Fallen

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When I was a kid I listened to alot of music, particularly at the and of my schooling and as a result alot of songs trigger different memories, of different times and experiences, which is really cool, a song comes on and instantly without much effort i am taken back to the time, experience and feeling. Now, with less time for more music and possibly music replaced moreso with imagery, I now find that images have taken that space and now trigger memories of a time and/or experience. I hear ya, saying, 'der of course they would', but its still cool i reckon 🙂 as i look at this image, it represents a few days in my life that I am sure I will look back in years to come and reminisce over, for good or the bad :-/

This one tree, or what was left of it, was sitting out in a sea of emptiness with its comrades way off, out of reach, seemingly so sad and lonely, just handing on to the what it once was…..

SIngle image, long exposure and I can't decided on whether I actually like the BW version better 🙂

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 @ 70mm Aperture: f/10 and Shutter Speed: 186.1s
ISO 100
out front: Lee Biggstopper

+Landscape Photography

Day to Night

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under the windmill

I can still smell the cow dung in the air…the dust of the road and the sharp cold as the last of the sun disappeared over the horizon.
…… experiences which are lost to the city.

Where is the Fairy?

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Probably one of the better focus stacked macros I have done, this one is created from 10 shots in total, each taken with the flash off camera to the right diffused with a white diffuser thingy..

I had the camera pretty well sitting on the ground and used the live view to compose the shot, I then reverted back to viewfinder to achieve the focus on the stalk since the liveview focus can be a bit flakey, then simply wound the focus ring in and out to get the depth of field, each time I just checked the image to see where the focus slice was and when it had past the front of the fungi I knew I had enough frames..

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 55mm f2.8 @ 55mm Aperture: f11 and Shutter Speed: 1/60s
ISO 400
Lightning goodness : SB600 off to the right triggered thru onboard flash

https://blog.avernus.com.au/wheres-the-fairy/

The Indicator

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I always knew that frogs were a environmental indicator, however I have been educated in the fact that fungi and also a key environmental indicator, specifically relating to air quality. Whilst this little specimen is healthy and happy growing on the side of a bit of bark in the damp, dark undergrowth, there are are some fungi which when exposured to pollutants grow and age in a different way, one of which causes the fungi gills to grow/form on the top creating a rose shaped fungi, which is called Rosecomb… apparently this is bad 🙁

Focus stacking, on the other hand is good for fungi 🙂 it allows a much greater depth of field in a macro image, particularly where the subject is super small 🙂 did you like that segway ?

This image is a stack of about nine shots, basically all it is taking a slice from extra picture which is in focus and blending them together to create a nice sharp image with the whole subject, in this case the fungi and a bit of the bark. I find that +Adobe Photoshop does a good job, however often there needs to be a bit of the manual alignment to get things to look decent.

The process goes alittle like this…

> find cracking little fungi -> position camera, tripod and body as close as possible, the challenge here is to do it without getting dirty and without moving fungi 😉
> take several shots with the focus changed a bit…you know.. start with the stalk in focus then work forward and aft of that.

Load into stack -> autoalign – > select layers -> auto blend (with stack) -> manually brush in bits where photoshop lacks awesomeness… 🙂 -> edit per normal process.

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 55mm f2.8 @ 55mm Aperture: f/29 and Shutter Speed: 1/60s
ISO 400
Lightning goodness : SB600 off to the left triggered thru onboard flash with gerry holding a diffuser in one hand, kneeling on the ground and pressing the shutter with the other 😉

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

The Last Post

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tread carefully

As I stood on the edge of the lake, perched on a few partially submerged rocks with the gentle sound of bird wings rushing through the air over my head I thought…. 'I am going to have to start wearing pants rather than shorts 'cause its fing cold…' 😉
Having grown up in a fairly cold area it has not bothered me so much and hence most often throughout winter I can be seen wearing shorts (with other stuff also for the record;) ), however this particular morning, I really wished I had something a bit more :-/

Getting back to the car and looking at the OAT (outside air temp), i realised that… yeah probably 1 degree Celsius is probably close to the cutoff temperature for short wearing…

This lake was, for the most part, like a mirror – in the mind numbing cold i really knew I wanted to capture the subtle tones of the sunrise (around 30 minutes before sunrise), however this is tricky, the dynamic range is such that the horizon, whilst not bright to the naked eye is quite bright for the camera and hence to nail the warm horizon colours you had to sacrifice some of the detail in the sky and water.

I did not use any filters here, no polariser, (I wanted the reflections) and no graduated filters, but a reverse graduated filter would have probably been useful..

The final image is a vertical panorama using three vertical frames, each one with the poles in the frame, since that was pretty well all that could be common between the frames for the software to stitch.

The little dark dots on the horizon are actually trees 🙂 the distance and the mirage effect causes them to appear like floating boogers 😉

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 @ 32mm Aperture: f/16 and Shutter Speed: 8s
ISO 100
3 frames stitched together in +Adobe Photoshop Lightroom as a blended panorama.

+Landscape Photography Community

https://blog.avernus.com.au/the-last-post/

*Wheres Wally i mean windmilly'

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pick the odd man out:)

There was this awesome sign near here which said:

OMG FOODBOWL

I noticed the sign some time ago and planned to get a shot of it, however life etc got in the way and also stopping on a road with some rather large roadtrains on it seemed not so appealing 🙂

The liverpool plains are the site of a proposed Coal mine, well it was apparently proposed back in 2008-ish when the then minister Ian Macdonald was around.. and we all know who well he handled coal mines in NSW lol.. nice one dude, corrupt much? anyways .. fastforward to now and apparently they are only gonna mine up above the level of the fertile soil of the Liverpool plains, aka the food bowl…that sounds like a excellent plan… on paper.. :-/

Its no wonder that people are so jaded by the whole mining issue now and at the and of the day it seems so hard to make a educated decision when there is so much spin and stuff that happens behind the scenes and you really can't know whos got whos hand in whos pocket…

Well anyway, here's a picture of the plains in its glory, taken with a favourite little lens of mine the nikkor 135mm f2.8, not quite as good as my 105mm f2.5 however on full frame this lens has been stellar and the sharpness quite incredible. The 105mm still beats it in contrast and rendition imo tho.

3 shot pano.. or was it 4 ? oh well it had a few shots stitched together and it seemed appropriate to convert it to monochrome.

ya gotta view it large, its all there in full res too..

Exif love:
D750 coupled with 135mm f2.8 @ 135mm Aperture: f/8 and Shutter Speed: 1/640s
EV -0.3
ISO 200
out front – Hoya CPL

https://blog.avernus.com.au/wheres-Wally-i-mean-windmilly/

+Landscape Photography

A Day in the City

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it goes a little something like this …

– found a cool softbox light for dad, but the T2 store were not so keen on dad taking it home…
– found another cool department store to have a look in, it was pretty and had all these people painting other people, it also had these funny windows you could watch the world go by through…
– found a cool chair and mirror and sat in it waiting for someone to paint me, but alas no one was forthcoming.
– hid in some things that appeared to be clothes and was great watching dad try and catch me…
– got tired of waiting for a someone to paint me and decided to start my own session.
– finally found the sale I had been waiting for….

The church of

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i am tempted to say gerry… but it should really be Sydney I suppose 🙂

So I kinda messed this up – i spent all this time waiting for the perfect moment when there we no boats cruising through my shot and took 3 exposures for all of the 4 frames…. except one, the far left frame did not have the over exposed frame, as a result i never bothered to look at, however given the instigated by +Kitten KaboodleInc​ and +Rodney Campbell​ i thought why not give it a smashing with the treatment.

Its a shot from the Kirribilli side of the harbour during the vivid sydney festival (#vivid), hence the buildings are lit up with various colours and the crazy spot lights from darling harbour can be seen over the southern bridge pylon.

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 @ 58mm Aperture: f/3.2 and Shutter Speed: 5s (normal exposure) 1/1.6s (underexpsoure) and 30s (over exposure except for the last frame…. grrrr)
4 frames stitched together in PTGUI as a blended panorama.

you know how hard it is to get 40s on the harbour with a damn boat floating thru your frame?? i deserve a medal for just that alone…
ISO 1000
out front – gerrys church 😉

Vivid Planet

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So, i only have about 14.5 billion images from vivid this year, so I think its only fair that I inflict some more vividness on the world… in light (hahaaa get it? vivid ..festival… light.. – ok bad dad joke) of the recent splurge of its only sensible that I do one of the pinstripped Sydney Harbour Bridge.

To save time I tried with just a single image (yeah kinda of lazy) just see how it would work out.. surprisingly well, i could have blended multiple exposures to get some more dynamic range and stitched a pano… but in the interest of saving time, here we go, tiny planet from a single 14mm shot.

Techie love:
D750 coupled with Samyang 14mm f2.8 @ 14mm Aperture: f/7.1 and Shutter Speed: 20s
ISO 100
out front – a very bending SHB

Sydney Skyline

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a wide view 😉

+Clint Burkinshaw just for you mate, i would have not posted it otherwise 😉

The little planet used about 2/3rds of this frame, the process (excluding the wrapping) is fairly similar, well as much as I can remember 🙂 …
The tricky bit is just getting the image level and getting the ends to join up without huge discontinuities (tone/colour and subject)

9 images stitched together in PTGUI (only because Photoshop struggled to blend the sky tones together in a natural way.
Exif love:
D750 coupled with 85mm f1.4 @ 85mm Aperture: f/14 and Shutter Speed: 15s
ISO 100
out front – Lee Graduated 0.9x Filter