Imaging with passion
Dylan is tasked with shooting a hogget for diner. Dan is not impressed with Dylan’s choice and decides to shoot his own. Dan, Dylan, a penguin and a couple of seal pups enjoy a Ruapuke Sunset.
If you haven’t seen parts I and II
Catch up on Part I – Ruapuke Island Honey Bees pt I
Catch up on Part II – Ruapuke Island Honey Bees pt II
I was staying with Joel and Kylie, shooting a story about Archery, Photography and Moonshine when Kylie mentioned how her parents celebrate Christmas. I decided I needed to make a Christmas special.
The Gore Santa Parade was on the next day so I went along to that, then met up with Joel and Kylie and travelled to Mokoreta to meet Kylie’s parents.
So here it is, my 2020 Christmas Special.
Part two, of Dan’s Story.
After setting up an enclosure for the hives, Dan goes back to Bluff for more hives and Dylan.
Dan also brings new queens and splits the hives. The bees are loving it…
Dan Tarrant is a bee keeper in Bluff and his dream is to have bees on Ruapuke Island. Ruapuke island is a small island situated off the southern coast of the South Island of New Zealand.
The island is exposed to extraordinarily harsh conditions, so Dan and his bees have their work cut out for them.
I’ve always wanted to visit Ruapuke so when Dan suggested I go over with him, I jumped at the opportunity. I feel honoured to have visited such an amazing place and to archive the beginnings of Dan’s journey.
Getting the hives set up close to the flowering Manuka and protecting them from the feral cattle, is just the beginning.
This video is day one of an incredible 4 day trip and the beginning of life changing journey for Dan and his family.
I wish Dan and his family the best of luck with this venture, I believe the honey will be extraordinary just like the island itself.
Follow Dan…
At his website https://www.ruapukeuncut.co.nz/
or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ruapuke.uncut/
Enjoy
This was a very impromptu trip. I started out visiting Booboo at his whitebait stand on the Mataura River then onto Tapanui via Fortrose.
I had a shot in mind on the Pomahaka River but events took a turn. I got to see a phenomenon called the Blue Mountain Express and caught up with my Uncle in Tapanui.
I visit Eamon in Gore then visit Joel to taste test some moonshine.
Photographically the trip was a bust but I did catch up with friends and Family and I captured some awesome hyper lapse footage of our beautiful countryside.
Enjoy the video…
I’ve known Kip for while now and I love his music. I asked him if he would let me record him as I wanted music for my videos. He generously agreed.
We managed to organise a day and time.
I had set up to record Kip when the Ramblin Rosies, Kylie and Renee, came over. I improvised as much as I could to document the interactions and make this video.
So make a cuppa tea and settle into a slice of life and history with Kip and Two Rosies
Kip Tipuna smiles his way through bad times and good with a sincerity not commonly seen anymore. His generosity is humbling but what he gives when performing is genuine and powerful. In my book Kip is a legend and deserves good things…
Check out Kips YouTube Channel
Cheers John
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.
