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Desert Oak, Curtin Springs Station

It’s off on an adventure, down an unmarked dirt road through the Kings Creek Station and into Curtin Springs Station. It’s hundreds of square kilometres of remote outback Australia and only a handful of people have access to the track, so we see no one else for the next day until we reach the Lasseter Highway several hundred kilometres south.

Our vehicle is purpose designed for this sort of travel, yet even so we find ourselves bogged at the top of a particularly soft sand dune. No trouble! We bundle off the vehicle, grab the metal boards from the trailer and dig them under the wheels. It doesn’t take us too long to sort it out, but we do unload a few suitcases to make the vehicle lighter. Was that a good idea? Possibly not as we found ourselves carrying our suitcases along the sandy track to the rescued vehicle – it certainly made a comical picture.

Future sand dunes were approached at higher speed and we only had one more situation to deal with. It certainly made it exciting for a bunch of people used to life in the city, although I dare say our driver Dave was a little unhappy with himself getting bogged the second time!

It’s amazing how much the landscape changes and we soon found ourselves in some beautiful parklands. We sheltered in the shade of desert oaks and set up camp well before sunset, giving us time to prepare our meals and take photographs as the light improved. We all went our separate ways, investigating the surroundings and struggling a little with the complex landscape.

However, once the sun was gone and the stars were out, we discovered a fantasy land right next to our campsite. The red embers from the fire were throwing a warm light on the surrounding trees, contrasting beautifully with the Milky Way above. We tried different exposures from 10 seconds to a couple of minutes, hoping there was not too much breeze moving the delicate leaves.

Post-Production

Between the shoot and preparing this blog post, Capture One Pro 7 has been released and it was an interesting insight to see just how much better the new version is. Look at the comparison pics below.

I have done my best to ensure the settings in Capture One for both versions were identical so we have a fair comparison. However, there is some folly in this argument because maybe Capture One 6 (on the left) needs different settings to look its best. Even so, to my eye there was a clear improvement the moment I pressed the ‘Upgrade’ button to change to the new processing engine.

The noise reduction has been handled automatically – I haven’t knowingly tweaked the settings. I mean, this is a pretty tough image to process. Taken on an EOS 60D, I think even Canon would agree that ISO 3200 is towards the limits of the camera’s capability (technically, it can be pushed to ISO 12,800). Give your subject lots of light and the camera will perform miracles, but here the foreground and the tree are either in darkness or lit by the dying embers in a fire some 50 metres away.

Can you see noise and grain? Yep! Do I like it? Yep – I think the image has a really great painterly feeling to it. Is it technically perfect? Who cares! In terms of communicating the amazing stars you see in Australia’s Red Centre, and the enjoyment of camping out in a swag, I think the resulting image does an admirable job. So I’m happy!

There was a colour difference between the top of the tree and the bottom of the tree (see photo above), so I added in a Local Adjustment and adjusted the colour of the top of the tree to match the bottom. Not exactly sure why there was a colour difference in the first place (possibly tall grasses filtering the light from the fire), but it was easy to fix.

Next, I added a second Local Adjustment to lighten the foreground, putting in some detail that doesn’t deserve to be there. It was a 76 second exposure, so the grasses have moved in the evening breeze, but as a descriptive image, I am happy with this.

Masking in Rainbow Valley, Central Australia

Admittedly it is hot. We’ve just stepped off a plane in Alice Springs, out of a safe, air conditioned environment and into the midday heat of Central Australia. The hot air hits you like a wall and, considering it is winter back home, we enjoy the difference just long enough before stepping back into an air conditioned vehicle.

The vehicle is not a bus, nor is it a truck, but a four-wheel drive hybrid with a trailer, designed to carry passengers along rough and remote outback tracks. You don’t want to get stuck in the Outback without being prepared and our vehicle has food and water supplies to last us a week, plus a satellite phone to ensure we have contact with the outside world. Later in the trip, we would be leaving the marked roads and following a pencil sketch on a torn piece of paper through some of Australia’s most inaccessible terrain.

Tonight, however, would be relatively civilized. We were heading to Rainbow Valley just 75 kilometres south of Alice Springs. Rainbow Valley is a part of the James Range, but the ranges in the relatively flat Red Centre are more like hills than mountains. The main feature to photograph is a salt pan sitting in front of a multi-coloured bluff. Some of the most interesting photos have the bluff reflected in water, but today the salt pan is bone dry with a few tumbleweeds scattered along its edges. There hasn’t been significant rain here for many months.

Sunrise is interesting, but you’ll probably find that the bluff is in shadow, whereas at sunset we have the escarpment in full light. And our shadows in the foreground, so we skirt around the edge of the salt pan, looking for some existing shadows to hide in, so our presence isn’t obvious. The other option is to wait for the sun to set and then shoot in the twilight. Central Australia is simply magnificent to shoot at this time of the day and by now, the temperature is very comfortable.

Tonight we will sleep under the stars in a swag. A swag is a large canvas bag with a comfortable mattress, sheets and blankets inside. You can be sure it won’t be raining! You simply pull it off the top of the truck, unroll it and climb inside. It’s like a big sleeping bag and there really is nothing better than lying on your back and looking up at the stars, the camp fire crackling in the background as you drop off to sleep…

However, sleep takes a little longer as we can hear the howls of dingoes in the distance. Our guide is unperturbed, so we take our lead from him and cover up our heads with the flap on the end of the swag. Later that night I wake to the sound of scratching near the fire. The embers are now just a glow and I can see the silhouetted legs of a couple of dingoes, scavenging for an easy meal.

Good thing they don’t eat humans. Often.

Post-Production

My image of Rainbow Valley (above) was taken with an Alpa TC, a 23mm Rodenstock Digaron lens and a Phase One IQ180 digital back. I positioned the camera very low and very close to the tumbleweed and took several frames at different focus points, so I can focus stack an image if necessary. However, I quite like the softness on the bluff in the background.

After applying some global adjustments to the colour, saturation and cropping, there were two main challenges to deal with and the first was easily solved. The bright sky needed to be balanced with the darker foreground, so I used a Local Adjustment in Capture One Pro 7 with the new Gradient Mask. This allowed me to darken the top of the frame and gradually reduce the effect towards the horizon line (see above).

The second challenge was to allow the tumbleweed to stand out from the cracking mud below. Although the wood in the tumbleweed is partially bleached, it is nevertheless coated with dust and sand, much the same colour as the mud behind. It is well camouflaged.

I would like to avoid creating a very fine mask for the tumbleweed itself, so I begin by increasing the colour in the foreground mud (above). I add a Local Adjustment layer and open the Advanced Color Editor. Using the Pick Color Correction eyedropper tool, I click on the mud to select the colour range and then I use the Saturation slider to increase the colour. It helps, but still the tumbleweed blends into the background.

I then added a four more Local Adjustments, lightening and darkening the areas surrounding the tumbleweed, but with no real success. It seemed that the only option was to create a fine and complicated mask for the tumbleweed’s branches.

This is what I had tried to avoid because creating precise masks can be time consuming, especially if your subject has lots of edges. Like a tumbleweed! I have cheated a little because this version of the image is only going to be 2000 pixels in size, so slight errors in my masking technique won’t be too obvious I hope! However, if you’re wanting to keep your workflow within Capture One, the masking tools are here. In addition to size and hardness, Capture One Pro 7 also has an opacity slider to adjust, so there is very little lacking in the application’s masking capabilities.

With the mask completed, the tumbleweed is lightened to ensure it stands out from the mud. I then went back and refined the other settings to produce the result seen at the beginning of this post.

Cheers,

Peter

Peter Eastway is a professional photographer and photography magazine editor based in Sydney, Australia. If you would like to accompany Peter and Tony Hewitt on a seven day Central Australia ‘Adventures in Oz’ workshop in August 2013, click here for more information.

And if you’d like to see a short movie explaining in more detail how Peter processed this file in Capture One,
click here.

To see more of Peter’s photography, visit www.petereastway.com. Peter also offers an online Landscape Photography MasterClass. It contains articles and videos, outlining his camera and post-production techniques. Details can be found at www.betterphotography.com.

High-Contrast Scenes at Ormiston Gorge, Central Australia

Ormiston Gorge isn’t as big as the Grand Canyon, nor as deep or as wide, but it does have a spiritual presence. The age of the rocks, the ruggedness of the terrain, the light spinifex grasses and the white trunked gum trees create an enchanting landscape. Around two hours west of Alice Springs, it’s not far from Glen Helen Gorge where we were staying for the night and we planned to be there for the morning shoot.

We awoke at a reasonable time, 5.00 a.m. which was an hour or so before sunrise. A short trip in our vehicle and we found ourselves at the mouth of the Gorge. From the car park, you can take a level stroll around a dry river bed and into the gorge itself. There are several deep pools locked by towering rock walls, but to walk further requires a more agile state of mind and some rock hopping. We went this way on a PODAS a couple of years ago with Kevin Raber, Ken Duncan and Jeff Schewe.

The other option is to climb up a path. There’s a great gum tree up the top of the rise and it can be photographed from a point half way up, or up at the tree itself. I went all the way to the top and spent a magical hour watching the light intensify, the sun rise and the light snake its way from the top of the gum tree down to the bottom of its trunk.

Just being up and out at this time of the day is wonderful enough, taking a few great landscape shots even better!

Across from the tree, a finger of land pushes into the Gorge, requiring it to dog-leg around. As the sun rises, its rays skim across the top of this land, lighting up the trees and grasses, but I’m also seeing the strong reds come through in the rock faces below and behind. To my eye, it’s a strong composition, but it requires a telephoto to make it happen. Although many people think landscape photography is best approached with a wide-angle or a panorama camera, I find a lot of my shots work better by simplifying the scene with a telephoto.

The accompanying image is photographed with a 110mm Schneider Kreuznach, so it’s only a mid-telephoto, but long enough to crop the scene and eliminate the sky behind. By removing the sky, the image has the feeling that the rock face behind goes upwards forever, plus it reduces the number of compositional elements to deal with.

And while I might be teaching most readers to suck eggs, when shooting into the light, it’s important to not only use a lens hood, but perhaps shade the lens hood with a cutter or your hand as well. It’s essential to keep any unwanted flare under control.

Post Production

In Capture One, the processing was relatively simple, especially with the new High Dynamic Range algorithms running around inside.

However, to start I struggled with the colour balance a little. The natural or ‘correct’ colour was a little yellow to my eye and I wanted there to be more contrast between the colour in the sunlight and the colour in the shade. The camera had set the Kelvin at around daylight, which was very sensible, but I found by dragging the Kelvin slider down to 4600-4700 that I was able to produce a little coolness in the shadows, and this contrasted well with the warmth of the sunlight on the yellow grasses.

The exposure was pretty right, so next step was to increase the contrast and give the image some guts. This worked well, except in two places. The highlights on the grasses lost detail and appeared too light, while the shadow areas in the bottom left became a little muddy. No trouble, the High Dynamic Range tool is the answer.

Using the Shadow slider, I lightened up the shadows without going overboard. I still want this to be a dark part of the image, but I want you to be able to see what’s in it. Similarly, the Highlight slider allowed me to return detail and colour in the grasses up the top.

I find when using the High Dynamic Range tool that I have to return to the Contrast slider in the Exposure tool and, usually, add in a little more contrast. Not always, of course, but if you’ve been using the High Dynamic Range tool and struggling a bit, try using it in combination with the Contrast slider and between the three controls, Capture One Pro 7 is remarkably powerful.

Sitting back and looking at the image, I then increased the colour saturation (I like colour), cropped the top of the sky out of the image completely, added in a vignette to darken the edges and, finally, added a Local Adjustment to darken down the rock wall in the distance. This helps to emphasise the separation between it and the finger of land in sunlight.

Cheers,

Peter

How to Delete Images in Capture One Pro 7

Often, one of the first tasks to do after importing images into Capture One Pro 7 is to delete those images that you don’t want to keep. Doing so early in the workflow makes it easy to focus on the good images.

Capture One has always offered an easy and convenient trash concept when organizing images in a Session. When you delete an image from a Session, the image will be moved to the Session Trash folder. You can always look in the Trash folder and move files back if you regret your deletion. You only delete the files for good if you use the option “Empty Session Trash”.

When organizing your images in a Catalog, Capture One Pro 7 has a similar concept for deleting images but it works a little different and is dependent on whether the original files are stored inside the Catalog or on an external location.

Deletion of images stored inside the Catalog

When working with images stored inside the Catalog, Capture One Pro 7 also provides an easy method of handling trashed images. When you delete an image, it will be removed from the Catalog and added to the Trash Collection.

As with a Session, you can look in the trash collection and move the files back into any other user collection or into the All Images Collection, if you regret your deletion. If you want to delete the images permanently from the Trash Collection, you can right click on the Catalog Trash and select the “Empty Catalog Trash”.

When you delete an image, for instance from your Recent Imports Collection, you will get a warning telling you that the image will be removed from the Catalog and put into the Catalog Trash (as shown above).

Deletion of images stored outside the Catalog

When your original files are stored outside the Catalog, you will typically have organized the files into a structured folders system – e.g. by using year, month and event name in the folder names. One of the benefits of using images stored outside the Catalog is that you don’t need to have access to your images in order to work and search within the Catalog (check out this previous post to learn more about storing your images outside the Catalog) This allows you to bring a smaller Catalog with you on the road more easily. Another benefit of using images stored externally, is that you can have different Catalogs referring to the same original file, while you have total freedom to adjust the image in different ways in different Catalogs. For instance, you could create a Black and White Catalog, as well as a Catalog for Color versions of the same raw files.

When deleting an image that’s stored outside the Catalog, Capture One Pro 7 does not use the Catalog Trash but gives you 2 options. You can either remove the image from the Catalog but leave it at its location or you can remove it from the Catalog and into the OS System Trash. The first option makes sense if you have another Catalog that uses the same image folder.

Warning dialog when deleting a file where the raw image is stored outside of the Catalog

Deleting multiple images

Right after import, I typically browse through the Recent Import folder and delete all those images, I for sure don’t want to keep. If I delete the files as I browse through them, I need to choose the deletion option for each image. To avoid this, I simply use the shortcut for tagging the images I don’t like with the Red color Tag (short cut “-“). After sorting, I use the filter to show only the Red Tagged images. I quickly double-check that all the Red tagged images should be deleted before I select and delete them at once.

Red color tag has been used to tag images for deletion. The Filter tool is used to show the images with a red tag.

Removing from a Catalog Album

If you have organized your images into albums, and you decide that a specific image should not be part of that album later, you can remove the image. When doing so, you do not remove it from the Catalog but just from the selected album. The file is still part of the Catalog and you won’t get a warning.

If you want to remove the file totally from the Catalog, you need to locate the file in the “All Images” Collection and delete it from there.

All the best,

Niels