News update

I've been rather busy recently with work, so I haven't had much time for working on my photographs. Meanwhile, however, my photographs have been working for me!

On 5 February, the shortlist for the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards was announced, and my Quiver Trees by Night 3 was shortlisted in the Open Panoramic category. Quiver Trees by Night 2 earned a commendation in the same category. The category and overall winners will be announced on 19 March, so I'll have to sweat for another month.

Around the same time, the finalists for the 2012 Environmental Photographer of the Year competition were announced, and Quiver Trees by Night 2 was selected as one of 53 finalists. The finalists will be exhibited at the Royal Geographic Society in London, 9 April - 3 May, and again later in the year at the Grizedale Forest. It is unlikely that I'll be able to visit the exhibitions, but if anybody reading this does see it, please drop me a line.

Quiver Trees by Night 2 Remastered

Quiver Trees by Night 2 has been remastered, in particular I have fixed the aspect ratio to 5:2, like the other two images in the series, by including more sky - cropping the sides was not an option. I had to rephotoshop the whole thing (see here how), so it looks a little different. Let me know in the comments if you consider this an improvement.

Quiver Trees by Night 2v2 - Canon 40D, Tokina 11-16, 12x30sec, f/2.8, ISO 3200, Nodal Ninja

As a result, the Quiver Trees by Night triplet now fits together as a whole, and is more easily framed as all have the same 5:2 aspect ratio.

Special Offer

To celebrate this, I'm making the following special offer for those who wish to buy all three prints:

Quiver Trees by Night 1, 2 and 3, 35x14cm (14"x5.5"), printed on metallic paper, airmailed anywhere in the world for only $99.

Guest Post: Andrew Carter talks about "Frozen Dawn" and "Mullimburra Dreaming"

Firstly I would like to thank Florian for inviting me to write a guest post on his blog.

My name is Andrew Carter and I am a landscape photographer based in Batemans Bay, Australia.

I have always been very keen on photography, so a bit over a year ago I finished up working as a vet, sold most of what I owned, and used all my savings to buy camera gear. My website recently went live, with photos that I have taken over the past year. Feel free to check it out - www.carterlandscapephotography.com.au - hopefully you like them.

I have found that looking at Florian’s photos has gotten me excited about night sky photography again, and as soon as the weather obliges I will be out in the dark!

“Frozen Dawn”

This shot has been one of my most popular photos, and taking the photo was certainly one of those moments that leaves you in awe of nature and the landscape.

The morning that I took this photo, I had actually planned to go to another location, but as I drove into a small valley, the terrain opened up to reveal thick frost blanketing the ground.

A reverse telephoto adapter?

Metabones has just announced its Speed Booster^TM mount adapter.

This interesting gadget lets you mount a full-frame lens on a mirrorless camera with APS-C or smaller sensor. It then acts as a sort of reverse teleconverter, reducing the focal length of the lens, while increasing the size of the aperture.

There seems to be some confusion on the forums about this, but it's nothing magical - all it does is reduce the full-frame image produced by the lens by a factor of about 0.71, so the new, smaller image circle still covers the smaller sensor, but with (ideally) no cropping. Thus the lens with adapter behaves like a shorter (by a factor of 0.71) lens for crop-factor sensors. The total amount of light transmitted is still the same, but concentrated on an area that is 0.71² = 0.5 times the original area, thus the light intensity is doubled, giving you an extra stop of light hitting each pixel. Very cool! I wish I had thought of (and patented) this!

Looking ahead to 2013

No, this blog hasn't been abandoned, I have just been really busy.

First off, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Canon 40D, Pentax 50mm f/4 macro (M42 mount), 1/60, f/4, ISO 1000

Here's a fun picture of a Christmas bauble. The cool thing about photographing a reflecting sphere is that the reflection contains a complete view of the whole room, the only thing missing is the portion directly behind the sphere itself. So now you know what the ground floor of our flat looks like, including our little wire Christmas baobab. My wife, Erica, wrote the greeting back to front so that it looks correct on the photo. Alternatively, I could have flipped the image horizontally. If you look closely, you'll see that the Canon logo on my camera is still reversed.

Quiver Trees by Night 1, 2 & 3

I finally got around to completing my third Panorama of the Quiver Tree Forest, as well as reprocessing the first one to bring out detail in the shadow regions. The three images now form a pleasing triple:

Quiver Trees by Night 1 - Canon 40D, Tokina 11-16, 6x30sec, f/2.8. ISO 3200, Nodal Ninja

Quiver Trees by Night 2 - Canon 40D, Tokina 11-16, 12x30sec, f/2.8. ISO 3200, Nodal Ninja

Quiver Trees by Night 3 - Canon 40D, Tokina 11-16, 16x30sec, f/2.8. ISO 3200, Nodal Ninja

Notice the Magellanic Clouds in the third image.

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.

The Image Says it All

Great news, I am taking part in an exhibition at the Exposure Gallery at the Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock, Cape Town. It is called "The Image Says it All", and features twenty photographers, with one photo each. The opening is on Thursday 25 October, and it runs until 21 November. 

Okay, so my name is misspelled, but it still means the same thing :)

My entry is Quiver Trees by Night 2, which looks beautiful printed 1m wide and framed. If you buy an unframed print of this at the exhibition, the proceeds will go to charity.

Quiver Trees by Night 2

Another of my pictures, a large canvas of Red Giants, is also for sale at the gallery. My heartfelt thanks to Linda and Antonio, who run the gallery and have been supporting me!

Red Giants

Garub Moonset

Canon 40D, Tokina 400mm, 0.6 sec, f/11, ISO 100, tripod, strong wind

Sorry for the long absence, I have been rather busy at work and also travelled to Europe recently. It's high time for another blog post. So here's a nice photo of the moon setting over the Garub Plains in the Namib, taken early one windy morning during the wonderful Aus workshop I have been going on about.

This was taken with my Tokina 400mm f/5.6 lens, which I had taken along to photograph the horses. This lens is really nice to use, and surprisingly good value for money: I paid R2000 for it, second-hand, and it's optically quite good, at least if you stop down to f/8 or so.

As I said, it was a windy morning, so even though I mounted it on a sturdy tripod, the wind caused the lens to vibrate a bit, so this exposure is a little soft. The moon itself is even more fuzzy, since you are seeing it through the thickest part of the atmosphere.

What more is there to say? Oh, yes, it needed some photoshopping, because the original shot looked like this:

So what's wrong with this? First, there is a telephone cable bisecting the image. It's not that obvious, but once you've seen it, it gets on your nerves. Second, there is something distracting in the bottom left corner, right on the edge. Normally, one would just crop a bit, but that would move the trees in the bottom right too close to the edge. What to do?

Wicus Leeuwner taught me the trick: use the Free Transform tool in photoshop to stretch down the bottom left a bit, until the distracting bits are off the edge of the photo. I actually used Puppet Transform, because it's more fun to use:

The yellow pins under the moon are to ensure that the moon itself doesn't get distorted, while the three pins at the bottom left got pulled down a bit.

Finally, the telephone cable was removed by selecting it and hitting "delete" to call up photoshop's smart Content Aware Fill. This basically replaces the deleted portion by patterns cloned from other parts of the image that fit in well. It's surprisingly good, and if you don't like the result, just hit delete again and again until photoshop serves up something you like. The one annoyance is that this only works if you have only a single layer. Beats me why. Of course, cloning by hand works just as well, but that's soooo low-tech...

Window to a Free Soul

Canon 40D, EF 70-200 f/4 IS @ 191mm, 1/125, f/4, ISO 100

The eyes are the windows to the soul, the old saying goes. Well, this soul is a free one, a wild desert horse living on the Garub Plains in the southern Namib desert. They are the descendants of horses that went feral around the time of the First World War. Their range is centred on the artificial Garub Station water hole, on which they rely for survival.

Canon 40D, Tokina 400mm f/5.6, 1/60, f/11, ISO 100, tripod

This was taken during the amazing Aus Workshop, run by Wicus Leeuwner and JJ van Heerden (they're not paying me to advertise, I'm just really enthusiastic), and photographing the horses at first light is one of the main attractions of the workshop, indeed of the whole area.

Canon 40D, Tokina 400mm f/5.6, 1/250, f/8, ISO 400, tripod

What amazed me is that, despite living completely free for many generations, these horses still have their bred-in affinity for humans. After drinking their fill, the horses mill around the water hole and socialise with each other, offering many photo opportunities of sparring stallions and suchlike. They are not bothered by photographers getting too close, and in fact some of them come over and demand attention, like the one in my title photo.

Canon 40D, EF 70-200 f/4 IS @ 200mm, 1/400, f/5.6, ISO 100

What I like about the title picture is that it reflects - literally - the horse's life and environment. Reflected in the perfect optical surface of the eye you can see the bleak desert which is their home, the endless blue sky, as well other members of the herd relaxing nearby. Of course, the image also contains the photographer (so it's also a self-portrait) as well as one other photographer in the background.

Canon 40D, EF 70-200 f/4 IS @ 200mm, 1/400, f/4, ISO 100