it did start off as quite a large vertical panorama, however crop at the very bottom of the frame just did not quite sit well with me. Hence rather than a horizon at the middle it ended up as a classic 1/3rd composition…
ya gotta view it large too 🙂
Exif love:
a whole bunch of vertical frames stitched together…
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 50mm Aperture: f11 and Shutter Speed: 1/180s
ISO 100
Out front – CPL only and a lonely tree.
Home Time – (c) Gerard Blacklock
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 24mm Aperture: f13 and Shutter Speed: 2.5s
ISO 100
Out front – LEE graduated 0.9x filter and CPL
Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 24mm Aperture: f13 and Shutter Speed: 2.5s
ISO 100
Out front – LEE graduated 0.9x filter and CPL
Sydney park Sessions – (c) Gerard Blacklock
4 frames stitched together and a few strays cloned out 😉
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 70mm Aperture: f5 and Shutter Speed: 1/160s
ISO 400
Out front – CPL only
Sometimes.. and only sometimes do things in life (with kids) line up nicely, this was one such time and it has nothing to do with the people in the image 🙂
I noted earlier on in the arvo, whilst chained to my domestic duties, that the clouds were pretty cool, as luck would have it, Chaos and tickles were both pretty zonked from a big day at the zoo yesterday so it was off to bed during the daylight hours for them 🙂 and at 6:30pm.. yes you read that right! i was cruising to the park with both girls in bed asleep (some credit to the better half there too i suppose ; ) ) which meant I got there just in time for some very cool clouds and sunset 🙂
Exif love:
4 frames stitched together and a few strays cloned out 😉
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 70mm Aperture: f5 and Shutter Speed: 1/160s
ISO 400
Out front – CPL only
We all Bleed – (C) Gerard Blacklock
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35 mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f16 and Shutter Speed: 30 seconds
ISO 100
Out front – LEE GND (0.9x)
I saw on some news/photography website yesterday that the famous ‘Philosophers Tree’ had been cut down by the farmer who owned the land where the tree was. If you have never seen a image of this tree, be sure to do a quick google and check it out, it is a wonderful subject, or at least it was.
Sadly, the reason for chopping it down, was ( it appears) partly due to the fact that so many photographers trespassed on his land..
Pretty sad state of affairs, but if that is the case, i cannot blame him, just shows you can love a tree to death I suppose.
So, in memory of the Philosophers Tree, here is my tribute, a shot taken when I was searching for those lone mangrove trees (https://plus.google.com/+GerardBlacklock/posts/QcPubRyxLiS).
it was also between getting rained on, eaten by mozzies and contemplating just getting the car and grabbing a coffee instead.. i would have, but the coffee shop was not open yet 🙁
Exif love 😉
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35 mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f16 and Shutter Speed: 30 seconds
ISO 100
Out front – LEE GND (0.9x)