Andy’s Blog

I’ve just recently (well, about a month ago) returned from holidays in Victoria. It wasn’t a photo trip as such, but I was able to visit some unique spots for some photographs. Here are some of my favourite images.

Here are some panoramas from the Grampians National Park, it is lovely area in north west Victoria. The first one is a sunrise at Baroka Lookout, and the second one a sunset at Reid’s Lookout. Both of these are stitched from a number of vertical frames with a 50mm lens.

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Yesterday, I got together with some local like-minded photographers made up of hobbyists and professionals combined, for the 2nd Newcastle Strobist Meet. The last one was over a year ago, so it was nice to catch up and get together with these guys and shoot some photos.

I have to thank Geoff for organising it and Brett for the use of his personal studio for this event.

Here are some of my favourite images from the day. The models were and make up artists were great and really contributed to the look of many of these, and top effort by them. It was a hot sweltering afternoon in the heat (no aircon in the studio), though you wouldn’t be able tell from the photos.

Graeme (below) is an avid sports and wedding photographer himself, but decided he would do some modelling for us today. This shot below was lit a rim light on either side and behind him (speedlights). The glancing light works great to emphasise muscle tone in men.

We have Rachel below (makeup by Bombshell Make Up & Beauty), who worked great with Graeme nicely. We used a floor fan close to them to give it the wind-swept hair look. Rim lighting was used on each of these and all were key lit with a powered monobloc with a large softbox.

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This evening, I headed out to Belmont Bay to photograph the sunset. There were some nice looking clouds in the sky, nothing spectacular but enough to bring a little life into the photos. Here are some of my favourites from the evening. Click on the photo to see a larger size version.

All of these except for the last were shot with my favourite filter, the ND400! The last panoramic image is a stitched image made up of 6 vertical hand held frames.

A very interesting storm come over the late yesterday afternoon at Warners Bay jetty and I was able to be there to capture it. What beautiful colours in the sky we had! And it all kept changing every minute.

Here is my favorite shot from the evening:

This photo was made from blending two exposure together. A technique I blogged about previously in my tutorials section. It also had some colour adjustments performed in CIELAB mode, my favourite method of colour adjustment. The long movement in the clouds is due to the long exposure, of around 90 seconds while using my ND400 filter.

I love days like this when nature puts on a great show for us photographers.

Welcome to Part 2 of the Smart Objects for Photographers tutorial. Here we will be showing a step-by-step tutorial on how to process this image using smart objects, in particular, selective white balancing.

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I know I’ve been a little slack and haven’t updated this as much as I would have liked, things have been a little hectic and I still plan on putting up some more Photoshop smart objects tutorials later.

This weekend, I met up with a few Flickr members for a sunrise shoot, at the secluded Susan Gilmore Beach. It was a nice morning, with clear skies though a few clouds would have made the images a bit more interesting. It was almost spot on at low tide, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it that low before, as I easily was able to walk there and back without wading through water!

Here are two of my favourite shots from the day.

On both of these images, I used my previously posted techniques for exposure blending and colour boosting.

The first image was around 20 minutes before the sun came up, and I used a ND8 (3 stop neutral density) filter, and the second image of the sun rising I used a ND400 filter, one of my favourite filters for landscape photography.

One of the great things that has happened since Photoshop CS2’s release, is the introduction of Smart Objects. Today we’ll talk about how photographers who shoot RAW can utilise smart objects in Photoshop to their advantage.

One the features that we have been all waiting for is soft proofing in Lightroom, Lightroom has so many quick and efficient workflow tools, but does not support one of the most fundamental tools of modern digital editing, soft proofing! (are you listening Adobe?)

We’ll see how we can “virtually” soft proof a RAW file undergoing adjustments for conversion.

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This evening, I went down to the Bogey Hole (in my home town Newcastle) to shoot the sunset. Its one of those cliche  locations, that surprisingly for me, I have never shot at before. It was nice down there, not many people there at all. It can a bit a little slippery and wet walking down those stairs and rocks (and if not too careful, could be dangerous), but this evening there was very little swell and low tide coincided with sunset as well.

The above was shot with a ND400 filter attached and my favourite landscape lens which I own, the 17-40mm f/4L. It has been blended from two separate exposures, a technique I use often (see the tutorial).

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On the weekend, i joined the movement of the Worldwide Photo Walk (also known as Scott Kelby’s Second Annual Worldwide Photowalk).

A walk was organised for Newcastle by local photographer Tim Boehm, for a 2 hour loop around city. It was a big turn up of around 40 photographers.

I decided this was a good time to do some experimentation with my tilt shift lens, a Canon TS-E 90mm f/2.8 manual focus lens. It is a really interesting lens to use if you haven’t used one before as it allows the tilting of the plane of focus on a standard 35mm format SLR which normally one would associate with large format view cameras.

Here are some of my favourite shots from the day.

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Recently, about a week ago, i photographed the sunrise at Susan Gilmore Beach.

Its a small secluded beach here in Newcastle NSW with great looking rock formations. Ideal for long exposures though you need to get there at low tide.

I don’t usually shoot sunrises very often, but i specially got up for this one since low tide almost coincided with the sun rising so it seemed like an ideal time to do this. Here are some of the shots below:

This one below is probably my favourite for the morning. I used a bit of localised channel mixer based colour enhancement here. Keep in mind, i didn’t use it all that much, the sky really was close to that colour when i was there. I used a ND8 filter for this one. This is a single exposure, since i wasn’t shooting into the sun, the dynamic range in the scene was only small (say within 4 to 5 stops), enough to be captured in one shot with a digital camera.

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