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I recently went on a week long photography workshop with Mark and Michael from Treakabout Photography. Had a great time, with great tuition, conversation, locations and photo opportunities. Here are a few samples from the week.

Early morning storms at Cemetry Bay


Red Tailed Tropic bird trying to land


A more colourful sunrise at the Bumboras


Take my photo too, pleeeeeese.

Nice Craig, I am partial to the two seascape shots and applaud you for taking the 2/3rd skys option since it is a quite a difficult composition to nail, I think in both these you could make a stronger image by opting for a slight pano crop to center the horizon. I don't think in both that sky is epic enough to want such a large portion of teh fram. The second seascape is (for me) let down by the almost black hill, this is at odds with the nicely exposed foreground and suggests pretty heavy GND filter, in in any case it really jumps out at me.

I have found that manually blending a couple of exposures (even when you have used a GND) can help when there is not a defined flat horizon hence resulting in unevenly lit hills/rocks etc.

In the last duck/goose (or whatever they are) image I see what your going for and with a caption (as you have) it works well, however for anything else I reckon barry needs to be cropped the hell out

Great images...like Gerry I am very partial to the two seascapes.....I dont really have much more to add to what Gerry has pointed out either.....

Craig - I really like the first - those tones of blue (esp the bright swathe through the water) are really nice. I mostly concur with Gerry's assessment and can only add that like the second seascape I would have perhaps liked a touch more detail and light on the rocks on the left. I like the idea of the brid in the second but I just don't think the wings were in the right position for you in this shot - can't fault nailing the focus and dof on this one tho.

Thanks for the comments guys.

Here is a different crop of #1



A different crop of #3 to remove the dark headland as I do not have another exposure with more detail that I could blend. The dark headland was my only disappointment with that shot, I did try to bring out detail in the raw file but the info was just not captured.



I have many more shots of the Tropic birds and will post some up in the next few days. The geese shot was just for the photoboming laugh.

Excellent images with #1 and #2 the standouts for me. I don't mind the dark headland in the first image. I think it's just perfect! The second image puts me right next to the bird, I feel like I'm flying! Seascape #3 lacks an eye hook in the foreground which would have improved the image a great deal.

CraigVTR wrote:Here is a different crop of #1

Hi Craig - I believe I prefer seeing the whole tree in the first so I prefer the original crop myself

I prefer the two landscapes, but that's me.

Hey Craig, just some food for thought on the processing of the two seascapes.

The big tree is a problem, as Rodney mentioned, having it cutoff looks a bit strange, however its probably a choice of lesser evils. On the other one, I think a square crop maybe in order.

Thanks Gerry
I like the square crop idea and can you tell me how you pulled more detail out of the pano crop, was it global or selective lightening?

CraigVTR wrote:Thanks Gerry
I like the square crop idea and can you tell me how you pulled more detail out of the pano crop, was it global or selective lightening?

Hi Craig, for the pano one I did both global and selective (u-point) shadow recovery, there is quite a lot of detail there even on the jpeg, hence I think you could a better job with the raw version.

I really like #4. Great angle and sharp as a tack.
What purpose do the red tails on the bird serve ?

Rooz wrote:I really like #4. Great angle and sharp as a tack.
What purpose do the red tails on the bird serve ?

Thanks

I cannot find any reference to the purpose of the tails but I do know there are white tailed varieties in different parts of the world.