Photography tips

I recently discovered a wonderful resource that I have started exploring. I found a website that lists 40 Great South Australia Short Walks and have been reading about them.

I used this list to "discover" the short walk I took a week ago to Morialta park and the Waterfall. See the post I made from last week.

I am always on the lookout (no pun intended!) to find new places that are not too far away from me and have something unique to offer photo-wise.

Well, today we went for a 4km walk from the Barossa Region walk. The one we did was the "Hale Bush Walk". The Reason we chose this one was it mentioned another waterfall and it has been raining on and off for most of the week.

First off I have a huge complaint about the map provided on the website. The map of the walking trail is great but the locality map is disgusting! I had to go searching thru a touring atlas to actually find the place. Worse still, we drove right past it - there were no signs on the side of the road pointing to the car parking area at the start of the walk. The parking area just looked like a dirt track off the side of the road.

After we got there we set off on the 4km walk. and headed anti-clockwise around the bush walking track. The track itself was clearly defined and had a marker every 200metres.

As we walked we could see some Kangaroo's in farmland adjoining the reserve - they were way too far away to try and get a photo of them.

All along the track we could hear birds but didn't see many - and those we did were very small and very fast!

As it was fairly late in the day we headed straight for the waterfall and almost walked straight past it!

Well, not quite! The waterfall was not very big and not much water was actually falling. I would guess that it doesn't often have water running over it at all.

The photo was taken with a wide lens and slow shutter speed - you probably guessed that by looking. I used a tripod and selected a spot that gave me the best surroundings and avoided the sky. It was quite overcast so the light was fairly low which helped as well.  I shot this at 100ISO, F22 3.2seconds with a 22mm focal length.

It required just some minor corrections in the processing. I needed to adjust the white balance and some minor levels and curves adjustments were needed. A tiny bit of sharpening and then resize finished it off.

After being (almost) dissapointed by the water droplets instead of a waterfall, we continued on around the track. As we climbed the hill from the waterfall there were some spectacular views to towards the South West just before we got to the Mica Diggings.

The view was over the bushland towards some distant farmlands

Late in the day with the sun low in the sky and stormclouds threatening to rain on us at any minute provided the scene above.

This photo took considerable processing to be able to show the view we saw.

As I had the sun in my face it was very bright and I almost lost all the detail in the foreground so I set about using every trick I know to process the image.

Firstly, I opened it up in my Raw processor of choice - RSP. I spent a bit of time working it, but no matter what I just couldn't get something worthwhile out of the photo. So, I knew that I would need to get a bit more creative and processed 3 different (tif) images from the single raw file. I processed the 3 images in such a way that across the 3 of them I captured the detail of the sky and clouds (highlights) and the details of the Trees (shadows).

I opened up Photomatix and imported the 3 images and lookad at the best way of combining them. In this case I settled on just doing an Auto combine for shadows and highlights.

The resultant image was pretty good, but just seemed to be lacking - it was still a bit flat. So, I opened up this image using Lightroom.

Lightroom is a wonderful program for processing your photos that I am still trying to come to terms with. I seem to take forever to process RAW files with it at the moment but I guess with more use I'll get better.

Anyway, lightroom can also work on tif and jpg files as well so I set about treating the tif just like any other photo file. All it took was some minor levels and curves adjustment to finish off the photo.

We continued to walk on the track and found some other really great spots to take more photos from even before we got to the lookout area. As it was getting late and we didn't want to be walking in the dark we pushed on.

Once we got to the lookout the view was spectacular (and very similar to the above photo). I took a few minutes to check out what other photo opportunities it may offer - and it certainly does have some things I'll try in the future.

The lookout would be a wondeful place to be just before sunrise. With the sun rising over the hill behind you and gently illuminating the valley it is somewhere I'll be visiting very early in the morning.

The walk took us just short of 2 hours and Next time, I'll head out and be ready for a sunrise and spend a little more time taking several photos and documenting the walk somewhat.

So far I am glad that I found the website listing the short walks and I'll keep exploring the ones that are not too far away of a weekend.