Nine Days Across the Outback: An Introduction

In September, I took a trip to Australia for some business, and under orders from friends & management, took some vacation time. (As a chronic workaholic, my former manager has a Facebook group). Per my general rule, I am a lover of civilization. Walls, a roof, kitchens (with gas stoves), soft beds, delicious food, fine wines, air conditioning -- these are to me what the simple ability to live in a city was to the medieval Germans. One might lose these things in a tragedy, or possibly some sort of Mad-Max style collapse, but giving them up voluntarily?

I'm dubious.

Balancing these misgivings was my unhealthy desire to go to interesting places and photograph interesting things. So there I was in Australia, with a d700 and a Crumpler bag full of lenses, so I did the only sensible thing: signed up for an overland tour of the Outback!

My friends and I traveled from Uluru, in the center of Australia, north to Alice Springs, along the Stuart Highway, then north to Darwin and Kakadu National Park -- a nine day trip of over 1200 kilometers. Along the way, I took a few photos...

This brings me to this post. I'm going to be posting one photo from my Outback trip every day for the next nine days. I'll pick a photo that I think I learned a lesson from, demonstrates a technique I found it very helpful to understand, or just, looks pretty, and then write about it here.

Before I start, here's a bonus photo:



I got this from the top of Sydney Tower, one of those taller-than-every-other-building buildings in Sydney. The good news: They let you bring SLRs up there. The bad news: They don't let you bring a tripod (and probably no monopod). They did let me bring my Crumpler bag though, which was good enough to give me a lot of fun options for shooting the city. I had a big problem, though, which was how to stabilize the camera enough for a nearly one second exposure. The high ISO on the d700 is good, but it's not enough to get the exposure I wanted for the cityscape (I would have ended up with window lights, but no detail on buildings or the streets).

The solution? They had a row of those pay-a-coin-and-look-through-the-scope dealies all around the edges of the observation room. I put the camera on one of those, locked it into place, and *bam*! Instant ad hoc tripod.