Since leaving Adelaide we have been exploring the Fleurieu Peninsula. This shot was taken at Goolwa Beach which is the location of Karen’s earliest memories. Her parents, Bob and Val, owned a beach house here 40 years ago. We visited Mannum yesterday and took a couple of ferries across the Murry River to reach our campsite at Narrung between Lake Alexandrina and Lake Albert. Next we head towards Mount Gambier.

These are the Stirling Ranges which we drove through three months ago on our way to Hopetoun. Time has flown by here and we will soon be hitting the road again and heading for Adelaide. We estimate it will take us two weeks to drive there and we hope to arrive before the end of the Adelaide Fringe on the 18th March.

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 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 the White Desert in Egypt. To process this image I have been experimenting with Photoshops inbuilt Camera RAW processor. Developing images from RAW files gives the best results. For this image I developed the RAW file three times, then once in Photoshop I blended them together to create a more dynamic image. Finally I applied a little vignette to darken the edges.

I heard the sunsets would change now we have a cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland drifting over us. It was a clear night with no red in the evening sky. These are the silhouettes of two nesting osprey in Rutland.

This shot of the White Desert in Egypt has become my fifth Enhanced License sale.  The original image had a very narrow tonal range giving it a dull greyish look. It is situations like this where it helps to shot in RAW.

If your camera saves jpegs or any 8-bit format the tonal range will start to exhibit banding when you apply a Tone-Curve to fix the image. This banding results in the image breaking up and in extreme cases giving an old poster look.

By shooting in RAW you record more data. In my case 12-bit. This means you can stretch the tonal range over the full 8-bit range without losing the nice smooth gradients between tones.

Both images are available at Shutterstock. Original Image / RAW Curved Image

This is another shot from Dahab in Egypt. The sun was in the wrong place to illuminate the surfer so I reduced the contrast with a curves layer then used a mask to boost the saturation of the surfer. I then reversed the mask to desaturating the background and adding a slight tint with a colour balance layer.

This shot was taken in Negril in Jamaica. The sunset was not that interesting so I decided to try out a technique called split toning I saw on this blog. Split toning works by making the shadows one colour and the highlights another. This used to be done by developing with different combinations of chemicals. In the digital age its a lot simpler. Andrew Briggs used Lightrooms split toning tools for his image. I don’t have Lightroom so I downloaded some photoshop actions instead. Actions are a way of automating tasks to save time. The split toning actions had several different options so I couldn’t resist building up several layers with different split toning colours then mixing them together with different (blending modes) to create some really strong colours.

This shot was taken in Trinidad in Central Cuba. I used a levels layer to shift the black point. This ensures jet black silhouettes. I then used a Hue/Saturation layer to boost the colours to something closer to the original sunset. For more information about shooting sunsets read the shot notes in Stunning Sunset.