Imaging with passion
Four seasons in one day, is typical for spring in Bluff. It’s a busy time planning the garden for the season ahead.
The native birds start visiting to take advantage of the early flowering species. The Tui’s are always fun to watch, I was lucky enough to capture a hilarious interaction between a Tui and a wood pigeon.
I’m experimenting with Paua shell in my Hypertufa pots, It adds a whole new dimension to my pots.
Enjoy my latest video 🙂
25 years ago I learned how to make Hypertufa Pots. It was a process I really enjoyed and the results can be truly spectacular.
Rekindling my love of masonry, I am going to make hypertufa pots again.
My first pot was to be a large trough. I made a mould and got on with the job.
I made lots of mistakes but still ended up with a garden piece with loads of character.
Watch the video of the making of this ugly beast of a pot 🙂
How I got introduced to the treasure that is Song of Wiataha.
This is the story of how I was introduced to another history of our nation. A history that goes back thousands of years.
Before Maori arrived from out of the Pacific, there was a nation of people living here and had been living here a very long time.
This nation of people are called Waitaha. In 1994 the Waitaha people broke their silence and told the world who they are in book called “Song of Waitaha”.
In mid October 2021 I had the opportunity to spend a weekend at West Arm of Lake Manapouri. This is where the West Arm Power Station is situated.
This is a very beautiful and remote place in the Fiordland National Park. NZ.
I stayed at the Meridian Lodge and had all weekend to wander around and explore the area, I even got to go down to the turbine room of the power station, thanks to the lovely staff at Meridian.
The view from the Spey River Bridge, at the lodge, was incredible. I wanted to get a good shot from the bridge. The forecast was for rain to come in and I didn’t know how long it would last. The light wasn’t very good but I decided to get a shot while I had the chance.
The rain did come in but it eased off a bit of for periods and I was able to get a second shot of the same frame. I tried an HDR set-up for this shot.
The waterfall behind the lodge was beautiful with the increased water flow.
Needless I say I was in my element and I documented my weekend in a video.
Enjoy 🙂
For more information on the West Arm Power Station check out the Wikipedia Page
I recently had the opportunity to spend a very pleasant hour, or so, in the heart of Dunedin City. A chance to try my hand at night photography in a city
Dunedin is a small city in the South East of the South Island, New Zealand.
The inner city radiates out from the Octagon, the town square on steroids and the Dunedin Municipal Chambers and St. Paul’s Anglican Cathedral occupy two facets of the Octagon.
Canon 5D mk4 – Canon EF 24~70mm 2.8 USM
Half second exposure – ISO200 – f8 to f3.2
I used the bracketing feature of the Canon 5D mk4 to get 5 exposures and I batch edited the RAW images in Darktable , Luminance HDR to blend the sequence and Gimp to finish.
I don’t shoot a lot of High Dynamic Range HDR but I like the variety of looks you can get with HDR especially with night photography.
St. Paul’s is an imposing structure, if not a tad creepy.
2 x shot vertical panorama f5.6 – ISO 100 – 1 second shutter. 24mm wasn’t wide enough to get it all in so I went for a panorama. I stitched it in Hugin – panorama photo stitcher which proved more difficult than I thought it would. I ended up rotating the image horizontally for the stitch, I also had a large overlap on the images which meant having to crop some of the overlap in Gimp to get a clean stitch.
Just 100 metres to the south of the Octagon, Stands the towering First Church, the city’s primary Presbyterian church. Less imposing, and in my opinion, a way more elegant structure than St Paul’s
I used the in camera HDR feature for this image, I batch processed the raw files in Darktable, Luminance HDR to blend the sequence and Gimp to finish.
24mm – f5.5 – shutter 1 to 2 seconds – ISO 400 to 800.
I used a slightly more processed HDR look for this image and played with a split tone look to get a strong Gothic feel.
The Cargill Monument stands at the corner of Princes Street and Rattray Street on John Wickliffe Plaza.
This monument is extraordinary, 16 years after founding Dunedin this drinking fountain was erected and dedicated to Captain William Cargill.
I used the in camera HDR feature for this image, I batch processed the raw files in Darktable, Luminance HDR to blend the sequence and Gimp to finish.
24mm – f5 – shutter 1/3 of a second, 2 seconds and 13 seconds – ISO 200
This next image looks down lower Stuart St from the Octagon to the magnificent Dunedin Railway Station
In camera HDR, I used the same general work flow, batch edited the RAW images in Darktable , Luminance HDR to blend the sequence and Gimp to finish.
70mm – f13 – ISO 100 – 2.5s 10s and 30 second exposure.
I had real trouble highlighting the railway station as it was so small and dark at the end of the street. I ended up using a square shaped gradient in Gimp to lift and direct the eye to the railway station.
Night photography in a city is totally different to star scape or milky way photography. I only had an hour or so on this trip but it has given me a small taste of something I would like to investigate further.
I have a particular fondness for this area, it has a rich history and beautiful natural surroundings and I can’t wait to go back to explore and photograph Dunedin the Edinburgh of the South.
Cheers
John Barrow
Do you what to know how to align, and blend, a Focus Stack sequence in linux?
I’m going to show you an easy way to focus stack in Linux using a few simple commands in Terminal.
This method only works if you have Enfuse installed but if you have Hugin – Panorama photo stitcher installed it’s already there. If you don’t have Hugin, pop over and get it, it’s free.
Create a folder for your images.
Right Click in the folder, and click on Open in Terminal.
Run the following command and press enter
align_image_stack -m -a OUT $(ls)
Enfuse will align the images and save them in the same folder, they will be labelled OUT and numbered sequentially.
We are going to ask Enfuse to blend the aligned images by running the following command in terminal and pressing enter. You can copy and paste them from here.
enfuse --exposure-weight=0 --saturation-weight=0 --contrast-weight=1 --hard-mask --output=baseOpt1.tif OUT*.tif
Enfuse will then output a single blended image with the name baseOpt1
In my case the image looks like this…
I cleaned up a bit of ghosting, tidied up the background and cropped edges in Gimp.
Easy!
Play with the window size (odd numbers only) to improve ghosting or halo effect. I haven’t used this option apart from testing it and the default value seems works okay in some situations.
enfuse --exposure-weight=0 --saturation-weight=0 --contrast-weight=1 --hard-mask --contrast-window-size=5 --output=baseOpt2.tif OUT*.tif
Experiment with the contrast-edge-scale value. The default option gave a softer image but reduced the ghosting a little I haven’t.
enfuse --exposure-weight=0 --saturation-weight=0 --contrast-weight=1 --hard-mask --contrast-edge-scale=0.3 --output=baseOpt3.tif OUT*.tif
I wanted to see if I could save the “focus masks” that Enfuse uses to blend the images. I want to use the masks to manually blend landscape focus stacks in Gimp.
I added –save-masks into the align code and to my surprise it aligned the images and saved the Hard mask and Soft mask for each image.
enfuse --exposure-weight=0 --saturation-weight=0 --contrast-weight=1 --hard-mask --save-masks --output=baseOpt4.tif OUT*.tif
I would love to hear how you get on, leave a comment or insight below.
There is a Enfuse GUI I haven’t used and would be interested in hearing from anyone who has.
Happy Stacking!
John B
Lock down was finally over and I was off. I didn’t have a plan as such but the milky way would be flat on the horizon at around 4:30 am. All I needed was a foreground and a clear sky.
I headed for Wanaka not only because of it’s natural beauty but also to visit my mum.
Just past Roxbourgh a fog layer appeared. It was an inversion layer that ran from Alexandra all the way to Wanaka. It lasted for days.
No sun, moon, no stars, just cold.
I did get to see my mum though and the next time I saw the sky was on the Crown Range over looking Queenstown.
Next morning I drove towards Te Anau, the air was so crisp and clear.
A quick stop at the Wilderness Scientific Reserve to get this shot of Mt Titiroa.
I could see the inversion layer was also sitting over Lake Te Anau, I made the decision to head towards Milford Sound.
I finally found my foreground just off a long straight on the way to Milford.
Man it was cold
Photographing the Milky Way and observing the night sky, in general, may soon be a little easier as people in New Zealand become more aware of the importance of dark sky areas. The Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve is a great example of what can be done when people work together.
I’ve made a small video of the trip…
On a recent trip, I found myself at the entrance to the homer tunnel on the Te Anau to Milford Highway. It was very late in the afternoon and I didn’t intend going to Milford Sound so I turned around and pulled over. The mountains surround me and seem to go straight up, in front on me is a very old tree, covered in lichen and looking like something out of Lord of the Rings. I decided to make this tree the focus of an image, the scale of what was in front of me was too much for a single frame so I decided to shoot a 4xframe panorama.
I did some basic edits in Darktable before creating the panorama in Hugin Panorama Stitcher, both are free and open source. The stitch was pretty good but the image didn’t really work.
The tree blended into the background and although the detail is there it was always going to be a big ask to get the tree to stand out. The edit was quite complicated but thanks to a few new tools in the latest version of GIMP 2.10.20 I got a result I was happy with.
The silver dot in the sky on the left side is the moon and not a UFO.
I made a small video of the drive to Homer Tunnel with a couple of photos on the way.
They will get better…
This is the shot I took on the way.
This is Lumi, one of two rescue cats that live with us. He is a cool little guy
The two cats, Lumi and Lima, are as different as chalk and cheese but they get on really well.
The first time I went to McLean Falls, in the Catlins, I discovered there are Glow Worms all along the steep edges and undercuts along the edge of the track.
I wanted to get a shot of one, so I went back a few weeks later. Just after dusk I set off up the track, my eyes adjusted to the darkness as I walked up towards the waterfall.
I didn’t want to use a torch as it would destroy my night vision and spook the Glow Worms, they switch off their light if they get spooked by noise or light .
As the last bit of light drained from the forest they started to appear…
I got straight into my work, finding photogenic groups of worms with easy access. I got my tripod set up and camera mounted but I really struggled to find and focus on a single worm.
What you see in the photos isn’t what you see with your eyes, the long exposure gathers a lot more light than our eyes can in real time. They are just these tiny points of light and if you looked really closely you can see the strands of sticky pearls.
I managed to hone in on one but couldn’t get any closer, the lens hood was hard up against the bank and I was looking into a small hole…
When I finally took a break and stood up to stretch, I was stunned by how dark it was. Apart from a few glow worms on the bank, I couldn’t see anything at all. Even looking up, I couldn’t see any sky, just black. On the other side of the track from the glow worms was a drop off to river. It was a very strange feeling, no light and white noise on a slippery mud track in the middle of nowhere. The lack of ambient light is noticeable as this scene is lit entirely by worms…
At this stage I started hearing things over the noise of the river, probably possums but my imagination disagreed. I finally gave in and turned my torch on but didn’t see anything.
Time to go back the the van…
McLean Falls are well worth the visit if you ever find yourself driving through the Catlins Forest Park.