This is Twelve Mile Beach. It is the campsite we stayed at when we first arrived in Hopetoun. Like many places in Western Australia there are no free campsites within a certain distance of the town. Twelve Mile is far enough out of town that you can stay there for free. I had to wait a couple of weeks to get a shot of a full moon to composite in. As it is a local shot I may get it framed for The Deck Gallery but I do not know how well photoshop trickery sells in print. What do you think?

We have gone inland to the Goldfields of Western Australia. This train passed by our outback campsite last night pulling 135 cars full of ore from the Kalgoorlie mines. We celebrated Karen’s birthday by checking in to a powered campervan site in Kambalda with hot showers. Tomorrow she has been promised a shopping trip to the gem stone and gold capital of Western Australia. It’s a good thing I start work in three weeks.

This shot of the Perth Skyline was taken at the end of our first day in Western Australia. The 30 hour journey to Australia via Singapore went fairly smoothly with the exception of Heathrow security who almost caused us to miss our first flight by holding us up when they discovered the metal in Karen’s leg and then swabbing my phone for explosives. It was raining when we arrived at 1am but it had all cleared by the following morning. At this point I would normally go into the all details of how this image was shot and processed however while we are travelling this Photoblog will be more of a Travel Journal like the Egypt Blog rather than A Photoshop tricks and tips study. If any regular readers wish to know how images were created please leave a comment and I will be more than happy to go into the details and the Photoshop layers used.

After removing all the logos and trademarks from the building this image was accepted for Stock Photography at Shutterstock and is available for high resolution download here.

This lucky shot was taken on the way home from the Ferry Meadows firework display. The only reason the four figures are not blurred in this 1 second exposure was that they stopped for a moment while their friend in the centre took a shot. Anyone in the right place at the right time with the perfect light has the chance to capture a great shot. As you learn more about photography you can increase the frequency of capturing these images. If you are an amateur photographer you could benefit from selling your work online. It is no coincidence the rise of micro stock agencies has coincided with the increase of the photography hobbyist. I can understand why professional photographers would be concerned with current changes to the stock industry. Crowd sourcing images has inherent advantages. Stock photography sites never reject images without a reason and suggestions to improve your photography. If you can take criticism it can be an invaluable learning tool. Professional photographers would probably find rejection far harder to stomach especially if they had been used to selling their work for much more at traditional stock agencies. The image below greets you when you login to shutterstock as a submitter. It shows where your latest sales have come from. Interestingly none of them have sold in the countries they were taken in.

This image shows what you can do by compositing images in photoshop. I started with a shot of me biting into a ball. This shot of the moon was added on a layer above and a mask was applied to reveal it where necessary. A quick google search for “star field” found the background. Another mask was applied and the composition was complete.

This was taken near Luxor in Egypt. The image was processed using Photoshops Camera RAW developer. The effect was created using the inbuilt split toning feature in Camera RAW. You access the panel by clicking on the icon which looks like an = sign after you open your RAW file. It’s useful to know when adjusting the saturation slider it acts just like an opacity slider. You can blend it between original image colour and the hues you have set for the highlights and shadows. The balance slider is really a midpoint. It defines the crossover between highlight and shadow. In this case a warm hue was added to the highlights to give the effect of sunset. A subtle blue was added to the shadows. Finally a vignetting was added.

This was the venue of my cousin Nikki and Paul’s Wedding reception. This shot of the Carlton Mitre was taken from the bridge. I tried a few settings and found a 1/6sec produced the best results getting sharp reflections and enough light. A small tripod was also used to get this shot.

The moon is the closest it has been to us for 20 years. 14% bigger and 30% brighter than normal apparently. Time to dust off the telephoto lens and try to capture as much detail as possible. Although this image does not have enough quality to be accepted for stock photography it can easily be added to any other photo. This image was taken at 150mm on a half size sensor so that is 300mm in old money. I did not resize/re-sample the image for this post. Instead I cropped out sky until I was left with 800×420 pixels. This avoids any loss of quality. As the original image had such a large area of black sky the cameras exposure could not be trusted as it will always overexpose the moon in an attempt to balance the image. Using manual mode I set the camera to f22 and 1/40sec to ensured the detail on the surface was captured.

This sunrise was taken on a balloon flight over the west bank of the Nile near Luxor in Egypt. In order to compensate for the cameras White Balance Guess a colour balance layer was used to bring back the sunrise colours. An advantage of using this method is the Highlights, Midtones and Shadows can be adjusted individually. This means you can control the colours in the dark foreground and the bright sky separately.

This is Tahrir Square in Egypt. This part of Cairo saw the start of the Pro Democracy marches which ended Hosni Mubarak’s reign and started a chain reaction which is now sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East. When I took this image in 2007 I was spotted by someone in the government building on the right. A short while later I was politely asked to stop taking pictures. Hopefully the new regime will allow greater freedom for the Egyptian people.