Baobab Panorama

Baobab Panorama - Canon 40D, Canon 17-55, 8x0.3s, f/8, ISO 100

I haven't posted anything for a while, and this post will be rather short, but rest assured that this blog has not been abandoned.

When my wife and I visited Madagascar in 2010, I took a number of shots for a panorama at the famous Baobab Avenue, just north of Morondava. When I got back home, I wasn't satisfied with my attempts to stitch this panorama (mostly because the sky was too bright), so I left it.

Recently, I got an email from a very friendly lady who wanted to buy one of my photographs, and asked if I have any baobab images in panoramic format, and perhaps in black and white. So I remembered the panorama I took, and reprocessed it again (now using Lightroom rather than Canon's own DPP which I used three years ago). This time I was very happy with the result, and the friendly lady now has a nice big canvas of this image on her wall.

More Night Skies

Galactic Arch - Canon 40D, Tokina 11-16, 13x30sec, f/2.8. ISO 3200

Special thanks to Phil Plait (the Bad Astronomer) for linking to my pictures and thereby doubling my all-time pageviews overnight! As a reward to all the BA faithfuls, I have posted a few of my earlier night sky images. Sorry if they don't quite live up to the Quiver Trees by Night series, but I am still learning. On the other hand, I have finally overcome some hugin glitches (by installing it on another machine) and managed to stitch a third Quiver Tree by Night panorama. Now it will need some heavy photoshopping, for which I don't really have time at the moment, but I will post it when it's done.

The above shot was taken at Nuwerus, a guest farm in the Cederberg, in July 2011. These are the most Southern quiver trees I've ever seen. It was taken in moonlight (about 35% full), which is why the foreground is so well illuminated. This shows nicely that moonlight is actually the same colour as sunlight, just darker. Actually, the moon was already too full in this image, so I had a hard time extracting enough contrast from the night sky. I had actually made a similar panorama the night before, when the moon was still darker - but the next morning my memory card died and took all my pictures with it! Thus, I retook the panorama that evening, and this is the result. The lesson is: never buy discount memory cards - stick to the well-known brands, even if they are more expensive. At least this image won me a nice little camera backpack from Pix Magazine.

Moonlit Star Trails - Canon 40D, Tokina 11-16, 45min, f/4, ISO 200

Early Morning Star Trails - Canon 40D, Tokina 11-16, 30mins, f/4, ISO 200

Above are two startrails I took that same night. The first is moonlit, the second was taken in the early morning hours, after the moon set, but the sky started getting light towards the end. This is the celestial South pole you're seeing, of course, so you will also notice the two Magellanic Clouds. The quiver tree in the foregound was illuminated with my flashlight. These are long, single exposures, which unfortunately leads to some hot pixels in the image. One can cancel those with a darkframe subtraction, but the darkframe would have to be a similar exposure length - and I didn't have the time for that. An alternative is to take many shorter exposures and then to merge them, using software like Startrails.exe.

Secret Pool by Moonlight - Canon 40D, Canon 17-55, 10x30sec, f/2.8, ISO 3200

This shot is another moonlit panorama, also taken in the Cederberg, but at Beaverlac. Later that night I took some startrails (after the moon had set), fell asleep next to my tripod, and was woken by an otter :)

Baobab & Milky Way - Canon 40D, Canon 17-55, 30sec, f/2.8, ISO 1600

Here is my first successful night sky photo, taken in the village of Antsiraraka in Madagscar, July 2010, with a baobab in the foreground. I shot at ISO 1600, which turned out not to be enough, so I had to push the exposure in postprocessing. The result is inferior to shooting at ISO 3200 directly.

Baobabs & Bicycle

Baobabs & Bicycle - Canon 40D, Canon 17-55, 1/60, f/5.6, ISO 100, polariser, tripod

As my first serious post, I've chosen one of my all-time favourites. This shot was taken at the famous Avenue of the Baobabs, north of Morondava in Madagascar, in July 2010.

Erica and I were on a tour to the West of the country for a week and a half, and this was our last full day, on the road back from the Tsingy de Bemaraha. Our tour guide had timed things perfectly and we arrived during the golden hour. Just the right clouds were decorating the sky, the light was warm, and the usual crowds of tourists were in South Africa watching the Soccer World Cup. Everything just came together in this picture, a matter of being at the right place at the right time, and a lot of luck (I wasn't even paying attention to the guy on his bicycle).

The trees are Adansonia grandidieri, one of six baobab species endemic to the island. The trees mostly line the road here, forming this avenue. Most probably, there were more baobabs here, but most of those further from the road had been cleared to make way for rice paddies (Madagascar's staple food). So this iconic scene of Madagascar is actually the result of the environmental destruction that is threatening the country.

Technical stuff

I shot this with my Canon 40D, EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 lens at 1/60, f/5.6, ISO 100, with polariser and tripod. The aperture is actually too large, so the most distant trees are a bit soft.

As for post-processing, this photo only really came into its own when I started using Lightroom. If you're quick (or, more likely, I'm slow with cleaning up my picassa albums), you'll find and older version of this picture in my picassa albums, which was processed with DPP (that's Canon's own raw converter, which came with the camera). What made the most difference, I think, is Lightroom's "fill light" slider, which is set to 40 here. I think it just looks better when the foreground is not too dark. Otherwise I made some minor adjustments to the usual vibrance and clarity, added a post-crop vignette, and slightly increased the saturation in the red and orange. But not as much as it looks: the trees really do have reddish bark, and this is accentuated by the light from the setting sun.

Competitions

This was one of my first photos to enjoy some success in competitions, and appeared in Getaway in November 2011, as well as Go Magazine and even National Geographic. I have to qualify this last bit: No, I did not win the National Geographic photo competition. I did win a prize in the Vale Eye on Sustainability Competition, which is hosted by NGM, and the winning photos appeared in the December 2011 issue of NGM - in an ad by Vale. Still, it felt pretty good, and my head swelled a few cm as a result.