Augrabies National Park #1

[Rudi Venter]

This is the first in a short series of images created in the Augrabies National Park in the North-West of South Africa.

The main feature in the park is the 73m high waterfall in the Orange river (also known as the Gariep) If you look at the color of the water in the photos you can see where the name comes from! The color is caused by the water flowing through an iron rich area of the country.

Normally the fall consists of just a single stream tumbling down the rocky face but this year when I visited the river was in flood and I counted 25 separate falls.

The main falls at Augrabies

Some of the secondary falls

The park is also rich in other landscape, macro and wildlife opportunities! Will post more later!

Thanks for looking,
Rudi

 

[Mark Grant]

The detail and colours are excellent.

 

[Rudi Venter]

Thanks Mark!

 

[Darren Turner]

wow them are stunning images................ i really cant wait to see more images from you Rudi.......!!!

 

[Hamish Gill]

Rudi, these are quite an achievement in terms of sharpness... care to talk us through the process?
sharpness without looking over sharpened is something i have no real idea how to do!
there is a feeling depth to these i think not often seen in digital photos
the way these are sharpened, you have managed to add a lot of realism to the image, but with the colours created a touch of surreal ... i like your style a lot ... and i'm not usually into landscapes if im honest!
the one thing im not so sure about is the sky in the first one... on my screen its a little too blue ... but its hardly a major issue ...

 

[Rudi Venter]

Thanks Darren!

Thanks Hamish!

I tend to agree about the color of the sky in the first image, funny, I took a similar image of the falls a while ago when it was not in flood, around the same time of the day (Late afternoon almost at sunset) and the sky came out even stranger. I am posting that image below, this image was a blend of 3 exposures done in Photoshop to help with the huge DR so I would class it as an HDR image. In this case the air was dry and full of dust producing the interesting colors from reflected light. In the initial post above the air was really clean since it was shortly after a rain storm so I was surprised at the different color.

I think the detail and sharpness can be attributed to a few things, firstly the camera and the lens, I have found the Canon 1DSmk3 with the Canon 17-40L to be a particularly sharp combination. The photos were taken at f13 (ISO 50) to try and slow the shutter speed, it also helped with great DOF.

I do not sharpen much, I always use the same technique, converting the image (16 bit TIFF produced from RAW by C1PRO) into LAB mode, then selecting the luminosity channel before sharpening (Smart sharpen in Photoshop CS4) around 70%, 0.5 and 0, this seem to produce good results for the screen. When I print I might sharpen a bit more, especially if it is a large canvas print (Have printed up to 3x2m from the 1DS3 with great results).

While the image is in LAB mode with the luminosity channel selected I also boost the contrast a bit, it helps to bring out detail.

The color is mostly as it comes out of the camera, the camera is set to Landscape mode that does boost color (mostly green channel) a bit.

The final resizing for the web is done with Breeze Browser, it also applies a bit of sharpening, normally needed when you scale down an image a lot.

I hope that explains my PP
Thanks for looking!!
Rudi

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Love the first two - really stunning look

Not sure about the HDR look - it's very arty, surreal in fact.

 

[Rudi Venter]

Hi Chris,

Yes, I think HDR is an acquired taste, I feel it must not be looked at as a photo, rather some other form of digital art