We have been quite lucky recently as every time we have had a Friday off together it has been the hottest day of the week. This week Chris and Carole from The Deck gave us use of their 4×4 for the day so we could explore some of the more remote areas East of Hopetoun. This is Fanny Cove in the Stokes National Park which can only be reached via a 4×4 track. I’m sure our van would not have got far and given the lack of traffic it could have been a long wait for rescue. The Toyota Landcruiser made light work of the terrain giving us the chance to snorkel this secluded cove.

This was taken at the groyne in Hopetoun yesterday. Fishing is a popular sport in Australia and there are usually around a dozen people fishing at sunset in Hopetoun each night. The time here has flown by and its hard to believe we are half way through our six weeks work here. We have both really enjoyed working at The Deck and will miss it when we go. I’ve been updating The Decks Website this year and have just put the new site online. I have a few more bits to add but most of it is there. Let me know what you think.

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.

We saw this stingray on our walk along Four mile beach on Sunday. I followed it for a while trying to get a good shot of it. They have the ability to disappear under the sand at a moments notice. This one did not seem to mind me snapping away as it glided along the shallows at a slow walking pace.  One problem with shooting through a zoom lens is you have no reference for how close you actually are to the subject. I had to keep peering over my camera to make sure I did not step on it. Although not generally aggressive towards humans they are related to sharks and if they feel threatened they can strike out with a venomous barb in their tail. Fatal attacks have been known, most famously on former Aussie crocodile wrangler Steve Irwin, but generally a stingray attack will only result in a severe disinclination to boogie.

Stingray Video

This is Sammy the sealion, Local resident of Esperance who comes ashore around midday to look at the tourists on the pier. Other residents include the remnants of Skylab which crashed to earth here in 1979 (The Australians fined the Americans $400 dollars for littering) and Doug and Ettie who were good enough to let us stay in their gorgeous home for a couple of days. Thanks to you both. Since the last post we have both been offered a job at The Deck in Hopetoun for six weeks. It was a hard decision as it meant giving up fireworks in Sydney which we had both been looking forward to. As we are not here for an extended holiday we could not justify turning down the work and it does include a nice little cabin near the beach and free internet. This change of plan also means we can spend more time in Western Australia as the job does not start for 3 weeks. From here we are going to do a big loop inland to Norseman, Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Southern Cross and Merredin before heading back to Hopetoun. We should start crossing the Nullarbor in February next year.

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

This sunset was shot in Montego Bay, Jamaica. It was taken in 2004 with an early digital camera. In those days memory cards cost 240 times what they do today. In fact the two 256MB cards I used almost cost as much as the camera I used then. In order to save space I was forced to use significant jpeg compression. The more a jpeg is compressed the more speckling occurs. This can be seen best in the dark areas of the left image below. Unfortunately this type of distortion makes it almost impossible to submit images for stock photography. If you want to sell your images always save them at the highest quality. Fortunately as this blog only needs images 800 pixels wide by the time the resolution is reduced the speckling is effectively eliminated. This can be seen in the right image below. The moral of this story is only compress your jpegs if you plan to put them on the web and nowhere else.

This was created by compositing three separate images. The Pyramids of Egypt, The Seas of Dahab and Rutland Water. Many adjustment layers and masks were needed in an attempt to balance the shot as each component was taken with different lighting conditions at different angles with different cameras in different countries.

This is another shot from a family holiday to Wales last summer. I can’t remember the name of the pub but if you recognise it please leave a comment.  Photoshop gives you many ways to make black and white images. I used Convert to Grayscale in Camera RAW. This allows you to adjust the brightness of each colour as it is converted. In this case the Yellow tones were made brighter to lighten the beach and give a greater variety of tones in the vegetation.

This is the Sinai coast in Egypt. After developing this image in Camera RAW it showed some nasty colour distortion in the shadow areas. It looks like alternate green and purple bands over the image. If you have this problem you can use this technique to fix it. Created a new layer and set the blend mode to color. Select a soft brush and reduce the opacity to 30%. Use Alt+left click to select a good colour from the image then brush across the stripes until they disappear. Try to sample lots of different areas so the image does not become monochromatic.

I know this has been done before but I decided it was time for my take on this classic piece of digital art. Like Future World I used an image of the world in the public domain. This time showing the Pacific as I thought it would blend into the blue of my left eye. My aim was to make it look as realistic as possible despite the unrealistic concept.