Due to many recommendations we decided to follow the coast around the Eyre Peninsula rather than taking the direct route to Adelaide. The coast continues to provide spectacular views such as this Osprey nest. When taking this picture I was torn between the desire to get the right angle for the shot and the instinct of self preservation which kicks in being so close to the edge of a cliff. Even Karen got very close to the edge in order to see the nest on the monolith. We are currently in the fishing town of Port Lincoln and expect to reach Adealade in 3-4 days.

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?

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.

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. 

This is the Belton Folly near Grantham in the UK. I wanted to get a bit more colour and detail in the sky. This is a situation where a graduated filter would help. Graduated filters are bits of glass you fit in front of the lens to help the camera get a good exposure. When shooting landscapes the sky is almost always far brighter than the land. Although our eyes are very good at seeing the detail in the sky and land at the same time a cameras sensor will often overexpose the sky or underexpose the land. A grad filter is clear at the bottom and slowly gets darker towards the top of the picture. Unfortunately Cokin who make the filters seem to have gone bankrupt but I hear they have recently been bought out. Anyway I could not find any camera shops with any Grad ND filter kits to fit my new lens. Fortunately there was enough detail in the sky for Photoshop to apply a filter after taking the shot. Although Photoshop does give you far more control in applying filters in post processing I still think there is a place for old school filters. Using HDR is another way of solving this problem but the results often look less natural.

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 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 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 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.