Trekking Tripod | HDR and Travel Photography of Michael Morris

Dolphin Beach

Published on 22 July 2012

Table Mountain from Dolphin Beach

After feeling bad that I was neglecting my bag of Lee filters, I managed to get outdoors and use them for the second time in one week.

It’s been pouring with rain in Cape Town the last couple of days, and roads are turning to rivers, but fortunately the day before the rain started produced a brilliant sunset. On a tipoff from a photographer friend that the clouds would be good, I left work a bit early and braved the rush hour traffic to Dolphin Beach with its picture-postcard view of Table Mountain. Man, it’s stressful to be watching the sun going down while stuck in gridlock traffic, trying to get to the beach in time. But I did make it in time, and spent a good hour and a half snapping away several hundred shots. Everything just calms down the moment you get your legs (and your tripod’s legs) in the water and see this view. What a great city to live in!

There’s something super relaxing about shooting with filters. When you’re choosing between several filters and combos, assembling filter holders and adapter rings, all while trying not to get sand and fingerprints everywhere, you just need to slow right down. Then, once your kit is all assembled and your composition chosen, its just a matter of shooting away as the light changes and making sure the sea doesn’t wash all your expensive kit away. Getting your filters right also saves a huge amount of time on Photoshop later, with less or no need to combine multiple images to get the exposure right. I must have only spent ten minutes processing this image later that evening.

This shot was taken after the sun had already gone down, all the dog walkers had left, and the magical blue hour had started. I enjoy the way the slow shutter speed blurs the water.

Categories: Blue Hour Photography, Cape Town, Landscape Photography, South Africa and Travel
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Slangkop Lighthouse

Published on 17 July 2012

Slangkop Lighthouse, near Kommetjie, Cape Town

My wife Lorna and I took a drive out to Slangkop Lighthouse near Kommetjie this weekend hoping for some good sunset photography. It was a fun drive through the beautiful Chapman’s Peak, watching the storm clouds over the ocean, but it ended up being pretty cold and bleak at Kommetjie with not much break in the clouds. Still, it was fun to experiment with my under-utilised Lee filters and try some long exposure shots. This one was a thirty second exposure in rapidly falling light, and blurred the clouds and water in an interesting way. These big glass filters are fiddly and slippery things, and I’m waiting to drop one on a rock. That will be a sad and expensive day.

According to my googling, Slangkop (‘snake head’) is the tallest cast iron lighthouse on the South African coast. It started operation in 1919 and is the fourth most powerful lighthouse in the country. I hadn’t realised that lighthouses could be pre-fab cast iron structures, and it was interesting seeing close up that what I had always assumed was a masonry structure was actually made of large metal panels.

I have a slight niggle. I took this shot during the beautiful ‘blue hour’ period, just after sunset, when the sky fills with rich and mysterious blue tones. But if I shoot in black and white, can I still call it a blue hour shot?

Categories: Architectural Photography, Black and White Photography, Blue Hour Photography, Cape Town, Landscape Photography, South Africa and Travel
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Ephesus

Published on 13 July 2012

Library of Celsus, Ephesus, Turkey

This is the beautiful Library of Celsus at Ephesus in Turkey, now nearly 1,900 years old.

The building was built both as a library to hold some 12,000 scrolls and as a memorial to Tiberius Julius Celsus, a Roman senator, consul and governor of Asia. Consul Celsus was rich enough to leave enough money to build the library, and he was buried in a sarcophagus inside it, this somewhat surprising mix of functions being apparantly as unusual then as today. The Library was completed in 135 AD, and was one of the best stocked of ancient times. It burnt down in an earthquake about 130 years later, leaving only the facade. It was rebuilt as a nymphaeum, which is rather less racy than it sounds, and was just an elaborate water feature. This too was destroyed, including the facade, in the late Byzantine period. The facade was restored in the 1970s to the state you see it here, and today it is one of the highlights of Ephesus.

It’s a stunning piece of architecture, and the stonework is incredibly carved. Need I say it makes me very happy to see so much money and effort expended on a library? Yes, it does. Well done, Consul Celsus!

It’s also hard to tell that I was surrounded by about 10,000 people when I took this picture. This place is beset by tourists from dawn till dusk, and getting people-free photographs here is a serious challenge. In the parking lot outside, they were playing a game of ‘fit 100 tour buses into a parking lot designed for 20′ that involved a lot of hooting. It was quite a sight, and made me glad we walked the two kilmetres from the nearest town instead of bussed.

Categories: Architectural Photography, Ephesus, HDR Photography, Selcuk, Travel and Turkey
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Paradise Bay

Published on 5 July 2012

Glacier at Paradise Bay, Antarctica

I was lucky enough to travel to Antarctica a few years ago. For someone like me, from Africa, who had barely seen snow before, this was really being thrown in the deep end. I don’t think I’ll be seeing this much ice and snow again in a hurry. ‘s no joke.

This is a spectacular glacier at Paradise Bay on the Antarctic Peninsula that we approached in our Zodiacs. You would think somewhere named Paradise Bay would be all about palm trees and beach volleyball, but not here. Still, very beautiful, and paradise of a less conventional sort. There was a tiny Argentinian research station in the bay near here, so if this is your idea of paradise, you could possibly get a posting out here. This picture was taken at the height of summer, so you would need to pack an extra duvet for winter.

That glacier face was as unstable as it looks. It would periodically calve off huge blocks of ice, the size of a house I suppose, which would fall into the sea with an impressive crash and splash. It’s a forbidding coastline, much of it like this, with very few places to land.

Categories: Antarctica, Landscape Photography and Travel
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To the boats!

Published on 15 June 2012

Luminance Mask version

I have been experimenting quite a bit recently with different methods of expanding the dynamic range of my photos, which is really an easier way of saying ‘making a better distribution of dark to light tones in an image without there being too-light lights and too-dark darks’.

Two of my favourite methods of doing this are using luminance masks and HDR tonemapping.

Luminance masking is a technique developed by Tony Kuyper which allows you to very carefully select certain ranges of tones on your image and selectively lighten or darken them. Tony goes into a lot of detail on how to do this on his website, which is well worth reading. It’s certainly way too complicated for me to summarise quickly, and you will be kept up way into the night as you follow Tony’s tutorials. What I like about his technique is that it keeps the final image looking very natural, while still allowing your photo to show a far greater tonal range than your camera can capture in a single shot.

Tonemapped HDR version

By way of contrast I’ve also shown a tonemapped HDR file. I used Photomatix HDR software, which I find the most useful of the many I have tried. I shot a bracket set of three shots, at -2, 0 and +2 exposure compensation. Then I ran them through Photomatix, trying to keep the settings as minimal and natural as possible. This software tonemaps the image, which means that it tries to compress the tones from the three images into a single image.

As you can see, it gives the photo a certain look. Everything looks softer, warmer, and more textured. In particular the tonemapping technique brings more light into all the shadow areas, usually far more than would naturally occur in such areas. Objects almost seem to glow from within. It’s enough to confuse the viewer into thinking that the image looks a little strange, without being able to quite say what it is. The advantage is that it can make the image a little more compelling due to its strangeness, while the disadvantage is that your image just looks, well, strange.

After seeing enough Photomatix images they can tend to start looking all the same. With this image, I think the HDR look is quite interesting and adds a bit of a steampunk feel. If I had to choose though, I would go for the more natural look of the Luminance Mask version.

This scene is of the lifeboat deck on the cruise ship Sinfonia of the MSC line, while we were en-route from Durban to Mozambique. The rest of the passengers were playing bingo and slot machines after dinner, so I decided to get out on deck and nab some photos. The lifeboat area was particularly interesting with all its heavy equipment. We had practised life boat drill here during the day. It was pretty chaotic, and I’m glad we didn’t need to use the lifeboats for real. The short people at the back had to stare at the life jacket of the preson in front of them for half an hour. At least the life jackets had whistles, which livened up the proceedings somewhat.

Categories: HDR Photography, Ships, Sinfonia, Transport and Travel
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