Last time we looked at two HDRs that were obviously pretty heavily processed. Here are two that benefit from combining multiple exposures while retaining more realism, mostly by dialing down "strength" and using maximum "light smoothing" in Photomatix Pro.
Sydney skyline from Watson's Bay.
Downtown Sydney from above.
See the whole HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
In 1927, Professor Thomas Parnell heated a sample of pitch and poured it into a sealed funnel. Then, he waited.
As Atlas Obscura tells it, "Pitch is the name of a number of hard tar-like substances and in this case bitumen was used. Though at room temperature pitch appears to be a solid and can be shattered by a hammer, it is in fact a very high-viscosity liquid, and Professor Parnell wanted to prove it."
Between 1927 & 2009, the pitch has dripped eight times. If you don't have much else going on, you can watch the pitch live with a video player here.
This is a screen capture of the pitch earlier today. Better run check, eh? Looks ready to drop.
If the Super Bowl's not for you, you can attend this experiment live in person at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Not in Australia? Take a tour here at EarthPhotos.com.
HDR stands for High Dynamic Range photography, a technique in which multiple exposures are combined to produce a greater range between the lightest and darkest parts of a photo than in standard digital photography. The most popular software for creating HDR images is PhotoMatix, a $99 download for Macs and PCs.
Here's an HDR photo I particularly like, taken last August of the shipyard at Freeo, as the locals call it - known to you and me as Freemantle, Australia.
See a larger, higher-res version of this picture at this link, more HDR photography in the HDR Gallery , and more photography from Australia in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
From the Toronto Star:
ALICE SPRINGS–Australian authorities plan to corral about 6,000 wild camels with helicopters and gun them down after they overran a small Outback town in search of water, trampling fences, smashing tanks and contaminating supplies.
From the Guardian:
The animals have caused chaos in the Northern Territory town of Docker River, smashing water tanks, destroying fences and approaching houses. State officials have described the siege as a "critical situation" and warned that the town did not "have the luxury of time", after the camels blocked the town's airstrip – preventing medical evacuations – and began to contaminate the water supply.
Camels were introduced to Australia to help tame the outback. Until the rail track was laid to Alice Springs in 1929,
"camels brought everything. pianos, motors, furniture and supplies. The arrival of these beasts of burden ws a time of high excitement. Mail, newspapers and long-awaited clothes and cosmetics orders also came this way."
*****
Take a look at this modern day cattle pen at the Undoolya Farm outside Alice Springs:
There's a water hole inside the pen to help round up the cattle. Note the metal bar at the top of the entrance to the pen, on the left. It's to keep out the taller camels.
Working camels on the other hand, like those at top, who take tourists on sunset rides along Cable Beach in Broome, are well cared for.
See 400 photos from all over Australia, including the working camels of Cable Beach, in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
When we were in Melbourne, in a post dated 25 August, we wrote that, "The oil rig in the Timor Sea will leak for two more
months while they tow in another rig from Singapore to tap the well and
stem the leak." Those two months were up last week and the rig is now on fire.
The operator of the rig, the Thai company PTTEP Australasia, "will now make a fourth attempt on Thursday after it failed on Saturday to plug the leak." The spill has hit the Indonesian coast, and since our original post from Australia on 25 August, "it has leaked more than 400,000 liters of oil, gas and condensate into the Timor Sea at a rate reported as being from 300 to 1,200 barrels a day, and now covers an area estimated at 6,000 square kilometers."
Makes me think about our trip to Pirallahi Island near Baku, Azerbaijan, to see the ravages of Soviet-era environmental practices in the oil business. This photo is from there, and there are more just as lovely in the Azerbaijan Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
The Perth-based West Australian newspaper tells us that "Qantas flies into history with Antarctic journey." During the coming southern summer, the airline will send two Airbus A380s on sightseeing flights over the Antarctic. The 14 hour round trip flights will not land.
The first operates from Melbourne on New Year's Eve and the second from Sydney on Valentine's Day. From the article: "Prices for the New Year's Eve flight range from $999 for an economy class centre seat to $6299 in first class."
I've been checking the West Australian since our stay in Perth because its aviation writer Geoffrey Thomas taught me something fascinating in an article in the paper that I can't find on the web. (Also because I like the idea that the West Australian even HAS an aviation writer.)
Here's what he taught me that I bet you didn't know: Australia's two main air traffic control centers, in Melbourne and Brisbane, control 11 per cent of the world's air space, from New Zealand almost to Mauritius, and Indonesia to Antarctica.
(Photo from EarthPhotos.com.)
Darkness falls around Sydney, Australia.
Examine this photo much more closely, see a nice, really big enlargement and see a few more select HDRs from Australia here. Lots more photos in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
1. Encounter authentically Aussie cuisine.
2. Say G'day Mate (very much).
3. Take off our shoes at airport security.
4. Love Melbourne.
5. See a kangaroo. Or wallaby.
The sun has just risen over your left shoulder at Watson's Bay near Sydney, Australia.
We posted a version of this photo earlier but then we decided it needed more work. The earlier version was from several bracketed shots and you could detect movement in the little boats in the foreground. So we went back and saved a single RAW snapshot as three bracketed 16 bit .tifs and combined them in Photomatix, and now you've got nice, sharp little boats.
Not that you can tell in this tiny picture. Examine this photo much more closely, and see a few more select HDRs from Australia here. Lots more photos in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
This web site says, "The only place in the world to find the unusual boab tree is the Western Australia Kimberley region." That may be strictly true, but for your comparison, here is a boab tree at the end of the airstrip at Kununura, Australia:
And here is a baobab tree way out in the country in Malawi:
The boab tree stores water inside its trunk. The baobab tree stores water inside its trunk. The boab tree is called "boab." The baobab tree is called "baobab." Their stumpy water-filled trunks look similar. Co-incidence? You decide.
(Photos from the Australia Gallery and the Malawi Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)
Met a man named Nigel Gaunt in Broome, Australia a couple of weeks ago. He might have preferred to be elsewhere on a Sunday afternoon, but some behemoth Princess Something cruise liner was due to inflict hundreds of passengers on Broome's Chinatown, so there he sat behind the desk in his photo gallery.
I think Nigel's work reflects calm - or patience, maybe - and the clarity of the outback. He used a camp fire, a flashlight and a long exposure to draw the most striking lighting effects from a photo (that I can't find on his web site) of a boab tree at dusk.
Nigel also puts on photo tours into the outback that would just have to be fun. Drop by and enjoy his web site, Red Dirt Photography.
There's a new number one in the Popular Gallery at EarthPhotos.com, as voted by viewers, and it's from our recent trip to Australia. Please visit EarthPhotos.com and vote thumbs up or down on all the photos that move you. Put any photo - anywhere on the entire site - in the main viewing box, mouse over, and give it a thumbs up (or thumbs down). Results show up in the Popular Gallery.
The new most popular photo is a view looking south along the cliffs at Watson's Bay near Sydney, Australia. It's the first HDR ever to be voted Most Popular.
It's about 6:15 a.m. and the sun has just risen out of the Pacific, so its rays are hitting the cliffs nearly horizontally, which sets up that nice warm yellow color.
There are about 400 photos from all around the country in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
Australia was my first all-RAW photo trip, which will allow me to continue to produce High Digital Resolution photos from any of the pictures we took. I've cooked up several so far, some bracketed with three, five or even nine exposures, others from single snapshots, exposure-adjusted and saved as three or five 16-bit .tifs in Photoshop.
You'll find critics of HDR wherever you look (random Aussie skeptic) and I'll grant that a lot of early HDR work (mine too, for sure) has been pretty heavy-handed. But you have to embrace the technology and appreciate what it can do. (Part of the trick in the program I use, Photomatix, seems to be to turn "Strength" way down. And I prefer to keep "Saturation" pretty high in PhotoMatix and then pull that back in Photoshop afterwards.)
After a few early months of being dazzled by HDR over-effects, most people probably will tend to drop the drama, opt for a less-is-more posture and learn subtlety. Betcha the people who huff about HDR were late to give up film for digital. Bet they scoffed at CDs and then digital downloads longer than you did, too.
I've opened up a small, quiet Australia HDRs Gallery on EarthPhotos.com. No big deal. It's only ever going to have a handful of HDR photos that I think turned out well. If you click on the photo in the larger window there, I've set it to open up into a nice, big pretty display. (And be sure to give any photo that grabs you a thumbs up or thumbs down when you mouse over the image. That decides the Popular Gallery.)
You'll see a bunch of HDRs in the main Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com now. Many were created on the fly in Australia or during the 17 hours of quality time we spent on Delta Air Lines flying home. Almost all were cooked up on my tiny Macbook, which - nothing personal, Macintosh - is no monitor for painstaking work. So from now on, the best new stuff goes in the new HDR Gallery.
I aim to add maybe two or three a week until the material's exhausted, and then just leave it at that. Enjoy them.
(Photo of sunrise at Watson's Bay, Australia.)
Twenty Seven carriages and two locomotives on a fifty hour trans-continental roll. That was us on The Ghan last Wednesday to Friday from Darwin at the tropical top of Australia all the way down to Adelaide on the Southern Ocean.
Two days and change of steady rolling is ample time to demonstrate the continental scale of Australia, but emptying your head and just gazing out the picture window in rhythm with the rails gets you to the same realization. Torrid at the top, outside Darwin fierce heat fairly radiates from the almost jungly ground cover, and the road hugs the track for the better part of the day, like if the two were separated, one or the other just might not make it.
They break the trip with a stop at the town of Katherine. The Ghan puts on several excursions around Katherine for the four hour stop, or you can simply remain on board.
The main attraction out this way is the Katherine River Gorge, which is owned by the local Jawoyn Aboriginal people. As soon as they'd secured their legal native rights to the land they leased back management rights to the government, and now it's jointly managed with the Parks and Wildlife Commission of the Northern Territory.
Were it not for The Ghan, you'd need to make the (relatively) short hop 314 kilometres (195 miles) south from Darwin along the Stuart Highway to the town of Katherine, then a further 29 kilometers out to see the Gorge. Last Wednesday it was completely bloody still and furiously hot. It's an austere, stark kind of place, and beautiful nonetheless. See here, here and here.
Before dark, and once the Ghan lumbered off again it was time to convene for dinner. The Ghan is marketed as one of the world's great train journeys, but the food's not over-elaborately presented, which, to us, is good. One thing for Australians, there's not a stuffy one in the lot, and dress was full casual - totally unlike the ostentation found in luxury trains' dining cars all around the world.
Continue reading "The Ghan Railway, Darwin to Adelaide, Australia." »
Back in US eastern time. We'll talk more about our visit to Australia over the next several days. During yesterday's 17 hours in the air there was ample time to create some HDR photos. Here's one of sunrise on Sunday from Watson's Bay:
Trip photos, including several new Sydney HDRs are here on Earthphotos.com.
Joy on the beach, Broome, Australia.
Back in Sydney with lots of raw material like this photo just taken tonight at sunset to work through. We've come back to stay here in Watson's Bay. Just a beautiful twilight out here at the mouth of Sydney harbour. Lovely.
(More Australia photos here on EarthPhotos.com.)
We're off the Ghan train and I'll have a bit of a review later. For now we're in Adelaide. The preserved retro architecture is one of the most fun things about Australia, and it's in every town you visit. Here's an HDR of a delightful building at the corner of the Rundle Street pedestrian mall.
Met a spry 80 year old couple on the train. Dot could recite from memory the poem My Country by Dorothea McKellar. Kind of touched you. A little bit of the way things used to be, learning poetry by heart. Bill Bryson borrowed from the poem for his travel book on Australia, In a Sunburned Country.
Read the poem here.
Arrived in Darwin last night in time to enjoy this sunset from our balcony, over what looks to be the local Naval yard. Tomorrow we'll hop on The Ghan, 51 hour ten minute service from Darwin to Adelaide, Australia top to bottom, and a trip that calls itself one of the world's great train journeys. We'll report in a couple of days.
(Photos from our circle tour of Australia here on 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.
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