Nov 102012
 

After taking the photo posted featured in “The Gates” I turned around to see the sun was bathing the lane and dried out crops behind me in the perfect golden light the Piedmont region is known for. My family were waiting for me to get back so we could go to dinner, but I decided to take a few more minutes to catch this shot.

Dirt road and dried out crops with golden light in Piedmont, Italy

Nov 012012
 

In this shot, I’m stood atop the lighthouse featured in a number of earlier posts (here, here, and here). While set up to take this picture I got the scare of my life. It was about 3am and there was no one around. Then suddenly I felt the need to turn around. I spun around and discovered to my horror a man climbing through the hatch in the roof. I couldn’t help myself and a stream of expletives escaped my mouth. We spoke with him briefly. He was Icelandic but not from the area. He never really made it clear what he was doing up there. I left him up there after I finished taking the photos.

The weirdest part is, the only way to get into the lighthouse is via the path in this photo. As you can see, I had a good view of the only approach and was watching it very closely as I was photographing it. I didn’t see anyone approach the lighthouse. He just appeared out of nowhere. Come to think of it, this probably would have been a good post for Halloween night.

Elevated view of white Gardur lighthouse with roads leading to and around it with ocean, clouds and blue sky in background in Iceland.

Oct 242012
 

Baobab trees really are fascinating. Grand in stature they loom over the Zambian landscape like giants frozen in time. Surprisingly, they are completely hollow on the inside. We got to experience this first hand when our guides took us to a lodge where they’ve actually put a door in the side of one of these mammoth trees that opens up to reveal a bathroom! This discovery was pretty shocking, but  I found that people actually used this toilet more shocking. Just above head height, sleeping inside the tree were a handful of bats. I wonder how many people wound up running out with their pants around their ankles after startling the bats.

Another interesting thing about baobabs is that their greatest enemy is elephants. Using their tusks, they peel the trees and eat the bark, causing big holes to form. We can see the result of this practice in today’s picture.

Baobab tree with large doorway-size hole in trunk caused by elephants in the center of a dirt field in Zambia.

Oct 082012
 

Taking this photo was a bit tricky. I was struck by the gentle curve and calm lake beneath the overcast sky. Initially, I set my tripod up on the road, but I wasn’t happy with it. I needed to be higher. So, I hopped up onto the Jeep’s hood. My thinking was, it’s a jeep, it should be sturdy. It wasn’t. That hood buckled easier than your average car would! I decided I could get up on the roof, if I stayed over the jeep’s roll cage. This worked at first, but after taking a few shots I realized that my presence on the roof was causing the jeep to move pretty much constantly.  I tried jumping off after setting the timer and hoping the jeep would calm down. It didn’t. So, I climbed back up again and stuck in my remote shutter switch. I jumped off and waited for a while before pressing the button. Then, I got the below image.

 

A gentle curving 2-lane road next to a calm lake beneath an overcast sky on Route 1 in Iceland.

Aug 272012
 

I’m not sure why, but I decided to treat the Twitter-verse to a play by play as I processed this one. I have no idea if it will be interesting to anyone but think I’ll keep doing it from time to time. Purely because I feel a bit like I have this underutilized Twitter account. You can follow me there if you like: @TraverseEarth. If you’ve got some time to kill feel free to read over tonight’s ramblings. If anyone finds them at all interesting, I can try to make a habit of it.

This photo was taken at the end of my first full night in Iceland. The sun was just peaking over the mountains behind us and turning everything we could see a beautiful golden hue. I liked the way the road peaked in and out of view as it wound through the fjord. I do wonder if I’d have gotten a slightly better vantage point if I’d climbed on top of the jeep, though.

Road along the coast in Westfjords, Iceland with 3 bends that peeked in and out with the sun was just rising over the mountains behind.

Jul 032012
 

Clouds poured off of the mountains into the entrance of the fjord when a lone building, painted as if to hide in the sky, appeared on the shoreline. As the car rolled to a stop, music filled the air, operatic vocals backed by an energetic orchestra. The perfect backing for the grand setting. It was beautiful, but eerie. The music was emanating from an empty building, and there didn’t seem to be anyone around. After quickly snapping a few photos, the horror movie feel of the place took over and we hopped back into the car. Driving about a minute further up the road, at the very ends of the property, the music still audible, we found a farmer working. With the source of the music located, we could only admire the power of this guy’s stereo!

An empty road with a lone building on the shoreline while clouds poured off of the mountains into the entrance of the fjord in East Fjords, Iceland.

 

May 202012
 

If you’re interested in finding this “secret” viewpoint, I provide a few clues as to its location in Niagara Skyline. It’s a pretty cool spot to  find, even if you’re not looking to photograph the area. It’s definitely a different view compared to what most visitors to the falls get to see. Once up there I decided I had to try to capture the whole scene. So, I framed up four different shots and bracketed each for HDR. I wasn’t positive at the time how I’d go about stitching them together.

It turned out it was pretty involved. I had a total of 28 photographs to work with. These 28 images could have produced 4 HDR photographs to then stitch together. This approach caused me all sorts of problems with ghosting. Another significant problem was setting the sliders in Photomatix so that they’d be optimized for all four images. I kept ending up with dark areas in the final result. So, I changed my tactic.

In order to get this to work, I wound up grouping the exposures for each image together – meaning that i had seven sets of four images ranging from -3 stops to +3 stops. I stitched each of these together to create 7 huge images that I could then run through Photomatix. Unfortunately, this pushed the limits of my computer’s capabilities and I kept encountering error messages due to insufficient memory. I had been trying to use Photomatix’s deghosting tool to clean up people and vehicles that had moved through the frame. Eventually, I decided I’d have to do this in Photoshop after producing the tone mapped image. This reduced workload appeased my computer, and I had an HDR image to work with!

I went into Photoshop and layered the seven original exposures under the tone mapped image and masked away any ghosting I could find. It was pretty time-consuming and I’ve spent ages trying to figure out how to do it, but I’m happy with the results. I’ll be producing more stitched panoramic images going forward. I’ve got an idea for another shot at the top of Horseshoe Bay using this technique. I’ll give it a try once the weather decides to behave itself again.

Cityscape panorama of Niagara Falls in Canada taken above and showing surrounding roads.

CLICK HERE To Buy a Print, e-mail HERE for licensing info.

Apr 072012
 

Tip-toeing about the lot enclosing this dilapidated barn I was on edge. There was a small house about 20 feet away, but I couldn’t tell for sure if it was inhabited. There was no-one about to ask if I could wander about the property, but I knew there would be some good photos about. Sure enough, there were.

This was about as far as I was willing to go down this dirt road. If someone had pulled in I’d have preferred to be visible from the road. I wouldn’t want anyone thinking I was a prowler hiding from view. It’d also allow me to walk straight over to them to say good morning and hope they were as friendly as everyone else I’d met around Niagara-on-the-Lake. As it turned out, nobody showed up.

This photo required a slightly different treatment to the usual. It was so bright that I realized my exposure bracketing would need to extend to -4. In order to get my Canon 5d Mk II to take this, I had to set it to auto bracket the following: -4, -2, 0. After this I fired off an additional three frames at -3,-1,+1. I took a look at the exposures and realized that the +1 had captured all the details in the shadows and I wouldn’t need to go any further. I combined these in Photomatix prior to polishing up in Photoshop.

The title of this photo is inspired by the Beatles’s. I had to go into work today and The White Album is my go-to when I need to get my head down and get some work done. I just decided to give it another listen so found it on YouTube. As I tried to think of a name for this photo John Lennon sang the line “the sun is up, the sky is blue” in Dear Prudence. I decided that was fitting.

If you’re ever in need of a bit of The White Album and don’t have it to hand, I found it all here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a9TMpAwwBw

 

Dilapidated wood and corrugated metal barn on a dirt road with a bright sunburst sky in Ontario, Canada.

Apr 012012
 

I like photos taken from the middle of roads but had never found an opportunity to take one myself. So when I found this view I decided I had to stop for the shot. It seemed like a nice quiet road. It turned out that it got a fair few cars. So, I had my trusty assistant stand at the top of the hill yelling whenever cars were coming so I could get out of the road. Having to move on and off the road made getting a shot framed up pretty tricky. In the end I used my 70-300mm lens to make sure that the farm didn’t become lost in the frame.

View of long straight road from hill top as road passes through farm ending in Georgian Bay, Ontario, Canada

Mar 302012
 

Before going to Toronto I wondered how my experience at Niagara Falls would compare to visiting the Victoria Falls in Zambia. It’s definitely different. The falls are equally impressive, but there’s much more concrete around them… and safety rails. There were a few that I desperately wanted to climb over but decided I didn’t feel like getting arrested. The whole place is very cheesy with its tourist attractions, replica CN tower and casino. But I kind of liked it. It was so over the top it was interesting, and I probably would have liked to spend more time there.

There was a lot of luck involved in this shot. The limitations on access to the falls (that safety stuff) was frustrating me as I was searching out an angle on the falls that would allow for a shot a bit out of the ordinary. As part of this attempt I was taking a photo of a section of the falls through a vine-covered doorway. I’m not sure that photo will ever see the light of day as the concept may have been a bit better than the reality. But, as I fiddled with my tripod trying to find the right angle a man I later found out was named Jay started chatting with me. Then, he told me about a somewhat secret viewpoint on the balcony of the hotel restaurant behind me. At this point I realized Jay was wearing chef whites and asked if he worked there. Sure enough he did. 5 minutes later I was stood on a tiny balcony outside the restaurant with this view in front of me. Then, I saw these five puffy white clouds drifting across the sky into a perfect position.

View of Niagara Falls with the buildings of Niagara including the replica CN Tower under a blue sky with five fluffy clouds.