Nine Days Across the Outback: Day Nine

I was ready for my trip to end. The lack of internet access gnawed at me. I kept running into Australians who asked for my opinion on McCain's VP pick on various US states ("Sure, I don't think she's qualified. But don't you think she'll win Florida?"). I missed not being dusty. Most of all, I missed being something other than melting in that damned 4WD.

Speaking of scorching, we did the smart thing on our tour that day, and visited Litchfield Park, and hit some waterfalls. Cool, soothing waterfalls, a gentle hike through semi-tropical woods, and then a plunge pool. Encouraged, I took off my boots, and walked down the stairs to the pool...

and nearly blistered my feet on scorching sandstone.

Really, I was tired of the Outback by that point. Even the 6 meter tall giant termite mounds barely lifted my spirits, and when we rolled back into Darwin, I booked another room at the Holiday Inn on my phone as I sat on the steps. My flight out was that night, but I had just enough time to catch one last sunset, and I headed back to Mindil beach to catch the very last dregs of it.

"Sunset at Mindil Beach"

This shot was a classic 'sunset and silhouette' shot. They're simple as pie to take. Get the subject in between you and the sun, then meter on the sky. Adjust your exposure to get the colors to pop to taste.

As the sun slipped below the waves, I walked down into the water, and felt the Pacific on my toes.

Hours later, I was on a plane back to Sydney, and then on to home.

Nine Days Across the Outback: Day Eight

Miseration. Heat. The 4WD vehicle we were taking through these tropical parks was a unique vehicle. Unique, because it lacked any insulation between the engine and the floorboard above it. And this vehicle, once it started going off-road, got very, very hot. Outside was hot, inside was hot, it was a mess.

I was ecstatic to find out that our destinations for the day were two giant waterfalls. Unfortunately, both of these waterfalls involved hikes. The first one was a fine hike, but I had to turn back when the trail required edging along a ledge you had to edge along facing the face of the rock. I might have made it -- but definitely not with the camera, lenses, and tripod. (Good news: The falls weren't running this time of year). The second set of falls involved clambering over boulders. Lots of boulders -- very high.

While the rest of the group decided to go climbing, I sat on one of the boulders, read my Kindle, and photographed a few lizards. Very relaxing, and when I discovered that the members of my group who had dived into the pool at the base of the falls were completely dry (from the heat) by the time they got back, I felt like the reading and lizards plan was a hit.

After looking at some really far away wild horses at Anbang Billabong (Outback version of an oasis/crocodile breeding ground), we went to our camp, which ended up having modern amenities like a saloon, and real bathrooms. I went to check-in desk (which was really the saloon), and asked what I considered to be the million dollar question. "Excuse me", I said, "But along with the places to camp, do you have .. rooms?". The bartendress smiled and said, "Yes, but it only has air-con, a bed, and a light". I nearly fainted from euphoria. "How much?" She didn't catch the note of desperation in my voice.

"Forty dollars."

"Sold!"

I woke up icy cold from the A.C. in the morning, and it was the best forty dollars I spent in years.

"She Didn't Start the Fire"

Speaking of heat, I snapped today's photo of a girl from our tour group by the campfire. When I took the shot, I was really only interested in the yellows & oranges of the fire coloring the scene.

What I got was a sort of glow, that seemed to capture the rays of light from the fire like a kind of orange fog. Which was a neat trick, considering it was so clear.

So, what caused this?

Hate to say it, but I'm not quite sure why I got this look (luck on my side, at last!). I have a few theories, but maybe someone reading this can explain the glow. Here are my theories so far:

• I shot this at f/2.5. Some sort of aberration from being so close to wide open?
• Off axis light bouncing around inside my lens, providing some sort of ghosting?
• "Banding", or sensor artifacts? (I did shoot this at ISO 6400)

Hopefully someone else knows more than I do -- hope you enjoy the fire. :)

For the interested, here are the rest of my photos from Day 8:

Twin Falls
Jim-Jim Falls
Sunset and Wild Horses at Anbang Billabong
Camping

Nine Days Across the Outback: Day Seven

Our seventh day saw us taking off from Darwin and heading into the wilds again -- on a cruise to see wildlife (read: Crocodiles) down Mary River, and then into Kakadu National Park, where we first went to an Aboriginal site at Burrungui Rock.

Culturally and geographically, Burrungui was more interesting. Viscerally, Mary River was more interesting because I witnessed firsthand the *snac* sound that a saltwater crocodile makes when it closes its jaws. The crocodiles, however, are not what today's photo is about.

"You Talkin' To Me?"

Along with the crocodiles, the Mary River was lousy with various Outback birds. Most of them were entirely new to me, so I was fascinated by them. Unfortunately, I ran into the problem one always does when photographing birds:

• They move pretty fast
• The good light for them (like most things) is not broad daylight
• Most of them are pretty afraid of people
• Did I mention they were pretty small?

Unless you are going to be photographing emu or giant ostriches, this means that bird photography is pretty difficult. You need a nice, long, telephoto lens (probably at least 400mm if you want to be properly insane about it), and you always want this lens to be reasonably fast -- probably f/4 or better, so you can catch birds in lovely golden hour light (e.g., get ready to break the bank). You also need to really understand the behavior of the bird, and how to get close to it. You've got to catch it doing something more interesting than just flying through clear air. You've got to get it in good light, like every other photo. You've got to get the focus right on something which can move very fast. And, while you're at it, make sure that composition is interesting. ;)

If I were going birding in the Outback, I would probably have needed to bring a big lens, which be something that would have added about six pounds to my lens collection. And which would likely not be handhold-able. And would have added about $1400-$10K to my lens budget, depending on how wedded I am to my new career in selling photos to the Audobon society. ;)

I made do with my 70-300mm f/4-5.6. Every one of them had to be cropped, and image quality was fairly poor. But I loved the look on this bird's face, and for one brief moment I thought, "This isn't just shooting birds. It's bird portraits.", and then it clicked for me.

Nine Days Across the Outback: Day Six

Darwin is a city of the tropics, located on the northern edge of Australia. The energy reminded me just a bit of Miami, but smaller and even more multicultural. The evening of my sixth day in Australia, I found myself dumped off in front of the Holiday Inn. I'd spent the last hour trying to find a hotel room in the city, which were showing up as completely full. Rather than staying at a hostel (my friend Tim & I), we stayed at the Holiday Inn.

After all that time on the road, I can assure you that Holiday Inn is the best Holiday Inn in the entire world.

That afternoon seemed like the most exhausting of my trip -- a long day at Katherine Gorges and then more time on the road -- felt like I'd been trampled by one of those outback camels we kept seeing everywhere. And as I collapsed on my hotel bed, I was almost ready to sleep the entire night...

but there was a photo opportunity, and I couldn't bring myself to miss it.

Darwin has a street market on a place called Mindil Beach. Hundreds (maybe thousands?) of people show up on the beach to watch sunset, then they hit the market to buy food at the market, listen to some amazing music (I witnessed a trance/didgeridoo mashup myself), or just wander around and experience it.

After slurping down some oysters and miscellaneous meat skewers, I ditched my traveling companions and just lost myself in the market, alone with my 135mm lens.

"The Man from Maningrida"

Finally! After six days of shooting primarily landscapes, an opportunity to shoot people was like mana from heaven. I stopped being tired, and started being excited. The sun had already set, but there was still just enough light that I could eke out some very nice shots.

The shot for today was an aboriginal artist, who I found playing his didgeridoo next to a display of his art. It was tricky -- this shot metered outside of 'stable' for this focal length (about 1/60 s) for the iso which I found was looking good in this light (4000). So, I was walking around in manual mode, forcing it to 1/125s, and trying to make do with the aperture at /4, /3.2, or /2.8.

I love my 135mm f/2 -- almost certainly my favorite lens. It's very sharp, but more importantly, it has a 'look' that makes it special. Only the 85mm seems to have such a similar feel, and even technically sharper or superior lenses do not have 'the look'. But it's not a perfect lens. At f/2, it's just a smidge less sharp. Aberrations (particularly chromatic aberration) can be noticeable. And on an FX sensor, the depth of field at f/2 is .. thin. Try < style="font-style: italic;">total depth of field. The distance in front of the subject is one inch. At ten feet!

This can be tough if you're shooting a person, where you focus on an eye, and hope you really got the focal plane flat, and not at some angle. And that's what I was trying at first with this shot, but got a little frustrated. So, I thought, "What about just accepting that it's going to be off kilter, and exacerbate this?" And that's what I did, after I went for a diagonal composition. Worked for me, and one of my favorite portraits I've taken in challenging conditions.

Here are there of my photos from day 6:

Camp at Katherine Gorge
Katherine Gorge
Last Leg of the Trip to Darwin
Mindil Beach Market

Nine Days Across the Outback: Day Five

Pubs. Termite mounds. More pubs, this time with crocodiles on display. More termite mounds. Our destination for the day was a camp at Katherine Gorge, a national park, but between us and it were all these pubs.

The mother of all these pubs -- the biggest, most touristy, and (apparently) the one with the best chips was in a place called Daly Waters. We stopped there, cooked lunch for ourselves, and then...

Our guide announced we go bowling.

I thought, maybe, we would be headed to the only bowling alley in the Outback. Nope! We started bowling on the streets of Daly Waters. Well, most of our group did -- I got out the camera and started taking some.. sports photography?

"Bowling for Daly Waters"

I tried a number of shots of people bowling, but it was pretty challenging conditions -- midday sun bright overhead, and my fundamental lack of interested in anything to do with bowling.[1]

When I saw this shot though, I pounced. Shooting from behind the bowler seemed to be a slightly novel angle, and the use of sepia was (more) accommodating to the harsh light. What makes the shot for me, though, is the composition. I love the symmetry about the diagonal line, and the 'mass' of the clusters of people (or person) on each side seem to be roughly equivalent. It works for me, but of course these things are subjective -- but hopefully it works for you.

You can find photos of my fifth day in the Outback here, here, here, and here.




[1] I took bowling as a physical education class in high school. I used up all my passion for the sport then.

Nine Days Across the Outback: Day Four

Our third night in the Outback went spent in a town called Alice Springs (population 30,000). It was nice to get away from the omnipresent dust of the Red Center and the crude accommodations of tents. Beers and camel pie followed, and then we woke up for an outrageous early departure.

It's not clear to me why we needed to leave at 5 am, but my rule of thumb is that if I am not waking up early for an amazing sunrise over a landscape painted by the hand of some sort of deity of pure beauty, I am waking up in vain.

So, I slept in our bus for the first few hours of the day, and then awoke for our first bleary stop, which at the marker denoting the Tropic of Capricorn. We had left the colder and sandier desert to the south, but we still had many hundreds of miles of wasteland ahead of us.

When we got back in our vehicle, I found I could never fully sleep. I would try to read, or mull about some problem, but my mind would constantly veer off from the chain of thought into wild and counterfactual contingencies. Time was liquid as I faded into and out of this state for hours on the road. I realized we had traveled for hours, but the scenery outside remained unchanged.

I mentioned this to the tour guide, and he cheerfully pointed out that the termite mounds were ever so slightly higher -- that was how we knew we were heading north.

I'll be honest: The land here was barren and dotted with scrub brush. The only breaks in the road were the occasionally ruined and burned-out car (these could be a photo study in themselves), and periodic pubs and small towns. These towns were often incredibly small -- a pub, a petrol station, and maybe a few scattered residents. The total population was sometimes in the double digits, and the towns would be full of stuff left behind there by visitors, which breaks us to today's photo:

"Wasted"

I found these crushed metal barrels out near a little petrol station and tourist destination known as the Red Sands art gallery. It was a little touristy for my tastes, so I stepped outside to wander around a bit, and found lots of abandonaria. These two metal barrels immediately caught my eye. Something about them rising out of the metal sand, so scorched, textured, and rusted really caught my imagination.

I went sort of wide with this shot, shooting around 24mm (wide, but not so wide I have perspective distortion to seriously worry about -- though imho, probably might have made another interesting angle here). I set it at f/4, because I wanted some separation between it and the background -- though again, the framing I ended up choosing here is really all barrel and sky, so I needed it less than I expected.

Most importantly, I used a polarizer. A polarizer can do two things for you when you slap it on your lens:

(1) Knock the reflected glare off water or some other reflecting surface (so great for shots 'looking into the water', but also reflecting glass, or even tree leaves)
(2) Bring out rich, deep blues in the sky.

(2) was what I wanted here. Since your polarizer is really just a filter that cuts out all the light vibrating in a particular direction, you get your deepest and richest blues about ninety degrees off from the sun.

One additional issue though: If you're shooting a big blue sky at a wide(ish) angle, you'll begin to see an uneven patterns. That's because the polarizer is going to vary continuously across the whole sky -- so you'll get parts of the sky that are ninety degrees away from the sun, and some parts that aren't. The above photo is a great example of this, since we have what is almost an ink spill of blue in the upper left hand corner and then a reduction in this as you get away from it. Here, the effect was intentional: The complicated pattern in the sky was meant to mirror the light and darker reds on the barrel.

Here's a complete list of the places we stopped on my fourth day in the outback:

Red Sands Art Gallery
Barrow Creek Station - Australia's first telegraph station
The Devil's Marbles
More from the Road
Campground at Banka Banka

Nine Days Across the Outback: Day Three

On our third day in the Outback, we went to a place called King's Canyon. We hiked up to the top of the canyon (about 300 meters), then hiked around the tops of broken sandstone domes, then finally back the other side.

That's the boring version. The truth is, King's Canyon was the most dangerous place for me I visited in Australia. We started our hike by climbing up something called 'heartbreak hill', which was a set of sheer steps in the side of the canyon wall heading straight up. I actually handled this pretty fine, but once I got to the top I realized I'd used up half my water in the ascent. Our tour guide cheerily bounded past us, "Don't worry, it's an easy walk once you're at the top!".

Ha!

At first, the top seemed easy. Some broken sandstone, but nothing like the initial climb. But as the sun rose higher and higher in the air, it got hotter and hotter. You know how people cook pizza in brick ovens? Imagine yourself getting hotter and hotter, only to find that the ground beneath you is absorbing heat and then re-radiating it back into you....

Fortunately (and this is one of the biggest lessons here), I was with friends. One of them brought an extra bottle of water, which we all split. This still only got us three quarters of the way around the hike -- after that, I had that moment where I turned over my bottle to see it sad and empty. The last leg was the worst. I found myself barely able to think, and could barely focus on not slipping and tumbling down the canyon. From a motivational standpoint, what kept me going was the thought of about seven grand in camera and beautiful glass going *crunch* was what kept me on that trail.

Later, at the bottom of the canyon and a liter of water later, my friend Tim put it this way:

"I knew something was seriously wrong when you stopped taking photos."

"Heroine"

Virtually every shot I got in King's Canyon I was vaguely frustrated with. All of them were decent, but none of them made me say 'whoa' -- no moment where it really all clicked. I think this shot comes closes. The girl in the photo was in our tour group, and she's standing on a ledge overlooking King's Canyon. The light was difficult, because it was getting close to mid-day, and so it's a bit harsher than I liked. I got inspired for the shot when I saw her walking around on the edge. I saw the red, white, and blue, and I knew what I wanted. "Pose like supergirl!", and she was on it.

Here's what doesn't make the shot for me, other than the hard light. The edge of this cliff is not well-defined enough for me. It lacks the dimensionality I wanted, which would have made the subject and the ground underneath her pop. I think I should have gone for a narrower depth of field here, to make the background more of a red blur, but maybe there's something else I could have done. What that is, I don't know -- suggestions welcomed. :)

If you're interested in the photos of my near-death experience at King's Canyon, you can find them here, and you can find some pictures from the road to Alice Springs and beyond here.