Looking at Paradise
Fuji XPro-2, 27mm, f/8, 1/600s, ISO 200
As soon as I set foot on Pasir Tengkorak Beach on the Northern shore of Langkawi I knew I had to take a shot using those two branches to frame the island out at sea. I did several attempts, but the photo was missing something, I felt, so I asked my son to sit on the branch. I think this balances the composition nicely.
(Click to Enlarge)
Piha Beach
Fuji TX2, 45mm, f/5.6, 1/100s, ISO 400
Film: Kodak T-Max 400
It’s hard to do good landscape shots at any time, but it’s especially hard when the light isn’t interesting. On my first day in Auckland a friend toured me around and took me to Piha Beach, which on a bright day would have been fantastic for photos. As it was, I only took a few shots and thought nothing of it. Turns out they were rather more interesting than I thought.
Mountain Rice
Fuji x100s, 35mm, f/11, 1/60s, ISO 500
I’m not a landscape photographer. I just don’t have the skill for it and I can only admire the masters from afar and, once in a while, shoot what to them would be a snapshot but at least brings me nice memories of something I saw. We recently spent a few days as a family in Ping An, North of Guilin in China. The region is known for its remote villages and terraced rice paddies. Not since I went to Bali when I was 13 had I seen such verdant green, and I was compelled to shoot many landscapes, few of which are any good. I had high hopes for sunset, but it turns out the nearby mountains hid the sun very early, and sunset wasn’t what I expected. Still, I tried to make the most of the slight haze of pink on the horizon, and this is the result.
My first ever attempt at long-exposure. With torrents, « long » is a very relative terms since anything above a fraction of a second makes the whole stream go white.
There’s an impredictability about sunsets. You never know what it’s going to give. I certainly never expected that mad fire over the Atlas mountains in Morrocco!
The good side of jetlag is it makes it easy to get up before dawn and be rewarded by landscapes such as this one…
An attempt at capturing the majesty of the Altiplano and the surrounding mountains. This is Mount Ancohuma accross Lake Titikaka in Bolivia.
One of the wonders of doing long exposure shots of water is you don’t really know before hand what the final picture will look like. That’s because you’re never quite sure what amount and texture of light will be hitting the water during the exposure. It’s only when I was processing Mercury Sea ( a shot of the cove of Port Mélite in Groix) that I noticed that metallic glint on the water that really makes the shot (in my opinion).
Some iconic landmarks you really want to shoot, but it’s tough to find a way of shooting them that you haven’t seen already. With the Golden Gate bridge I tried to combine the selective sharpness of the Lensbaby with a marked sepia processing. Might have been done in the 1920s, I guess!
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