While on a boat tour of the Mekong delta, we stopped for a coffee in a small waterside guesthouse before visiting a rice paper factory. Upon returning to our boat, we came across another boat guide deftly dissecting a pineapple with a big knife. After exchanging what seemed like some cheeky comments with our guide, he finished removing every ounce of skin from the pineapple, while seeming to preserve 99% of the fruit. Then he handed us half, which we gladly accepted.
I just booked ticket to Florence, Italy for May. So I felt inspired to post a picture from my last trip there.
Today’s photo was taken when the days were longer and I was able to slip down to Horseshoe Bay before work. It wasn’t summer and was actually pretty chilly, I was wearing long trousers and a fleece. I was shocked to discover how many people head down to Horseshoe Bay for a morning dip each day. I spotted this man making the walk into the chilly waters, facing the sunrise, and fired off three bracketed photos. In the end I decided to let the man and cliff be silhouetted against the sunrise.
I’ve decided to stick with my rule of not posting photos from the same country two days in a row (I know I’ve broken it in the past), but I’m desperate to work up some of my Iceland photos. I expect I’ll be up late tonight doing just that. On top of that I was in the middle of redesigning the site when I had to take a break to travel to Iceland. I really want to make a little more progress on that tonight.
For those of you patiently waiting for my tutorial, I did make a lot of progress before leaving. I find I work best on the weekends when I can really dedicate a lot of time to it. I’ll be putting in some more effort this weekend.
Canoeing down the Lower Zambezi makes use of the old cliché “the journey is half the fun” really come into its own. Drifting casually down the river (while carefully keeping your limbs in the canoe) is punctuated by moments of intense activity and excitement. A lot of the time this is brought on by hippos hanging about in the shallows. The problem posed here is that when hippos get scared they head for deep water. So, if you’re in between the hippos and the deep water, you’ve got a problem. As a result, the approach is simply a bold game of chicken, in which you steer straight at the hippos in an effort to move them into the deep. Other exciting moments resulted from elephants coming down to the water to drink and play, which Chris and I may or may not have gotten dangerously close to. Other times the excitement was that we had an opportunity to get out of the canoes, whether it was to eat lunch, make camp, or go for a swim in a “safe” stretch of river. I say “safe” because, when asked, our guide said we were safe from crocodiles in the shallow water because we could fight off a crocodile there. Now, I don’t know about you, but in my opinion, if I’m having to fight off a crocodile I am already in serious trouble!
This photo was taken at one of the calmer moments as we floated through a narrow channel of the river. I’ve changed my approach to photos with moving subjects. Rather than trying to combine three different exposures I’m working with one RAW. Using Photoshop’s RAW converter I create three images by adjusting the exposure of the original. Then I combine these three images using Photomatix. This way, I don’t have to deal with loads of ghosting issues. If you look through my gorilla photos by clicking the category to the right, the last few have employed this method and you should be able to see an improvement over my earlier attempts.
