The other day Gavin and I went out to scout a new location. It is called Lurline Bay and supposedly this is the place where many dead bodies wash up ashore – nice!
Well armed with head torches, gps, tripod and our cameras, we made our way to this remote spot in Sydney’s South. It was not easy to find and the pitch black did not make it easier. However we arrived there on time for sunrise and realized that it is almost impossible to get down to the bay without climbing gear – especially in the dark.
So we had to stay up on the cliff and shoot from there. You can see the actual spot by following the shoreline to where the pebbles are. I took a close look through my long lens for a close up shot and no – no dead bodies that morning
I was always interested in up close photography. So close that you can see things in a way you can not see them with the naked eye. This is probably what fascinates me the most about photography.
Macro Photography is such a thing. It opens up a whole new world to you. Seeing the fine details of the eye of a praying mantis, or the fragile canals of a maple leaf. It’s all there – right in front of you.
We tend to ignore this perspective mostly – but I encourage you to go flat on your belly in a garden or in a park and observe life up close. You will see so many new possibilities opening up to you.
Here is a macro photographer I always admired and I followed his work for years. His name is Ronnie Gaubert – a Louisiana based photographer.
Personally I shoot with a Tamron 90mm macro lens. It is one of the sharpest lenses I have ever used and I even use it for portrait work sometimes.I also bought a Nikon pn-11, which is an extension ring that you can put between the lens and the camera. This allows you to focus a lot closer and thus get into the zone of larger magnification than 1:1. In fact with the pn-11 you can get as much as 2:1.
The below shot was one of those 2:1 macros, which really shows you the detail you can get from this setup.
In case you do not recognize what it is (another artistic trick that you can use in macro photography), it’s the surface of a strawberry!
Our local surf photographer here in Sydney has just been displayed on magicseaweed with a collection of his best shots from the Mentawais – an island group in Indonesia, world-renowned for it’s surf breaks.
Uge, the owner of aquabumps.com takes most of his shots right in the water with an aqua housing. Over the years he has become so proficient with it, that he now takes some of the best surf shots, I have ever seen.
Usually you don’t get to see his shots in large unless you visit his gallery. However for the plug on magicseaweed, Uge cranked out the med. res files and it is a true joy to look at them.
Click here to see the gallery
Check out Uge’s website aquabumps.com. Make sure you subscribe to his daily newsletter – whether you’re into surfing or not, his photos are gorgeous!
It has been a while, but I just never got around to processing the actual shot of the model shooting in the old train shed. I posted the video about it here while back. Here it is again in case you missed it:
Thanks to Brent Pearson who put this video together.
A bit of background information about this shoot. We were almost a dozen photographers crammed camera to camera (with tripods intermingled) in a small side room of a large derelict train shed here in Sydney. It is quite interesting to walk around and admire all the graffiti. Here is a shot I took about a year ago at the same place:
Anyway our makeup artist-turned-model Mandy was showing a lot of talent for modelling and she was happy to pose for us.
Brent came up with the idea of a girl wandering home after a horrible party just to find herself not being able to walk anymore and taking a rest at this very place, high heels off, clothes and hair messed up, smeared make-up…you get the picture.
The lighting was simple, yet tricky. We had a large softbox at the top and right of the frame. Triggered with two hot-shoe flahes via pocket wizards (we had 10 of them thanks to Oat from hangingpixels.com). Btw. be sure to check out his lighting workshops, they are fantastic.
The walls were light-painted with torches after Mandy had packed up. My resulting image is a combination of 9 exposures, pretty much one for every part of the image as well as a base image with Mandy in it.
The floor has been lit with very low, horizontal torch light, which gives it the grunchy feel and makes the dust look more prominent.
It’s been lots of fun to shoot with so many skilled and experienced portrait and fashion photographers… even though my passion remains landscapes
I was overdue for a cracker sunrise, and although I would have hoped for some more clouds, the colour in the sky was simply amazing. When we arrived at 5.30am, and the sun was still one hour away from rising, there was some pretty pink colour in the sky already.
Processing:
None of the colour in the sky got enhanced. I simply darkened down the sky with the grad tool in Lightroom.
At the time of shooting I used a 2 stop ND grad. The lighting actually required a 3-stop ND which I had in my bag but forgot to clean the day before. With a sunrise like that you cannot afford to lose any time cleaning your gear. I made sure I would not blow out the sky (by checking the histogram on my screen), so I would have no problem later on in LR to bring down the exposure another stop.
I added more detail in the water with some local sharpening and contrast adjustments.
The splashing wave in the frame was pure luck. I had a few shots with splashing waves, but this was the only shot which had most of the elements the way I wanted them to be.
Sometimes I am too lazy to spend one hour in photoshop, to enhance a shot by 5% when I am very close to the result I wanted to achieve in the first place.
I prefer spending less time processing and more time shooting lol
