Monthly Archives: July 2012

Countdown

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Peter MacDonald

Looking back since making the decision to hold my upcoming Lake Eyre Exhibition there’s been a host of hurdles to overcome…but probably the biggest has been transporting all 16 prints and frames from Adelaide, 500 kilometres to Parachilna where the exhibition opens this Saturday night.

It took about fours hours to pack them in my vehicle (fresh from the muddy dilema in the previous post)) and twice as long as that to transport them yesterday.

However they all arrived in one piece.

Hanging the exhibition at the Prairie Hotel starts Friday.

All accommodation for opening night has been filled with people coming from as far afield as Adelaide and even Sydney.

Above is one of the images from the exhibition. It is quite a large print, around size A1 – lots of detail and texture in the landscape which unfortunately is lost in the smaller offering that is posted here.

There has been so much attention on the flooding of the lake over the last couple of years it seems that waiting until the end of the rush might prove to be a good way of redefining the beauty of this amazing place.

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On The Road

Posted on July 29, 2012 by Peter MacDonald

Here’s a bit of a reality check following on from the previous post…… an ocean of mud, something to get your feet firmly back on the ground.

Luckily a short climb up a hill managed to get some mobile phone coverage to call the cavalry….otherwise this could have been a time consuming, very dirty problem.

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SALA Award Winner

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Peter MacDonald

In my home state we have a annual event called the South Australian Living Artists Festival (SALA).

It is a really great opportunity for artists in all forms of the arts to exhibit their works and it’s is well patronised.

This year I was fortunate to win, with the above photo, the Atkins Technicolour Photographic Award for Artists working with photo based artwork.

It is one of the works in my upcoming Lake Eyre exhibition which starts on August the 4th.

Details of the exhibition are here.

Everybody is welcome. I will be in attendance on some of the days during the exhibition dates so drop in if you are in the area.

Posted in Lake Eyre | Tagged | 4 Comments

Faces of the Outback

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Peter MacDonald

Met this bloke in the front bat of the Prairie Hotel.

Interesting fella….a muso from Bathurst in New South Wales who plays everything from a guitar to a mandolin or a banjo, as well a a string of others in between.

He’d hooked up with a couple of Irish folk musicians and had been recording some work in the old schoolhouse in Parachilna.

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In the Beginning……

Posted on July 23, 2012 by Peter MacDonald

Something of a historical photo….the first successful landscape I took.

The date June 12, 2004 and somehow in amongst a numbing number of poorly exposed/out of focus/poorly composed/ and a host of other mistakes….my first success.

It’s a place called Greenly Beach, west of Port Lincoln on South Australia’s west coast. The afternoon was heavy with the spray of the surf.

It was shot with my first camera, an entry level Canon 300D camera. Fortunately I had been given some good advice about buying the best lens I could possible afford which was a Canon 28-300mm L series zoom with image stabiliser.

It’s one of Canon’s top of the range lens and I still use it today, even if the camera is long gone.

The beginning of a wonderful journey. So lucky.

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Colour and Light

Posted on July 22, 2012 by Peter MacDonald

In the previous post I was trying to show that getting the light to fall in the right direction will improve any photograph.

You can see from the shadow of the tree on the left hand side of this image that the sunlight is coming almost directly towards the lens.

The sun is really bringing out the best in the foliage and showing the texture of the beautiful tree trunks.

As I mentioned in the previous post too, a strong foreground is pretty much an essential and in this case it is the shadow of the tree trunks falling towards the camera.

The unlit trees further into the background provide a nice contrast.

The picture was taken only a few metres from the road running through the Parachilna Gorge in the central Flinders Ranges but this a technique that works almost anywhere, even parks and gardens in a city.

The next step is getting the camera out of auto mode and into aperture priority…but that’s another story.

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Men At Work

Posted on July 21, 2012 by Peter MacDonald

Riggers high above the skyline assembling the jib on a giant crane soon to be used to build a new office block in Adelaide City.

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Pot O’Gold

Posted on July 21, 2012 by Peter MacDonald

The Adelaide CBD…capital of South Australia….population about 1.2 million people.

Shot with Fuji X 100 @ f16, 1/250th sec, ISO 400 from a building in Victoria Square, the centre of the city proper.

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Sweers Island

Posted on July 21, 2012 by Peter MacDonald

I am pretty used to sunsets where I live in the Flinders Ranges, but I found the ones on Sweers Island particularly peaceful.

Maybe it was because I was on a beautiful island with no internet, mobile phones atc…or maybe it was the tropics…maybe I was on holidays.

There are lots of beautiful beach to walk and explore on Sweers…this one is a rocky rather than pristine beach, but nevertheless it was interesting.

I didn’t take a lot of photos while I was there. I went fishing with my friend Mick a few times. He is a great fishing guide and we certainly found the right spots. I was a bit too busy to reach for the camera.

At the end of the day Lee would cook up a sea-food dinner to die for.

Heaven

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Light and Colour

Posted on July 21, 2012 by Peter MacDonald

I have a student new to photography whose pictures don’t have much life. The subjects are interesting but the pictures aren’t conveying that. The answer won’t lie in Photoshop or Lightroom but in what happens in the field.

How many times have you seen a fantastic panorama that’s just going to be the perfect picture, but after the shot is processed or printed, its flat and lifeless.

When taking a photo, the first thing to look for is the light, secondly colour and then the subject. Getting the light to fall from the right direction will make all the difference, if colour is the main feature then it has to be brought out.

The shot above is no world beater but its got interest. It a creek that’s flowing out of the Flinders Ranges and it’s about halfway to Lake Torrens.

In previous floods the waters have cut a bank about 4 to 5 metres high. The late afternoon sun really brings out the colours in the bank.

The big advantage here is that the sunlight is going across the picture from right to left, providing contrast and therefore a sense of depth.The water is a line leading the eye through the picture and another essential is a strong foreground.

Similar treatment for this section of the creek a few hundred metres further downstream and taken 30 minutes earlier.

I visited both these spots twice just before sunset. The first time I didn’t get all the elements to gel. This was on the second day.

Both were shot at f22 for maximum depth of field and a graduated neutral density filter was used to reduce the contrast from the sky so that the details of the bank and the creek were maximised.

Levels were the only adjustment made in Photoshop.

Shooting between sunrise and 10 or from 3pm to a little after sunset are the times when most of the elements will be in favour of the photographer.

Posted in Lake Torrens Area, Photography Tips | 1 Comment