26 February 2017

The Wife’s away and shes taken the children (actually young adults) away and you are home alone. So what do you do?

You go on a road trip, thats what you do. And you take your best friend (camera) and your three legged companion with you.

This was the chance to take my 2001 SLK for a long drive and hopefully do some heavy braking  before the many curves to try a get the squeech out of my discs brakes.

The plan was to leave Wellington in the morning, travel to Whanganui then take Highway 4 (the Para Paras) to Taumarunui.

That went well and I visited Raetihi on the way.  I stayed a night in Taumaranui and that was an experience. It was a bit like NZ 50 years ago. Every thing closes early and there are only a few restauarants catering for travellers. There’s no pub and the only concession to the 21st century is a Scottish restaurant that is open 24 hours. Personally I’m not into big macs for dinner so I ate a typical kiwi meal as if I was in Wellington. I ate Thai and that was the only restaurant serving food after 7pm! It wasn’t bad at all and had some genuine flavours and genuine Thai women there as well…..  I had just got back from Bangkok 3 weeks before having done another cooking course so I did approach the meal with some trepidation.

The next day I took highway 43 back to Whanganui. And what I drive it was! Lots of bends and no traffic-not bad for a Saturday. Even though there are some gravel surfaces, overall it would rate as one of my best driving experiences in NZ. I can say that because I don’t get out much. It was better than the Kaikouras in the South Island. It helps that my companions don’t  get car sick as well. It was a sunny day so I had the top down, zooming along the straights and braking hard into the corners leaving a plume of dust clouds behind me. The Mercedes 320 slk is more suited for long fast bends than these short bends. A Mini or Subaru WRX would eat my car and a better driver would have far more smoothness and speed than this old man. Anyway I wasn’t trying to get the fastest A-B times and managed to stop to get a few photos as you can see next. These photos are more for a travel log and not intended to be photo studies.

At the Taumaranui side I discovered this lavender farm – Laurens Lavender farm. I had not been to a lavender farm before and purple is a colour I don’t wear very much. But I think I have a Deep Purple vinyl somewhere, “smoke on the water , fire in the sky….”

I dedicated a separate section to this farm as I did try to get some photostudies but it was difficult as I had the  mid day sun and its bleaching effect with the overhead lighting didn’t help. The food, coffee and service was excellent and I recommend a stop here. My Host, Lorraine was very helpful allowing me to get up close and personal (to the flowers that is) as there had been cases of certain tourists damaging the plants. She also pointed out the wood pigeons to me in the near by tree which I managed to shoot….with my camera. Being a passionate Bird photographer….not.

Will it was a successful two day trip and I arrived back in Wellington 10pm the next night. I had another kiwi dinner at Whanganui. I ate Japanese….

The brakes don’t screech as much now and I probably will repeat the trip sometime later in the year, but going along the Whanganui river next time visiting Jerusalem.

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1. 4 Feb 2017     Nikon D800     iso200     200mm     f13     1/125sec     Nikon  70-200mm f4

2.     Moki Tunnel

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9. Notice board in the Hotel.  Definitely not politically correct!

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12 December 2016

My point and shoot camera is a 1″ sensor- Canon Gx5. I used to use an Olympus OMD as a walk around camera. I use APSc cameras for my dentistry-Fuji 5s pro and Nikon D7200. But when serious, nothing beats using full frame cameras for predictablility of image capture. These include my Nikon D750 which my jack of all trades (24mp). Nikon D3s (12mp) for anything that moves and in dark places. Nikon D800(36mp) for slow work on a tripod-landscape photography.

In good lighting conditions and accurate exposures all the above cameras will give great results and  images enlarged to at least 16 x 20 inches. So for passports, selfies, holiday shots you should be fine. And you probably would find it hard to distinguish which camera was used.

However when the going gets tough, bad weather, poor lighting, everything happening at once, we can’t always get ideal framing, composition or exposure-especially me. As explained in a previous article I am more a snatch and grab photographer ( unless doing landscapes) and especially when travelling with tour groups when one doesn’t have much time. Often I get the settings wrong in the excitement. For example, forgot to adjust the iso, used too fast a shutter speed resulting in under exposure, paying so much attention to the subject and forgetting to zoom in! Yup thats me , I need lots of latitude. People say that about my behaviour as well!

Using an electronic viewfinder can sometimes artificially enhance the scene. I found that a lot with the Olympus. I see the image in the viewfinfder (EVF) and think , wow thats gonna be a nice picture. Put the image on the monitor later and its pretty boring. With a large viewfinder (35mm equivalent) its amazing how much of the scene you really see and there is less chance of disappointment later.

Also, when the surroundings are very dark the EVF doesn’t do as well as the optical viewfinder like in my ballerina shot.

The  following 2 scenes will hopefully illustrate what I mean.

At the wedding I only had the 85mm lens and was shooting in availble light. My white balance is always set to daylight and it doesn’t really matter when shooting in raw. But from a post processing point of view it is always good to start from the same baseline. No auto white balance for me (unless you shoot in Jpeg). Notice  with the severe cropping,  detail and especially colour is preserved. Most camera reviews go on how good the noise (or lack of ) at high isos. But what is more important is colour information, especially when underexposed. The Olympus, and even the new Nikon D500  (APSc) lacks the colour information which I desperately need to “make’ the shot. I included the balanced colour crop for reference , before turning the picture into B&W using SilverEfex pro. The decision to use B&W is because the medium conveys emotion well with out the distraction of colour. I see a lot of photographers using B&W for gimmicky reasons (as it is trendy now-like vinyl records) or to hide the noise from using high iso. But in my view the content of the image should help decide how one is going to present it and not because I decided to cover the wedding in B&W because I can or own  a Leica M Monochrom (I don’t).

The second scene I was covering a ballet concert  from a behind the curtains point of view. It was very dark and the kids were moving all over the place.

Initially when I saw the under exposed image I was going to discard the file. But I decided to boost the exposure in Lightroom by at least 2.5 stops as a matter of interest. What a surprise, I got a “keeper”! There was a little noise, but that added to the impressionistic effect. But what is amazing is how much colour I manage to recover. That is the advantage of the Nikon D3s. Only 12 mp but sensors with “large buckets” to collect the light and all visible wavelengths. This picture won me a Bronze medal in the 2011 Better Photography competition in  the “Creative Flair category. The moral of the story is don’t delete your photos in a hurry. So when you go on a photo expedition or safari, don’t spend the evenings on your lap sorting and editing your days work. I don’t, then again I don’t have a lap top just lots of memory cards !  Sometimes its best to revisit the images after a month with fresh eyes. Its amazing what you can find which if in a hurry, you may have previously discarded.