Augrabies National Park #2

[Rudi Venter]

A few more images from the Augrabies national Park, not only the falls today! During my last visit a few weeks ago a large section of the park was closed due to flood damage to the roads (In the desert!!) but I still managed to hike to a few locations.

First one more photo of the falls....

A really noisy spot!

This poor tree was nearly washed away in the recent floods, only the strong roots wedged between the rocks kept it from being swept out to the Atlantic ocean.

Something a bit different, this photo was taken of the Orange river before it reaches the falls, the only illuminations was the full moon. Exposure time was 5 minutes. In this small web image you can just see a meteor trail in the top right hand corner of the image.

Thanks for looking!
Rudi

 

[Hamish Gill]

full moon ... looks like daylight ... i suppose you can sort of see a little bit of grain from the long exposure? ... but otherwise one would assume its taken in day light!

im going to start a thread on c1pro as im very intrigued to learn how to get this quality of sharpening ... also, i notice your images take a little bit of time to load ... how do you save them for web? just interested to know if that is contributing to the image quality?

 

[Rudi Venter]

Hi Hamish!

Yes, there is a bit more grain, in this case I did not use the VERY effective in-camera noise reduction in this case, should have.... The image was a bit under exposed so I pushed it about 1 stop in C1pro, also not good for the noise. But sometimes grain adds character

No, I do not save the images in any special way for the web, it can be done in Photoshop and it does help with the size, they are also saved at 100% jpg quality so they are larger than normal but it does help with quality. Right now they are on a server on a rather slow (busy) link, I am waiting for a line upgrade but here in "dark" Africa these things take time.....

A C1Pro thread sound like a great idea, would love to contribute.

 

[Hamish Gill]

i have been saving images for web at 60% quality for a long time (thats what working with web designers has done for me)... at least until last night when i noticed how soft it made some of my already soft focus images .... lesson learnt there i think!

 

[Rudi Venter]

60% is a bit low, I would not really go below 75%, also remember to re-sharpen after reducing the size, just a bit but it helps! It does depend on the image, some images look better a bit softer!

 

[Ralph Thornton]

Really like that moon lit shot. Well done!

 

[Rudi Venter]

Thanks Ralph!

 

[Chris Dodkin]

That moon shot is something special - care to share the camera details? (ISO, noise reduction on/OFF etc)

 

[Rudi Venter]

Hi Chris!

Ok, here goes..... Camera was a Canon 1DSmk3 with a Canon 17-40 L lens at 24mm and f8 for some DOF. ISO was 100 and the "Long exposure noise reduction" was off. In hindsight it would have been better if it was on. The camera was mounted on a Manfrotto tripod and the exposure was controlled by a TC-80N3 remote set to 5 minutes.

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Thanks Rudi - I'm already thinking of some possible moonscape shots out in Sedona AZ - will member to pack my remote timer!

How did you work out the exposure? Trial and error?

 

[Rudi Venter]

Sorry Chris, missed this question!

I normally take a high ISO, up to 30 sec exposure with the lens wide open and then calculate the ISO 100 (or 50), lens stopped down exposure time.

Hope that helps!