I'd like to thank everyone who entered this months competition, and also thank everyone who voted.
I'd also like to share a little story about the photo I entered this month...
At 4AM in remote Southwest Tasmania, the sound of a distant thunderstorm wakes me. Up I get from my tent and head to the beach with my camera and tripod. Noyhener Beach is suddenly lit up in front of me by a lightning strike in the clouds.
So I set up and start a time exposure.
Nearly a minute in, and nothing, I was thinking I would have to start again, otherwise the lights from the fishing boats and yachts that are sheltering behind Mutton Bird Island would be over-exposed.
Then it happened, two consecutive strikes, behind Sugarloaf Rock, followed by a massive strike in the clouds above me illuminating the beach like daylight.
I stop the exposure at 60 seconds, the noise reduction on my Nikon D700 starts doing its thing.
The storm is now way too close for comfort so I only get the one photo, having to rapidly retreat to the tent to shelter from the rain.
This is the result.It is only seconds away from raining on me, which is why the strike above me looks lost in the cloud, a lot of rain was on its way and that is mostly what was illuminated by the overhead strike.
There is a heavy shower tied up with the lightning strike on the left, quite visible. There is also a bit of light rain falling over the water towards the boats and islands, and a lot of sea mist / spray being blown off the waves, also illuminated by the lightning.
The creek in the foreground is Murgab Creek, so anyone that has been there will know I am standing at the track above the dune, that leads into the campsites about 80 metres away.
As a bushwalker, I was somewhat thrilled at the experience of being there and witnessing this scene. As a photographer, I was elated at capturing the moment and am very happy to be able to share it with you here.
There has been some discussion on the forum about post-processing of photos. My photo this month was taken on a Nikon D700 in a mode that saved two files to the memory card - a basic JPG image at 1.5Mb, and an NEF file which is the RAW data from the camera sensor, at 12.7Mb.
The RAW data allows for a lot of corrections to the image without losing quality. One of those corrections is White balance.
A resized version of the basic JPG image from the camera is here -
- Basic JPG from caemra, no corrections.
- D7C_0821 (Small).JPG (15.18 KiB) Viewed 5374 times
Scenes like this and many night shots are somewhat challenging for the electronics of the digital camera when it comes to white balane. One thing I notice more about the D700 over the D200 is a strong blue cast on long time exposures when there is practically no daylight.
Correcting the white balance and adjusting brightness levels, and a touch of sharpening is about all that was done to the RAW file to produce the result that I entered this month.
Again, thanks to all who voted, and if anyone has any ideas on how to get more people to vote each month, there is a topic discussing it
here.
