Just wanted to show you Brent’s shot of the same morning. His theme was about the photographer (me) struggling with wild weather conditions to get THE shot.


What I like about shooting with other people is the variety of images that you come home with as well as the different way of processing.

Brent Pearson - Man vs. Wild

The alarm rang at 4.15am. After a very short night, I made my way up to the Northern Beaches – about a 45 min drive from where I live – to meet up with Brent. Our destination was Long Reef (see map below) to get some photography done.
On the way there it was raining cats and dogs and Brent had to take a detour due to a collapsed tree blocking the road.


I was looking forward to some wild conditions – always good for very dramatic photos.
Armed with umbrellas, tripods and cameras we made our way down to the reef. Low tide allowed us to cross to the top end of the reef – always shooting away from the almost horizontal wind to keep the lenses away from potential rainfall.


The waves were huge and crashing on the rocks, splashing high up and, shortly after, hitting Brent and me. And our tripods.
I have a very sturdy tripod – a Gitzo 2540 – usually nothing makes this tripod move. However the surging waves had so much force that I had to hold it down with some of my weight.


We had a blast! Not only is it a good thrill to battle the storm and the waves, you also get rewarded with very special photos.
We could hardly believe our luck – for a full 1.5 hours not one single drop of rain fell down.
How is that for a great start into the weekend

And here is a satellite view of this incredible spot:

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Nothing is more rewarding than those very special places on earth which are hard to get to. Antarctica is surely one of them.
Similarly Gosses Bluff in the Northern Territory (West McDonell Range) is one of those special places. Too magnificent to be captured on camera.


140 Million years ago, this massive meteorite crater formed a huge mountain range in an otherwise completely flat area in the Southern Northern Territory. It is almost perfectly circular and well worth the 30 min off-road track (only for serious 4WD’s). Not many visit this spot for the same reason – it is almost impossible (and dangerous) to get there even with 4WD.


Fortunately it was the rainy season when we visited this place and it created a beautifully and lush oasis in the centre of the crater.


The forces that were at work here (100 million times the power of the hiroshima bomb) were most likely enough to have created an ice age on planet earth.


The following shot is an 8 shot Pano stitched in AutoPano Giga.

And here is a satellite view of the very same place. Mother Nature is truly incredible!

View Larger Map

Sometimes you take photos and get excited what you captured, but then you return home and instantly get disappointed once you look at them on your (calibrated) screen.

One of those moments I had just recently upon returning from a 4WD trip through the Outback of Australia.
We went up north to Northern Queensland to shoot the rainforest.
I waited for the sun to shine through a whole in the canopy of the rainforest and was rewarded with some really nice sun rays (caused by the 100% humidity up there).

However back home these rays were almost invisible when looking at my raw files in Lightroom.

In those instances I need to recreate what I saw. This is when photoshop is really handy.
Some call it cheating – I call it recreating what you saw – or what you felt.
The camera with it’s 5-6 stops of dynamic range is a pretty primitive tool compared to the capabilities of your eyes which have a dynamic range of about 25 stops.

So I have no problem to utilize photoshop in those cases. Maybe eventually photoshop will become obsolete for me, however as long as we deal with cameras which have very little dynamic range, it is a necessary tool for me.

The below photo has been run through photoshop using the following steps:


• copy background layer
• Filter > Blur > Radial Blur
• Amount: 100, Select Zoom, Select Best
• Move centre point into the appropriate place where the gap in the canopy is
• Recreate the same effect one more time by pressing CMD/CTRL + F
• Set Layer Blending mode to Screen
• Create Layer Mask and take out the effect where you think it is overdone


I am quite happy with the end result and it reflects very closely what I saw when I was in this special place far away from civilization.

Bracketing exposures is important for all of us who do not want to bother, trying to expose the image correctly at the point of shooting (the lazy ones) or for the ones who are really into HDR.
HDR is becoming more and more popular amongst photographers young and old.
Taking several exposures all with at least 1 EV difference, can be tedious on consumer-style cameras, who do not have a bracket button.
However all pro-sumer and professional cameras have a bracketing button. I may be lazy, but I simply could not live without mine although – as you will find out in a minute – even I have to dial in three different exposures sometimes. I am talking about shooting in Manual mode.


When the sun has set and light begins to fade, you may still be inclined to take HDR photos. There is only one problem, your half-automatic program setting (Shutter priority or Aperture priority) displays a Lo sign in your viewfinder. Meaning: There is so little light, that the camera can not figure out the exposure time anymore.
The only way out is shooting Manual Mode. At those times an exposure time of over 30 seconds is usually necessary.
In these cases even I have to resort to manual bracketing, since you can not use the bracketing button in Manual Mode. It does not make sense.

Now you will find yourself looking at your watch and starting the countdown at say 30 seconds, 15 seconds and 1 minute (0 EV, -1 EV, +1 EV).
A tedious job.
I am always on the look for more efficient ways of doing things, and so I came up with the following solution to the bracketing problem:
Rather than having to use your stop watch (or for some of us, their more sophisticated remote releases), we can simply change the aperture or the ISO for that matter and just double it for one shot, half it for the next, and leave it as it was for the third ( e.g. ISO 400, ISO 100, ISO 200) or f/16, f/ 8 and f/11 as an example.

It is easily dialed in and saves you a lot of time too. You may say that this changes the noise or the DOF, true, but from my personal experience – the resulting HDR image has significantly degraded in quality anyway. You will not notice this minor issue, promised


The below shot has been taken from 3 exposures at different ISO’s (the ones mentioned above: ISO 400, 100, 200)