kokerboom

Sorting through my archive has led me back to the good ol' days of film... A few years ago I went on a three day flower photo trip up the West Coast with my friend Fran, and we ended up at the quiver tree forest near Niewoudville late one night, where we promptly went about setting up our cameras in the dark. I shot this one on my lovely Pentax MZ5n (at a mere 410g it was half the weight of my Brikon, making it a shutter-happy hiker's delight - sadly it has since been pinched).


Facing due west, stars streak through the sky behind a mature quiver tree.

The quiver tree (or kokerboom in Afrikaans) is so called because the hollow branches were used by the bushmen to make quivers for their arrows. They are fascinating and beautiful trees, with the most wonderfully textured bark. If you're interested, more details about the trees can be found at www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A26151482. Along with so many other species, the trees are under threat from global warming - read more about the report at www.bgci.org/conservation/Aloe_dichotoma. The quiver trees flower around this time of the year, so if you happen to be in the area, you might want to pay a visit to the forest - details and directions from www.nieuwoudtville.co.za/information31.html.

water ranger's hut

This week's pic was taken two years ago and it very almost went to whatever afterlife ex-digital photos go to! Another HDR image from 5 exposures, I had an idea for processing the image, but didn't have a spare moment to work on it at the time, and then I forgot about it as more and more photos piled into my library. Now that I'm finally getting stuck into the task of organising my digital library (whittling it down from over 20,000 odd photos to around 2,000 usable images) I noticed that these images were missing from all my hard drive backups! Fortunatly I'm paranoid enough to burn a DVD as soon as I download the images from my camera, and there they were, although for some reason unknown to the Me Now, the Me Then had deleted the RAW files but kept JPEG versions... However, since I'm combining the exposures into a single high definition image, ending up with same quality image as I would with the original raw images, I'm not too devastated!

I think this is one of those images that look better large, so click on the image to view the large version...


Just before taking off at the end of a search & rescue training exercise on Table Mountain with the SA Airforce, (and shortly after the Oryx had a hoist failure with me on the end!) a ray of sunlight pushed past the mist that was starting to race up and over the mountain, illuminating the water ranger's hut perfectly. I have no idea how I managed to handhold the camera still enough for 1 second while I shot a burst of 5 exposures - perhaps the vibrations of the aircraft cancelled out my shake - but the images line up perfectly and the only movement evident is in the mist as it sweeps up towards the hut (hence the odd ripple line effect).

water dance

With all the rain we've been having, the streams are flowing in full force, and gullies that are wonderful scrambling routes up the mountain in summer are currently waterfalls!


High-speed shutter action over a Silvermine stream - pot luck really, as the water is moving so fast and is pretty much unpredictable as to where it's going to leap up, so it takes a bit of patience watching for a pattern, estimating the focal distance since there's nothing to focus on, and hope that some of the dance will be conveyed in one of the shots!

motlatse canyon

This week marks the 2nd anniversary of the pic of the week! This one is for my friend Lisl who was living in between the Kruger National Park and Blyde River Canyon, but is currently walking on a pilgrimage through Spain...


The Blyde River Canyon in winter. Recently renamed the Motlatse, the canyon is the largest vegetated canyon in the world. Cutting through the northern section of the Greater Drakensberg Mountain Range, it really is one of Africa's spectacular sights.

cleaners...

As with most things, even The Mountain needs a wash every now and then. The cleaners appear in the form of the southeaster and nor'wester winds...


Clouds part temporarily to provide a beautifully crisp view south from the summit of Devil's Peak, with the Ledges route from the saddle appearing in the break.

swartkop

On a stroll down south...


Looking North from Swartkop as yet another delicious storm moves in over Table Mountain and Muizenberg Peak

cape of colourful storms

a sunset squall over table bay obscures the mountain

tugela

A classic view of the Tugela River at the base of the Amphitheatre in the Natal Drakensberg, still my favorite place on the planet...


This image has had a fair bit of post processing, so if you're interested in the technical details:

After wading through some pretty icy water to get to a photogenic position in the river (with my tripod being very handy in preventing more than the necessary amount of wetness), I set up my tripod on a teeny island and composed my shot. Although our eyes are capable of discerning a wide range of tones, a camera's sensor is far more limited, even when shooting in RAW format. So because the sunlight on the clouds and peaks was so much brighter than the shadowed river valley, I took a series of 6 bracketed exposures, so the highlights in each area of the image were correctly exposed:


Back in the virtual world of my pc, I processed the raw files into individual black and white images before combining them into a single high dynamic range (or HDR) image. HDR is commonly results in images that have an almost artificial painterly effect, but I prefer to use it to recreate a scene that is closer to what I experienced, bringing out the details that were visible to my eye at the time of shooting.

Finally I manually dodged the clouds in the middle and burned a few areas on the hillsides to selectively increase the contrast, added the coloured filter, something I usually don't like in my own images, but often admire in others', and viola...