Since we left Augusta we have travelled East into the heart of Western Australia‘s forests. It’s hard to believe we will soon be crossing the Nullarbor which is named after its lack of trees. The native trees here are all types of eucalyptus but you would not know it looking at them as they vary from tall white barked trees to ones which resemble oak. This shot was taken as we cooked our diner on the free Barbecue in the National Park surrounding The Gloucester Tree which is a 61m tall tree which was regularly climbed to look out for fires. A job which is now done with light aircraft.

This image was accepted for Stock Photography at Shutterstock and is available for high resolution download here.

This is a 1943 John Deere tractor which has been lovingly restored for classic farm shows. This may be the last post from the UK as we are in the final staged of moving to Australia. I will try to post daily once we are out there. Next stop Perth.

This is Belton Park in Lincolnshire, UK. It was the first chance to test out my new Canon 5D Mark II. It’s nice to be using a camera without a schizophrenic auto focus for a change.  The Mark II has been out for three years now and many believe a mark III will be announced soon. The good news is Canon have dropped the price of the Mark II recently which means you can get a lot of camera for your money.

To process this image I used the HSL/Grayscale tab in Camera RAW. This lets you change the saturation of individual colours. For this image the purple of the background flowers could be increased without over saturating the yellows in the grass.

This is Elvaston Castle in Derbyshire, UK. The original image was a little underexposed in the shadow areas. I used Fill Light in Camera RAW to bring back some detail. Lens Correction was also used to straighten the walls.

This was taken on a family holiday to Wales in 2010. I used Camera RAW to process this image. I like to show what setting I use for each post unfortunately “Print Screen” does not record anything when the Camera RAW dialogue is open in Photoshop. I’ve managed to get round this by using “Problem Step Recorder” This is a bit of software which is included in Windows 7 and takes a screen grab each time the mouse is clicked. It saves them as heavily compressed jpegs but it is the only way I can show the settings I have used. I replaced the sky with part of this image because I wanted some more blue in it.

This is Braunston in Rutland, UK. It is a beautiful old English village. To make it look a little older I removed all the pylons, wires, concrete and tarmac. To add some colour to the sky I used the color range tool to select the bright areas of the sky. This selection was used to create a mask which was applied to a gradient. The Blend mode Multiply was used as this is the most forgiving when it comes to masks of light colours over dark colours. A rough mask set to Multiply will not cover the branches or leave a halo. The worst that can happen is the thinnest branches get a slight hint of blue. Even this could be argued as a natural effect of soft focus so the end result looks natural.

This is the Eden Project in Cornwall. The Image is an example of how you can simulate Tilt-shift photography in order to create the look of a miniature scene. Essentially you create a narrow band of focus to mimic the effect of angling the sensor/film. You can use this site to automatically make your own tilt shift images. It seems to work best with wide angle shots when you are looking down on a scene with variety of foreground and background. The Sandpit is a great example of a tilt-shift video in which they have speeded up the playback to add to the miniature effect.

This is the river Nile in Aswan, Egypt. I wanted to create a spot colour effect with the Blues and Greens. Instead of making a mask I used a black and white layer with a duplicate image above set to Lighter Colour blend mode. Then all you need to do is move any of the six colour sliders to fade that colour in and out of saturation. It is far quicker that creating a mask and I think the results look more natural.

This was shot under the miners bridge near Betws y Coed in Wales. I balanced the Camera on a rock and used a long exposure to get the water to look like that. I developed the image using Camera RAW 6.0 in Photoshop CS5. Once in Photoshop I did a few little tweaks to the colours but most of the work had been done by Camera RAW.

This is Llyn Lldaw on the way down from the Snowdon Peak in Wales. To process the image I used Vibrance instead of Saturation to bring the colour out of the bleak landscape. I then used various masks and adjustment layers add a bit more drama to each area of the image. High Resolution image is available here.