Sunrise at the beach

WHAT

Sunrise at the public swimming pool at King's Beach, Caloundra. Caloundra is a beautiful sea-side town situated on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland and is about 1 hour north of Brisbane.

WHY

King's Beach has been a favourite holiday destination of my family's for over 20 years. I love going up there at this time of the year (or any time of year for that matter) and was on a recent 'weekend getaway' with my husband. I realised that in all my trips to this beautiful location, I'd never once seen the sun rise there. Of course, I had to make ammends by capturing it with my camera!

Prior to the sun rising on this day, I'd been at the other end of King's Beach attempting to get a nice sea-scape shot of the water flowing over the rocks at low-tide. This proved fairly unsuccessful due to the large amount of cloud around at the time.

After the sun had risen, I wandered up the beach to the location seen in the image above and loved the way the umbrellas were silhouetted in the sunlight. I then spotted the boat on the horizon.

HOW

I positioned myself so that the shade structure on the left would block out the intense, glaring white ball that was the sun and then waited for the boat to sail along until it was between 2 of the umbrellas.

I think I used a tripod for this one as I had intended to make an HDR image using 3 different exposure values and therefore needed the 3 shots to be identical. However, I decided that the HDR version of this shot didn't look very good so I opted for this exposure (the '0' EV) instead.

I used the aperture priority setting, set to f/16 with a shutter speed of 1/160s.

POST PRODUCTION

I used photoshop to shift the tint of this shot slightly towards the purple end of the spectrum to give the sky a nice colour.

Time out before the rains

WHAT:
This is the pier at Shorncliffe, north of Brisbane City. Taken at about 3:30pm before a heavy downpouring of rain.

WHY
The Shorncliffe pier is a favourite hang-out of mine for both relaxing and for photography. It's always crawling with fishermen, walkers, joggers, cyclists and people like me.

This shot was one of my last for the day before I went home - I only took it on a whim and I'm glad I listened to my instincts as it was about the only one worth printing from the outing! I loved how the fading light was hitting parts of the white railings.

HOW
I hand-held my camera at eye-level to take 3 images at exposure values of (-2,0,+2). I stood in the centre of the pier. The man on the left was just walking into my frame and I swung the camera slightly to the left to include him in the image.

Captured using aperture priority, f8, shutter speed 1/640, ISO 200.

POST PRODUCTION
I used Photomatix to combine and tonemap the three images taken at the pier. Because the man on the left was walking as I took my three shots, he initially had a pretty awful 'ghosting' effect. I decided to re-create my HDR image and selected the 'attempt to reduce ghosting artifacts' option. This resulted in the man being nicely frozen in time without any noticeable ghosting effect.

After I'd played around with the various levels in Photomatix, I then opened the image in photoshop. I then increased the vibrance, contrast and clarity levels to really bring out the clouds and subtle differences in the grain of the wood in the pier.

The tree at Brighton

WHAT
This tree is located at the southern end of the Hornibrook bridge, Brighton. (About 40mins north of Brisbane). I took this photo at low tide and about 45 mins before sunset.

WHY
My husband took a beautiful photograph of this same tree about 4 years ago and I have always loved the image of the lone tree with the rocks in front of it. At the time, I'd just started getting into HDR and I wanted to try it out on this tree.

HOW
I set up my tripod in the soft sand directly in front of the tree at eyelevel. There were a few other mangrove type plants very close to my location, so I was careful to exclude them from my frame. I set the camera to 'bracket' and took three shots - one at each of the following exposures: -2, 0, +2.

If I had my time over with this shot, I probably would have moved the tripod and myself closer to the tree so that it fills the frame more.


POST PRODUCTION
Once home (and after cleaning the legs of my tripod!), I uploaded the images into Photomatix and tonemapped them to this result.

I like the colours of the sunset reflected in the water and the way the tree itself seems to glow.