Another Long Bay Excursion

I have been busy doing non-blog'able things lately and have not been able to pack as much action into my weekends as I would have liked to. However, living at the coast gives the possibility of getting into something that feels like nature in very short time and I have tried taking advantage of that - unfortunately my underwater camera has become very unreliable and if my last tweaks do not help I am afraid it will have to spend the rest of its life on land.

Being restricted to land-based photography I took of to good old Long Bay. Despite having visited it over and over again there is always a surprise or two hiding along the cliffs down there ... and if not, you will have to make one yourself :-)


I nearly always find myself at Long Bay towards the end of the day, probably because it gives the most fantastic lighting conditions imaginable! The sun going down in the west and the cliffs facing east out towards the ocean gives an amazing play between light and shadow ... and a welcome excuse for testing out the HDR capability of camera and software.


HDR photography: Stacking five raw files taken with -2,-1,0,+1 and +2 stops of compensation means that you expand the dynamic range of the resulting photo i.e. you keep information in the shadows as well as in the highlights. Afterwards you can play around and try to compress all that info into a conventional jpg file by performing a tone mapping step ... Depending on how hard you push those sliders you can end up with something that categorize everywhere between normal and freaky :-D ... Unfortunately, stacking five pictures also mean that it becomes very clear just how dirty your lens or sensor is - looks like I need a go with a bit of soap and water to clean that old camera of mine ;-)

Sometimes though the light is just right and you do not need fancy software to manipulate anything. Tip of the day is to visit Long Bay just as the sun is disappearing and shoot those golden cliffs.