Benz World Blog » Bar

Walkabout Creek

Jason Benz — Sat, 27 Oct 2018 04:18:56 +0000

This is the Walkabout Creek Hotel in McKinlay, Queensland. It was made famous by the iconic Australian film Crocodile Dundee in 1986. The pub is decorated with props and photos of the cast and crew. If you are lucky the friendly bar staff will hand you a 16″ Bowie Knife to pose with. It shows a remarkable level of trust to give a lethal weapon to people who have had a few drinks. The atmosphere is warm and welcoming. Like many outback pubs, the population of the bar often exceeds that of the town. Since recently acquiring phone coverage the landlady has introduced a no mobiles at the bar policy which guarantees you get a good old fashioned chin-wag with everyone.

The day and night temperatures have been increasing over spring and inside my van it exceeds 50°C when on the road. I plan to leave the tropics in a few days and look forward to some cool mountain air once I reach the Great Dividing Range.

Opera Bar

Jason Benz — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 17:13:17 +0000

This is the Opera Bar which has great views of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. I am sure it is a lovely place to spend an evening as long as you can justify spending $9(£6) on a small bottle of beer. We went there to get some more shots of the Vivid Sydney Festival which has animated projections on many of the city’s landmarks.

We are now officially in Australia’s winter although it is hard to see how anyone can call blue skies and 21C winter. Sydney has just had its warmest May on record and it definitely feels significantly warmer than this time last year when we were in Melbourne.

Sydney Cove

Jason Benz — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 11:48:55 +0000

The building with the orange roof is an oyster bar with a view of Circular Quay in Sydney, NSW, Australia.

New Year

Jason Benz — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 16:49:19 +0000

This is Albany band Manaia who Rocked Hopetoun last night with their own brand of Reggae, Funk and Groove. After the gig the guitarist ask if I could get them a gig in the UK. Unfortunately it’s been 10 years since I put on gigs in Nottingham and I think persuading a venue to fly five guys half way round the world is beyond my ability. I wish them the best of luck and if they make it I would gladly pay to see them play again.

The last 25 posts I have been experimenting using sRGB colour space. From now on I am switching back to Adobe RGB as the last two low key gig shots displayed a lot of visible noise in the shadow areas when viewed using Firefox browser. Redeveloping theses images in Adobe RGB colour space has greatly reduced the distortion. I suspect this is due to the wider colour range of Adobe RGB being clipped to display on the web. The clipping will increase the amount of pure black in the picture which makes the image punchier and eliminates the dark grey noise.

Hopetoun Rocks

Jason Benz — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:59:33 +0000

Last night we went to Hopetoun‘s Christmas Party at the local pub. They had set up a marquee out the back where Esperance band Sezwho performed to the crowd with an assortment of Aussie 80′s Rock. We were both impressed with the gig and I suspect I had one too many beers by the way my head felt this morning. The temperature has started reaching the low 30′s recently so we are glad to both be off on Friday. We plan to camp at a site on the South Coast Highway tonight and then explore Bremer Bay tomorrow.

Welsh Pub

Jason Benz — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 07:19:54 +0000

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.

Cuba Pool

Jason Benz — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:40:57 +0000

This is my best selling photo from Cuba. Since submitting it to stock photography agencies in 2006 it has sold 98 times and made USD$35.65 so far. It almost did not get accepted at all. The original image had a great deal of speckle because it was not saved at the highest level of jpeg quality. You can see the uneven speckle patterns in the sky caused by lossy file compression.

I had to use so much noise reduction and despeckle that the image started to appear soft focused. Fortunately with this type of dreamy ideal holiday type shot a bit of soft focus does not look out of place. This image was accepted at Shutterstock and Dreamstime and can be downloaded here.