Lake Boga prepares for the approaching flood


Holt your mouse pointer over the image to read the caption. Please contact me for any editorial or commercial use of these images, all monies donated to flood relief.

Photo of the Month: July

A few weeks ago while on a week holiday in Dunkeld  I photographed this old home. The image was taken with a Singh-Ray Gold-N-Blue polarizer, hence the strange colour cast. I processed the file in Adobe Lightroom followed with some tweaks in Photoshop CS5, using the content aware feature to remove the power line. Then back into Lightroom for the final crop and a couple of graduated filters. The shot was not taken under ideal light, in fact it was very poor light, but serves to show what you can do with filters and modern software. Before and after images below.

Before

After

Time Lapse Video, Melbourne Southbank

I recently attended PMA Australia, Southbank Melbourne. We stayed in an apartment block close by. I took some time lapse photos with my 5D Mk II from our 18th floor balcony. After a bit of experimenting I took 367 shots at 3 second intervals, f4.5, 0.7 sec exposure with a 24-105L set at 28mm. I then processed the RAW files in Lightroom, exported the images as full size jpg files 5616 x 3744. The resulting files were then loaded into Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. Then the trouble started, I have a i7 system with 6 gig of RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX285 Video card, 3 HDD’s and my system almost ground to a halt. I wanted to pan and zoom as the images played through their time lapse segments. Even with my reasonably powerful system and CS5 with its new Mercury playback engine I could not play even 2 frames, no such thing as any sort of preview when loaded with 367, 21 megapixel images. So I basically set the zoom and pan settings, rendered the time line (which took about 15 minutes each time) made the necessary adjustments and rendered it again and again and again…, eventually I had my time lapse movie somewhat to my liking.

Southbank by night from Stephen Dyer on Vimeo.

Photo of the Month: April

This is a photo of the “Natural Arch” in Springbrook, Queensland, Australia. It was originally taken as 3 images with exposure bracketing to render using one of my HDR programs. I just could not get it right so I used Photoshop, masking out sections where necessary. I would love to return and try again, next time I would bracket manually over 5 or 6 frames.

Prints & Postcards can now be purchased online

Selected prints and postcards can now be purchased at photograph.asia. We have just set up a new website with full shopping cart facilities incorporating Fotomoto. As a special offer to our readers the first 10 people to purchase on line can use this discount code to receive a 20% discount. Enter this code: 62651D. Fotomoto is already working with hundreds of photographers across more than 25 countries. They are quickly becoming a trusted and respected brand among photographers because of their quality service. Fotomoto is a company based in San Francisco and is backed by one of the highly respected investment firms in the US, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), the same firm that invested in Hotmail and Skype. We will be away in New Zealand  from Christmas till the 18th of January 2010 so any prints or cards ordered during that time will not be processed till we return. If you require a print or a card of any of the images on stockphoto.com.au please email me Steve and I will post the image on photograph.asia for you