D'entrecasteaux National Park and Windy Harbour - A quick WA escape

Another set of photos from some lovely days visiting WA. The south western corner of Australia manages to produce great holidays all year around. Going towards an Australian winter, there is not a place much better for some wind and vistas. In particular, I find the beaches down around Windy Harbour and D'entrecasteaux National Park simply stunning.

A low setting sun gives a fantastically warm, lovely light that is well worth a few shots and some photo stitching. I am fairly pleased with the outcome of the first pano in this post, and equally disappointed about the last one - these two panos were shot with only a few minutes between, but very different light. Click the various photos to be taken to high(er) resolution versions of them.






There was a decent number of waders hanging out at windy harbour. I guess a name like that does not necessarily attract hordes of tourists longing for long strolls along a wind blown beach, and indeed that day windy harbour lived up to its name and those birds seeking refuge at the beach had very few visitors to keep an eye out for.
 

Blue Gum Forest in the Grose Valley - Blue Mountains

Back in the Blue Mountains! Still taken by the profound in-your-face beauty of the Grose Valley that had hit me during our Mount Banks trip, I had convinced Jarrod to come along for (one of) the steepest track in the Blue Mountains - the descent into the Grose Valley and the Blue Gum Forest from Perrys Lookdown - good to have someone along that can help carrying you up and out if you get tired :-D


Once again weather was on our side and we had stunning views over the valley for most of our descent and, apart from a good healthy(?) burning sensation in the quadriceps and slightly shaky legs due to the muscles working overtime trying to stop us from running wild down the steep track, it was all pretty fantastic :-)


What a difference 656m makes! Vegetation up high on top of the sandstone cliffs is scrubby and dry, but when you get yourself down into the valley where the river flows it is like entering an entirely different world. The blue gums are standing tall and strong, everything is green and lush - full of life.


What a great spot! There was a bit of traffic up and down the track, but as soon as you are down in the valley, the vastness will dilute the hordes of trampers (we saw less than 10 all day) and it is easy to find some serenity. Remember to press the river panorama below to be taken to a high resolution version.


Great walk and quite a bit of a workout, I managed to avoid taking any pictures during the ascent - I had other things to concentrate on .. like breathing and the repetitive exercise of trying to bring the lowest foot up higher than where the front foot was parked. At some point I was even getting slightly grumpy with myself for always having to drag the DSLR along - You do not need 3kg of long tele-lens in a dense gum forest, next time I will bring the primes instead! .. maybe :-)

Such a good feeling, to sit there in the car, heading back home to Sydney in a dry t-shirt (the other was "slightly" damp) with a coffee and a mountain pie in the belly and feeling good about having done something with your weekend - that is all you need to forget about all hassle of dragging your lazy carcass up the hill .. who knows maybe I will even do it again one day.

Mount Banks Panoramas

It is impossible to catch the grand views of the Blue Mountains, but nevertheless I keep on trying :-) I still remember first time I was bushwalking in the Blue Mountains: You are making your way through the bush, noticing that the ground start to slope downwards and you start to see blue sky between the trees in front of you, you push the last few meters out through all the greenness and bang! You are hit by these fantastic views of green forest below, blue sky above and vertical walls of golden sandstone - Not bad at all! :-)

You simply cannot have a bad walk with views like that - great day in the mountains! Mount Banks is definitely worth a visit. Being located 20 min off the Great Western Hwy and hence a safe distance away from most of the crowded Blue Mountains tourist magnets, you are likely to have a hole lot of national park to yourself and your companions, without in any way having to feel that you settled for a sub-prime experience.

All the panoramas have been put together with AutoStitch and have been uploaded to my Picasa album in high resolution (press the photo to be taken to the HR version).

Barrington Tops National Park - HDR and Panoramas

With no birds around we had ample time for all kinds of other photography, including the challenge of trying to capture the beauty of the vistas that are associated with a mountainous environment. HDR does a good job at that! Some time back I used a bit of blog space to describing the process of using HDR and Tone Mapping to capture the details in the bright as well as in the dark parts of a photo, it all got a bit confusing. A few photos are worth many words: Above is a HDR + tone mapped photo combined from 5 raw images and below is a single jpg shot of the same view.

The jpg is doing a fair job at trying to preserve details in the dark front of the photo, but at the cost of badly overexposing the sky in the distance. In the HDR image details are contributed from all 5 photos allowing good resolutions in the dark as well as the bright parts. I might actually prefer the horizontal version of the view.

I also managed to shoot a few panoramas. Autostitch still works a treat and as long as the old CPU does not have too much to chew on and that I do not ask for too high a resolution it spits out panos as fast as I can generate blog posts to put them in. :-)

There is obviously the possibility of combining HDR and stitching - making tone mapped panoramas! - That will have to be another day, but there is absolutely nothing difficult about it, just a matter of shooting a hold flock of raw images and then remember what goes where. :-)

All good! Great escape to Barrington Tops National Park. We entered the park from the western side, but decided to leave going east. It is safe to say that we saw more birds during the ca. 40 min drive out of the park than we had seen during the 3 days up on the plateau. The eastern part also called Gloucester Tops National Park seemed very much alive and vibrant and I could be convinced to go there for a long weekend at some stage if someone is up for a bit of camping and an attempt at seeing a scrub-bird.

Lamington National Park - Evening Photography From The Terrace

Being restricted to the terrace while the sun was setting behind the mountains was not to bad at all. Having all the camera gear there and good time I managed to experiment a bit.

I am always impressed by the performance of the Autostitch Panrama Tool that I link to in the "Software you can't live without .. and that is free" down to the right of this site. It is really free and it just works incredible well. Set your camera to aperture priority and choose something like f/13 for landscape, see what shutter speed the camera gives you in the center of your wanted panorama. Then set the camera to manual control and dial in f/13 and the shutter speed your camera gave you before. It might sound slightly complicated, but by locking in the same exposure for all the pictures you avoid changes in brightness across the final panorama. The program works on jpg files and handles everything itself - the only thing you have to adjust is what quality you want. Choose "Edit" and "Options" and then I prefer to use the "Scale (%)" setting at either 50 or 100% - but if there are a lot of pictures being stitched and your computer is memory weak, then 25 and even 10% will do just fine.

HDR is equally simple and just as exciting as making panoramas. At the moment I do not have a link to a free HDR software, I will see what can be done about that. Quite simply you take a set of photos of the same scene at different exposures (RAW images preferred). The software will then combine all the information of the photos and selectively let the photo with the most information in a certain region be the main contributor to that part of the final photo. In the photo above the most overexposed photo is probably the only one that was able to catch the details and greenness of the bush in the lower part, whereas only the most underexposed photo would have had the colors of the bright sky. It might all sound very complicated, but as for the panorama tool, it is super easy using the software and if you manage to hold the camera fairly still while shooting your photos, the software will take care of the rest.

Final HDR and Pano From Ben Boyd National Park

After going through the pictures I realized that I had a few sets of pictures that could be used to make a high dynamic range (HDR) and a panorama. As I have said before it is really simple stuff. Panorama-making software is easily accessible by following the link to the right of my blog I use autostitch, which will run on windows and is free! HDR software is out there as well. Photomatix will let you download a free trial version and it seems new ones are popping up all the time, take a look here or here.

I have managed to get quite a few of the pictures jammed into the last few Ben Boyd National Park posts, but for those of you that want to see them all - with "all" I mean the ca. 10% making it to the internet - I invite you to follow the link below to my Ben Boyd National Park Picasa album.

Ben Boyd National Park

Storm Approaching - Rain in Coogee

Driving back from work Thursday was quite an experience. As the Magna started the decent from Randwick down towards Coogee the view was absolutely stunning. Some seriously bad weather was approaching from the sea, Dark blue clouds were building up and I could see two rainbows. At the same time the sun was setting in the East on a cloud free sky given of a warm orange color. The play of the colors ended up being quite amazing with velvet black clouds being lit by the fading sunlight.

It was all changing really fast, so as soon as I was home I grabbed the camera and ran to our roof top terrace. Getting the colors right is quite hard and if I had been home maybe 5 min before my guess is it would have been even more impressive.

Trying to capture a massive storm front approaching with a minimum focal length of 50mm in your arsenal of camera lenses makes you wonder if you bought the right setup ;-) Well, well thanks to autostitch, which is an absolute fantastic easy to use, free piece of software for making panoramas, you can actually still manage to capture a good wide view over Coogee, having nice blue sky left in the picture and tremendous rain coming in from the right.

Still I might pull the plug on a Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 when the Australian dollar starts showing a bit of strength again :-) Remember to click the last picture to get a better resolution version of the panorama.