Last week's Wednesday HDR brought a little spell of Australia nostalgia. Here are a few storefronts and street scenes from the other side of the world:
From the top, they are from the Darlinghurst neighborhood of Sydney, the Rocks in Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Fremantle.
All processed in Photomatix and Photoshop. Click 'em to make them bigger. More HDRs here, and more from Sydney and the zoo (koalas and stuff) in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
The Sydney Opera House from vantage points you don't usually see. Both shots taken across the harbour at the Taronga Zoo in the suburb of Mosman.
All processed in Photomatix and Photoshop. Click 'em to make them bigger. More HDRs here, and more from Sydney and the zoo (koalas and stuff) in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
An Australian couple deplaned from Qantas flight QF94 because there were no complimentary XL-sized pajamas for them for the 15-hour flight from Los Angeles, the Melbourne Herald Sun reports. The A380 - and the up to 400 passengers an A380 can hold - were delayed about a half hour while the couple's baggage was off loaded.
Passenger Angela Ceberano:
"The cabin erupted in laughter when the captain announced the reason for the delay.
He said: 'Just to inform you all, the reason we've had the delay is because two of our first class passengers refused to fly on this plane as there was no extra large pyjamas on board for them.'"
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And this comes from an article by Michael Moynihan on foreignpolicy.com critical of the leftist slant of guidebooks to lefty places. He's quoting Lonely Planet: Afghanistan:
"The burqa can be seen as a tool to increase mobility and security, a nuance often missed in the outside world's image of the garment. Assuming that a burqa-clad woman is not empowered and in need of liberation is a naïve construct."
Give the Foreign Policy article a read if you're so inclined. It'll only take five or ten minutes.
Absurd as the burqa quote is (and he finds more), Mr. Moynihan gets a little overwrought about guidebooks describing leftish places in leftish ways. He decides that
"The problem with guidebooks to countries like Cuba, Iran, and North Korea is not that they encourage travel to rogue regimes ... but that they consistently misinform tourists about the exact nature of those countries. The solution isn't to stop traveling, but to travel wisely, not mistaking grinding poverty for cultural authenticity or confusing dictatorship with a courageous rejection of globalization."
Whew, got it. Cuz there I was just about to book myself into Pyongyang after being misinformed of its exact nature by the History section of a Lonely Planet guide.
And is sure is a lucky thing that the solution to lefty guidebooks isn't to stop traveling, huh?
Taken from the train platform in Spiez, a little town on the Thunersee, between Interlaken and Thun, in Switzerland.
The mercado in Addia Ababa, Ethiopia. They call it the world's largest outdoor market and it really is huge. It's blocks and blocks and blocks both long and wide.
Out in the countryside in St. Helena, a British territory in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Kind of frozen in time.
Along the side of the road in rural Uganda.
Fremantle, the port near Perth, on Australia's Indian Ocean coast.
All these HDRs come from Nikon cameras and were processed in Photomatix with Nik filters, and finished in Photoshop CS4 & CS5. There are currently 390 HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
Here's the photogenic Katherine Gorge in Australia's Northern Territory. There was about a half day stop on the Ghan train between Darwin and Adelaide, and the only way to get in in that amount of time was with a kind of paddle boat thing with twenty or so others.
With a little determination, you could get out ahead of the others in time to set your tripod down and fire off a few photos without getting Phil and Marge from Brisbane in the picture.
As usual, it's multiple shots with a Nikon D-700, combined in Photomatix, finished with Nik plug-ins and CS5.
There are 354 more HDRs here and 405 more from Australia here at EarthPhotos.com.
Leaders have the power to set budgets, try to make the trains run on time, that sort of thing, but the ability to make an entire day completely disappear? THAT's power.
There will be no 30 December in Samoa, or Tokelau, a group of three atolls in the Pacific that are territory of New Zealand. They will redraw the international date line at midnight on 29 December, with both jumping straight to 31 December. It's to facilitate commerce with New Zealand and Australia. Wellington and Sydney will now be one and three hours earlier than Samoa and Tokelau, respectively.
Here's how the Samoan Prime Minister explains the rationale: "In doing business with New Zealand and Australia, we're losing out on two working days a week. While it's Friday here, it's Saturday in New Zealand, and when we're at church on Sunday, they're already conducting business in Sydney and Brisbane."
Interestingly, American Samoa is staying right where they are, so although the two territories are only 30 miles apart, the time difference between them will be an entire day.
(Thanks to timaanddate.com for the story, and the photo is actually Rarotonga, the main island in the Cook Islands. Haven't made it to Samoa yet. We'll get to work on that.)
Those of us who have used HDR processing for some time will not miss that this photo is clearly a result of tonemapping. But that's not mentioned where we see it, in an article in the New York Times. So nowadays, HDR tonemapping goes unremarked....
The photo accompanies the article Buliding a Better Mitt Romney-Bot in the New York Times. Compare it's arty feel to this photo I took and converted to HDR from Sydney, Australia:
The notable thing is that the NYT doesn't mention that their photo is HDR. Photo manipulation isn't new in journalism. Apparently, HDR techniques need not be disclosed nowadays, either.
HDR from a single RAW. It's from an amusement park in Dolling Hobba, Sydney, 2009. Click to enlarge, and enjoy 340 more in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
The sun has just risen from the Tasman Sea over Watson's Bay, New South Wales, Australia. Click this photo to make it much bigger via EarthPhotos.com.
This is from a single RAW, re-exposed -3, -2, -1, 0, +1 & +2 and saved as .tifs, combined and tonemapped in Photomatix and finished with several steps in Photoshop CS5, then applying the Glamor Glow filter from Nik.
See 338 other HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
We're all taken by the view the other way, across the Sydney harbour bridge, with the opera house and the city skyline, but there's actually a proper city on the other side of the bridge - North Sydney, as seen here in HDR.
Nikon D700, Photomatix Pro and Photoshop CS5. Click it to make it bigger.
See 321 HDRs in the HDR Gallery and 400 photos in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
We haven't been out on the road in far too long. Day job demands attention, so day-dreaming is in order. Here's an HDR favorite from Sydney, Australia, taken at dawn from Watson's Bay. Click it to make it much bigger.
There are 400 photos from all over the country in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. Like this one from Broome, for no particular reason, except it makes you feel good. If it were one of those motivational posters it would be titled
Exuberance:
We only passed through Alice Springs, gateway to Uluru and the Red Center, in the morning on a half day stop. What did we know? A substantial article in the Australian called Destroyed in Alice paints a mighty grim picture, mate.
Photo from the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
"there could be torrential rainfall in Alice Springs at the weekend...." from Cyclone Yasi. Remarkable. Alice Springs is in the very dry "Red Center," the staging area for Ayers Rock (Uluru), something close to 900 miles from where the storm began to weaken after making landfall in Queensland.
See 400 photos from around Australia in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
At the Taronga Zoo, Sydney, Australia. Three exposure HDR from a single RAW shot, with a little lighting effect around the star of our show. Click on the photo for a much larger version. And see nearly 400 photos in the Australia Gallery, 550 photos in the Wildlife Gallery, and (at the moment) 216 HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
As we continue proofreading and polishing up the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey, we're posting the chapters here. Last week's entry: Paraguay. Before that: Climbing Mt. Kinabalu. Today, it's our driving tour of Tasmania.
Here's one more Out Of Bounds (or "OOB") photo and then we'll let it rest for a while. This is a combination of HDR and OOB, actually. These camels take tourists on a sunset walk along the surf every afternoon at Cable Beach in Broome, Western Australia. This one's from our tour around Australia, clockwise, in August last year.
Find OOB galleries here and here, and tutorials on how to create an OOB picture here, here and here.
And see more HDR Photos in the HDR Gallery, and lots more from Australia in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
There's a new competitor in the HDR processing software market, called HDRDarkroom. It's a $79 download for Mac or PC, and thus twenty dollars less than its main competitor, Photomatix. HDRDarkroom's promotional material calls it "the first all-in-one HDR software to achieve both photo-realistic HDR photography and surreal HDR photography easily using two patented innovative Local Tone Mapping technologies." Download a trial version for free and see what you think.
This week's HDR entries are more or less realistic HDRs, the first from Freemantle, the next from the Darlinghurst suburb of Sydney, Australia.
(See more in the Australia Gallery and the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)
Common Sense and Whiskey is the companion to EarthPhotos.com, where you can see and buy professional photo prints from 105 countries and territories around the world, and the blog for Common Sense and Whiskey - the book. It's Intelligent discussion about the world out there.
The Photos:
