Sunday 29 October 2017

Brown's Shaft at Night: Broken Hill Workshop

This is an HDR shot, three frames, of Browne's Shaft, one of the many disused mining shafts you see dotting the Broken Hill landscape. It's part of the town landscape and a good spot to practice lighting at night...
Same place, 20 mins later. This was a single shot lit up using a handful of small LED torches (I forgot to bring my bigger LED torch this time). Exposure is 20 seconds at f4.5, ISO 400 - even though the sky appears dark, there's still a lot of ambient light about which mixes nicely with the LED torch light
Later still, with a more powerful LED head torch and a slight change of White Balance to give a different colour
Five frame HDR shot of the water tank at the back of Browne's Shaft. To the eye the sky appeared quite dark but to the camera with a 20 second exposure it illuminates like daylight. The processing using the new version of Aurora HDR 2018 gave it a really eerie colouration which I quite liked.
Same place 40 mins later with a much longer (single) exposure and a moving illumination gives an amazingly eerie look to the landscape. Keeping the sky a bit dark brought out the stars quite nicely.

Wednesday 18 October 2017

Dealing with Unreadable RAW files

Ever get stuck with new RAW files that for some reason will not update through the usual Adobe Camera RAW updater? 

Here's an easy solution - batch convert all the errant RAW files to the DNG file format using Adobe's free DNG converter for Mac or PC.

(https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/adobe-dng-converter.html)


 
Adobe DNG Converter from Robin Nichols on Vimeo.

Wednesday 4 October 2017

Photo Tour of Iceland announced for October 2018


It's been quite a hassle getting this tour together as the prices keep going up and up in Iceland - it seems everyone wants to visit... 

I can't say I blame them - it's a stunningly beautiful country, with a very friendly, highly-educated population, wild countryside, very comfortable accommodation and superb food.

My tour is planned for the second week in October - 8 - 23rd, and includes 12 nights accommodation, most meals when we are in the countryside, transport with an English-speaking driver (nearly everyone speaks English in Iceland), entrance to several museums, plus two Northern lights evening excursions (weather permitting - October is a good month to witness this amazing phenomena).

Get the full information here