Redgate Beach turns it on
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.