This is Native Dog Beach in Bremer Bay which we visited after Christmas. Bremer is the nearest coastal town to Hopetoun if you travel west. It looked close enough on the map but involved a 320 mile round trip around the Fitzgerald National Park. In hindsight it was a long way to go when Hopetoun is surrounded by miles of white sandy beaches. It was good to give the van a run as its not moved for a fortnight but we will probably stick to more local attractions for the rest of January while we are living here.

Today we left Australia‘s Goldfields and entered it’s Wheatbelt. This image was taken in an area between the two. It shows two of Australia‘s environmental challenges. Fire and the rising salt level caused by historic deforestation. We camped at a place called Kokerbin Rock which has the title of Australia‘s third biggest monolith after the famous Uluru and Mt. Augustus which I had the chance to climb 15 years ago in my first visit to Australia. Tomorrow head East to the wonderfully Australian named Bruce Rock before heading south to The Deck in Hopetoun where we will be working over the festive period. 

These are the Al Hassan and Al Rifa’i Mosques of Cairo in Egypt. The image was created from two separate exposures stitched together in Photoshop. A mask of the sky was made to add some blue however it clashed with the warm tones of the buildings. By changing the blend mode to Exclusion the blue sky layer added a soft brown which looked like a dust storm and balanced with the other colours in the image.

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.

This is the Nile skyline in Egypt. To create some extra sparkle you can use a high pass layer set to hard light blend mode. Sharpening also works well to make the lights stand out. It works best if you sharpen at the very end of the process, after you have resized. If you sharpen an images at full resolution the effect will be reduced once you resize to a low resolution needed for web output.

The High Resolution version of this image was accepted at Shutterstock in a surprisingly fast 7hrs.

This is the Arboretum in Nottingham, UK. To create a planet like this you need to capture a 360 degree panorama. For the best results use a wide angle lens and a tripod. To create the planet you will need a little help from Photoshop.

These are the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt. This image began as five separate shots. Instead of developing each RAW I stitched them together as jpegs. Once stitched and cropped the resultant image had a low dynamic range. To fix this I used levels layers and in some cases individual channel levels to keep the sky blue. Finally I used a Fractalius layer to add some glow to the image.

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 is Normanton Church on the shore Rutland Water. I used low opacity split toning, desaturation and various blend modes to get the dramatic sky without too many unnatural colours. As all thing are possible in photoshop I added a bit of lightening too.

This planet was made from a panorama of a salt lake in the Bahariya Desert in Egypt. I set up the tripod on the shore line which is why the resultant globe is bisected in the way. There was a lot of banding between the 20 images when stitched together. I used Photoshop CS5′s new feature Content Aware Fill to remove the planet so I could smooth the sky to the horizon without contaminating it with blurred planet. This is an easy way to remove banding from sky but it does not work on the sand as you would lose texture. Read this to find out how to make your own planet.