Australian landscape Photography

Another shot from the Margaret River region of the rarely sighted and almost legendary Blackwood River Nymph.  This was shot a few seconds after the previous image Read the rest of this entry »

We had an awesome sunset sky in Fremantle a couple of weeks back, i just thought i would share it with you.

Big Sky at South Beach Fremantle. Click on the image for a better view.

Normally a lovely sky makes a great backdrop to an image, helping to create the mood and adding Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been wanting to put this image up for a few months now, but there was a little reticence on the part of the model, the Blackwood River Nymph.  It’s a landscape image with a difference for me, it has a person in it Read the rest of this entry »

I shot this image of the Pinnacles near Cervantes North of Perth in WA a few months ago, and basically forgot about it…  That seems to happen a lot.  I needed a couple of shots of the Pinnacles a few days back, so i opened the folder and had a play around and got this Read the rest of this entry »

The Kimberley Marine Parks the  West Australian Government have proposed in the far North Kimberley region of Camden Sound are part of   the worlds largest Humpback Whale nurseries.  They are doing this as an attempt to distract the Australian people from the real issue of industrialising the Kimberley, beginning with the enormous James Price Point Kimberley gas project. They are trying to buy us off.  How the two are connected beats me, instead of saying the Kimberley is unique and we will protect it all (as should be the case)  they have said, the Kimberley is unique, so we’ll put aside a bit of it before we set about ruining the rest.  Obviously these words are mine, but if you read the documents you’ll see that my paraphrasing is correct.

The Far North Kimberley Coast, Western Australia

The Marine Sanctuaries as they are proposed are woefully inadequate with only 13% of it offering any real protection from commercial fishing and other industrial activities, which of course defeats its own purpose.  It becomes a Sanctuary in name only until our pro multinational government decides to sell it off to the highest bidder.

Until the 1st of February you get to have a say on what you think of the  proposal, so go to this link, have a read of the letter, do some research, look at some maps and if you agree, submit it.

Low tide at Dawn on the Kimberley Coast

I have been up to the Kimberley many times, and 2 years ago i had the opportunity to go on a boat trip through the Far north and see a lot of this isolated and beautiful coast that you can only get to from a boat.  It really is like nowhere else on Earth,  a unique place that should  be preserved.  The only reason this government  can get away with selling off the Kimberley is that few people have seen it and so most don’t know how special it is and  what we would be giving up.

I want to be able to show my Grandchildren the Kimberley, the wild untamed Kimberley, not a barren industrial dump that it will become if these greedy and unthinking men get their way.  Do yourself a favour, if you’ve not been to the Kimberley, go.  it will get into your blood and touch your soul the way few places can, and then you too  will know why this is one place we cant let the greedy bastards ruin.

Early morning light reflected off the King Leopold sandstone cliffs

Finally i got some time to work up that image from Redgate Beach, Margaret River, though actually its not the same image that i posted a few months back, its a differant series a few minutes earlier, the other one i may work on some more tomorrow.

Clearing Rain, Redgate Beach, Margaret River

I  love the water movement across the foreground of this image, as the water from the previous wave rushes back out from the left to the right.

This image is 6 pairs of vertical exposures stitched and then manually HDR blended to get the light in the foreground, its shot on the Canon 5DMk II with the 17mm f4L tilt shift lens.   Its still a work in progress, but i think its coming up nicely, i may put this one up in the gallery to see what the response is.

Happy New Year by the way, they seem to come up more and more often the older i get!

Well i’ve been a bit slack lately, its been over a week since my last post,  Christmas is always a busy time though, everything seems to happen at once.  I managed to get away camping for a couple of days again, this time to a magic little spot on the Murray River just out of Dwellingup, a small town South East of Perth in the middle of the Jarrah Forest.

As a young kid we used to go camping on the Murray river at Dwellingup, its really the place where i first developed a love of the Australian bush and nature.  The forest around Dwellingup and the Murray River have a particular smell, one i have not smelled in quite a few years, yet as we drove through the town and out into the bush the smell of the forest brought back a host of childhood memories, good memories of what this place represents for me.  Its amazing how a smell can connect with so many other things in our lives, it is the key to many memories and experiences and all we have to do is catch a faint sniff to be brought back to other times past…

Wandered off the point a bit there for a while, back now.  Had a great weekend, wandering through the bush, canoeing up the river, swimming and reading books.  I gave the new F Stop camera bag a thorough field test, filling it full of camera gear tripod and water and went for a nice long walk, it passed with flying colours, great bag, highly recommend it.  I only took one photo all weekend, and this is it…

Ah... beautiful. Explain to me again why i can't just stay here?

It is an 8 shot pano stitch shot on the 5D Mk II (of course) with the 16-35mm f2.8L  lens at 16mm, of the Murray River at Sunset.  actually its a 24 shot, cause it was bracketed and then manually HDR blended.

The Redgate beach pano is still coming, i’ve been a little distracted… there is also several hundred shots from Greece, Chile, Brasil, Argentina and Central America still to come, Stay Tuned!

I just had a few days camping around Margaret River, something i haven’t done for ages.  It really is a beautiful place and a very odd site to try and build a coal mine…

The first couple of days were a bit rainy and grey, which is the perfect weather for stuff like this…

Weathered Wood

Shot on the 5D Mk II with that really cool 17mm f4L tilt shift lens i keep writing about.  Seems its almost permanently glued to the camera these days, in fact most times i seem to leave the rest of my camera gear at home or in the car (heavily locked and secured of course).  I just love the texture of the weathered wood in this shot, it was really  an experiment to see just how much depth i could get with the lens tilt and an extremely close subject, and this old gnarly tree was a great subject.  By tilting the lens so the focal plane was parallel with the tree trunk i was able to keep all of it pin sharp while dropping out the background very nicely, its almost like having a field camera again, but not as big or clumsy.

By Friday afternoon the weather started to clear and i found myself down at Redgate beach again, where the sunset was just amazing!

Clearing sky at sunset, Redgate Beach

I had brought a very heavy bag with all my Canon gear and the 6×17 down with me (and mostly left it in the car), and although my brain told me i should take out the 6×17 and use that… stitching not being so great for beaches and moving waves… i just couldn’t bring myself to do it.  Really i needed 2 tripods set up next to each other so i could shoot with both at once, oh yeah, and an assistant to carry all this gear, and a second assistant to set it all up…  Working on these lovely clean digital files has really spoiled me, its hard to go back to spending hours dusting huge scans, removing fingerprints and chemical smears that turn into whole continents when enlarged to 100%… maybe i need an assistant for that too…

This image is of course shot with the canon 5D Mk II and the  17mm f4L tilt shift lens… its actually one image of a 7 or 8 image stitch, which i haven’t done yet.  i’ll play around in the coming days and see if i can get it to work, stay tuned.

All  the images on my site are shot on large format film, except one… can you pick it?   I have many thousands of negatives of all formats from 5″x4″ to 35mm in folders all over the place… so much for organised security!

I’ve had a lot of fun with film, and used more than my fair share of it over the years.  Time i moved on, so,  about 8 months ago  i bought my first real digital camera, a Canon 5D Mk II  and  i am loving it.  I recently took it with me to Greece and i just had a ball, shooting HDR images (manually blended with layers) and stitched Panos with this awesome  pano head from Really Right Stuff that i picked up a while back.  This camera is not just my first real digital, its my first camera with auto focus!  I’ve been sitting on the fence for quite a while it seems.

The last 35mm gear i had was a Leica RE with a whole bag of beautiful prime lenses, all manual focus and full manual exposure.  I think the camera had some auto exposure functions on it, but i never used them, so i have no idea if they worked or not.  I just sold this camera recently, it’s helping pay for the new setup.

I remember 12 years ago when i worked for Fremantle Black & White (Black & White lab here in Freo), and using one of the first serious professional digital cameras in the studio, it was about 1.5 mega pixels and hugely expensive.  It had a viewing screen the size of a postage stamp and was awfully slow, but even then it was clearly the way forward, though it had a long way to go.

Check out the depth of field

A couple of days ago i picked up the latest addition for the Canon 5D Mk II kit, a 17mm f4L Tilt Shift lens. its a bit more like what i’m used to, being a prime lens with manual focus.  Although it’s really designed for architectural style work, the tilt and shift capabilities make it ideal for landscape due to the almost infinite depth of field possible.  I took it down to South Beach yesterday after work and had a bit of a play around, takes a bit of getting used to, but i think its going to be awesome for stitching pano images.

I think it’ll still be a while before i replace the 6 x 17 film camera, but not because i think it’s better than digital, rather, i can’t yet afford the camera that can replace it.  Anybody want to lend me $50,000?

Both these images shot at f5.6

Sydney is such a beautiful place it’s hard not to take photos, and the clouds this afternoon were spectacular… Now where is that permit…

Tomorrow it is back to normality.

This image is Manly Pool in Sydney,  shot on the Canon 5D Mk II with the 16-35mm f2.8L lens at 16mm.

Manly Pool with looming sky