1 April 2013

MartyO goes to Legoland. Images of Canberra

1 April 2013 | johnboy

MartyO has sent in a set of striking photos and an explanation of a little known local landmark:

I had only seen one photo of Legoland and was instantly intrigued. I had been to the Cotter caves and Gibralta Falls – and had always been aware of behemoths further south. Just past Thawara, on past Honey-Suckle creeks (which for some reason I thought was in Victoria..doh!) then onto Orroral Ridge (carpark). It’s a slight downhill hike for 15 mins. If I would of know it was so easy to get to I would of gone much sooner.

To get the exposure right in the caves I was shooting 5 & 7 frame brackets on a sturdy tripod.

Can’t wait to spend an entire day observing the sun beams and planing some moving time-lapse sequences. Anybody wanna go camping?

Here’s the slideshow:

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Ben_Dover11:11 am 03 Apr 13

Fantastic. many thanks Marty, I’m indebted.

martyo10:20 am 03 Apr 13

Ben_Dover said :

Many thanks for the explanation Marty, unfortunately you may as well have been talking about Chinese algebra. Do you have a link to a tutorial or something?

I do – follow Trey he is the man – http://www.stuckincustoms.com/hdr-tutorial/

Gungahlin Al10:02 am 03 Apr 13

Ben_Dover said :

Many thanks for the explanation Marty, unfortunately you may as well have been talking about Chinese algebra. Do you have a link to a tutorial or something?

I feel the same way! Martin, you could put together video lessons of how you do this and make some money out of them by offering them as classes on Skillshare: http://www.skillshare.com/about

Ben_Dover7:43 am 03 Apr 13

Many thanks for the explanation Marty, unfortunately you may as well have been talking about Chinese algebra. Do you have a link to a tutorial or something?

martyo9:23 pm 02 Apr 13

martyo said :

Ben_Dover said :

In addition to my question above hem..hem… what sharpening method did you use? High pass filter?

yup – the hdr stack adds lot’s more with the defaults. So I tweak the shadow and hi-light saturation and run micro-smoothing off 🙂

I do the color balance and saturation/contrast in Photoshop using the merged file and using raw version of some of the stacked frames to paint in or put the HDR harshness.

It’s a bit like paint-by-numbers but using exposure with HDR – there is no point stacking detail on detail (then add a bit of random camera shake or wind) and expect it to be sharp. It’s mainly exposure you are after not detail.

martyo9:22 pm 02 Apr 13

Ben_Dover said :

In addition to my question above hem..hem… what sharpening method did you use? High pass filter?

yup – the hdr stack adds lot’s more with the defaults. So I tweaked the shadow and hi-light saturation and smoothing always off 🙂 I do most of that in Photoshop using the merged file and using raw version of some of the stacked frames to paint in or put the HDR harshness. It’s a bit like paint-by-numbers but using exposure with HDR – there is not point stacking detail on detail (then add a bit of random camera shake or wind) and expect it to be sharp. It’s mainly exposure you are after not detail.

mossrocket8:42 pm 02 Apr 13

http://youtu.be/E8fnNvW3zDs
a quick video of our adventure…

Ben_Dover2:56 pm 02 Apr 13

In addition to my question above hem..hem… what sharpening method did you use? High pass filter?

martyo11:31 am 02 Apr 13

watto23 said :

Awesome, will have to go visit myself.

were you doing HDR with the brackets, or just choosing the best one and adjusting the levels?

Watto – the brackets are all merged together (Photomatix – http://www.hdrsoft.com/ ) – so in a way you are taking the best parts of each and building up a well exposed scene. It’s a huge range of tones between cave shadows and the sun, and the cave had a few hot-spots (of light) I wanted to expose for.

p111:05 am 02 Apr 13

Very nice pictures. I haven’t been out climbing at Orroral Ridge for a few years, really must head out one fine day soon. Lego land is but one of the clumps of huge granite tors along Orroral Ridge, you could spend your life photographing (and climbing on) them.

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