Plitvice Waterfall
Photo of the Day
For the next little while, the photos of the day are going to be from one of my favourite places in Croatia: the Plitvice Lakes. I think I mentioned before that if there is a heaven, there’s a little slice of it that looks like Plitvice.
As the water flows through the area’s mountains it picks up minerals that coalesce to form barriers between the ever-changing lakes. These natural dams force the water from the lakes to leap down from one step to another in gorgeous cascades. The result is a landscape photographer’s dream (except for the tour groups).
Wooden walkways have been sensitively integrated into the natural surroundings and keep visitors from trampling the place into oblivion. It’s not a place where you get to do a ton of wandering off course, but the best bits are near the paths anyway.
This first shot is one of the first big waterfalls that you will see when you visit the upper lakes.
Solin Roman Amphitheatre Ruins
I don’t think I’ll ever cease to be blown away by 2000-year-old structures, ruined or otherwise. The ruins of the Roman city of Solin near Split Croatia don’t disappoint. Okay, so it’s not quite 2000 years old, but it doesn’t matter to me.
The fact that these structures are still here for us to admire centuries later is such a joy. This amphitheatre is one of the better sights and it inspires your imagination to wonder what it would have looked like in its heyday.
Click for a larger image:
Cobblestones of Trogir
The old town of Trogir, Croatia is a tiny island composed of narrow, winding, cobblestone alleys. The texture of this particular stretch of road caught my eye.
Dalmatian Islands at Sunset
From high above Dubrovnik, the view to the North West is a sea speckled with tiny islands that all beg for some exploration (and anyone with a boat in Dubrovnik’s harbour will be more than happy to help you in that endeavour).
Here’s a panorama of this group of Dalmation Islands looking their best in a sunset off the Croatian coast. Click for a larger view:
Franciscan Monastery in Dubrovnik
Is there anywhere more peaceful than the cloisters of a monastery? Well, yes, if the monastery happens to be heavily touristed, but fortunately, one can find little silent breaks between groups of cruise ship passengers to relax and enjoy the quiet space.
And every once in a while, as in this shot of the Franciscan Monastery in Dubrovnik, you get to share the space with some of its religious residents:
Dubrovnik Harbour Night Panorama
I seem to be moving ever closer to Dubrovnik’s picturesque harbour with the last few entries. This is as close as I can get without getting wet.
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Dubrovnik Harbour Panorama
As with the previous post, this shot is from the Old Town walls in Dubrovnik. We’re now at the opposite end of the city where the walls lead out to the harbour and islands beyond.
Believe it or not, this is actually a somewhat cloudy day for this portion of the Dalmatian Coast. If we had that here in sunny Manchester, I think everyone would be pretty pleased.
Click for a larger view:
Dubrovnik’s Stradun
A bout of bronchitis a few weeks ago seems to have knocked me out of the habit of posting here, so let’s see if we can get back into it…
My last post showed Dubrovnik’s old town from above and this photo carries on with that theme, but now we’re a little bit closer. This shot was taken from the city walls surrounding the old town. They make for a great walk and getting up there as soon as the gates open is worthwhile. The walls are quieter and so are the streets below.
Stonehenge at Sunset
On the way back from Cornwall, Stonehenge was too enticing a detour to pass up. A night in a little roadside motel about a mile away from the ancient rocks allowed for easy access at sunset and a quick trip up the road to be first in line for the morning opening.
I’ve met some people that dismiss Stonehenge’s value as a destination, but I couldn’t help but be impressed. Seeing so many photos of a place can rob it of its majesty or diminish a visitor’s sense of wonder upon seeing the real deal, but that didn’t seem to happen to me. I mean, these are some huge rocks! I’m not sure how you couldn’t be sucked in by this ancient wonder.
The brilliant sky behind the silhouetted stones was shot was taken from across the field outside the fence with a long lens. As seems to be a trend with me lately, this is a composite of a few shots – just a vertical panorama in this case. I could have done this in one shot, (and I think I probably did on other frames), but this one comes out at a higher resolution than I would have gotten otherwise, so if anyone wants to buy a Stonehenge-sized print of this one, it should turn out nicely!
St. Michael’s Mount Panorama
This will be the third Photo of the Day in a row that goes to St. Michael’s Mount and that’s just because the place is so cool!
It’s a castle on an island, just off the coast and it’s the stuff of fantasy novels. ‘Nuff said.
This shot was a bit more difficult to put together than most panoramas. I wanted to try to capture the bright sunset that was occurring in the right-hand side of the shot while getting the blue of the ever-darkening evening that was happening on the left.
The range of stops in the whole scene was too wide for one exposure, so I did a bracket of five shots for each component shot of the panorama in order to be able to catch all the lights and darks and worried about how to put it together later.
When it came time to put everything together, I had all the component parts I wanted, but I really wasn’t sure what was going to be the best way to assemble it. I tried using the stitching software to put the HDR side of things together while simultaneously stitching together the panorama. Nope, it would have been far too easy for it to work in one, nicely-automated process. I’ve used that technique with a small degree of success in the past, but it was with a slightly more static scene inside a church. No moving water, shifting clouds or changing light to deal with.
On the next attempt, I tried to put together individual HDR shots and then stitch them together. That didn’t work because the lighting and colouring of the HDR shots came out too differently from one another for them to seamlessly blend. This occurred despite using all the same settings for every shot in the HDR processing. When processing HDR shots, I usually take a more manual, hands-on approach to avoid it all turning into a glowing surrealistic mess, but I didn’t think that was feasible with a panorama. There would have been too many differences between each image again.
So, the next step I took was to process five different panoramas, one for each exposure bracket, then see if I could layer them together. This was what ended up producing the final shot, but it came with its own big challenge.
I only ended up using two of the exposures in the end. It was enough to catch the full range and it minimized my work a bit because the problem with using this technique is that the stitching software stitched each panorama differently. When stacked on top of each other, the differences were a bit more than slight. Good thing we have the handy dandy align-layers feature in Photoshop to help us through!
But that only got us part of the way down the road. After all that, I was still left with a tedious bit for retouching when it came to finishing off the alignment and blending of the two images. With a bit of patience, it was eventually finished off for a decent result.
Click the image for a larger view:
St. Michael’s Mount Causeway
Today we have another shot of St. Michael’s Mount, this time from the causeway leading to the island soon after the tide had receded enough to allow for foot traffic.
We we took the boat over to the mount in the morning, there was only the faintest hint of the causeway below the choppy surface waters, but only a few hours later and we were walking back a few metres below where we formerly floated.
As soon as the causeway’s cobbles were exposed to the sun, a steady stream of people slipped, stumbled and stepped lightly from shore to shore so you can imagine that this shot took a bit of patience (both pre- and post-processing) to get to its present state. It only proved possible thanks to the tourist removal trick.
I combined that trick with shooting a panorama of the scene to get a wider view than my equipped lens would allow. I aimed to catch the sweep of the causeway as it approached the island and I think I succeeded there.
Click the image for a larger view:
St. Michael’s Mount – Photo of the Day
Today’s photo is another from Cornwall, this time, the magical St. Michael’s Mount.
Only accessible vie boat or by the causeway when the tide is low, this beautiful National Trust Property off the south coast of Cornwall hosts a castle, a small port and a few shops and cafés that serve the location’s many visitors.
The island is accessed from the small town of Marazion, but this sunset/dusk shot comes from further East along the coast. I chose to move away from the relatively featureless coastline near Marazion to be able to get some foreground interest and these rocks fit the bill perfectly.
I did a 30-second exposure to flatten out the ocean right when the sky and the lights of the distant towns are balanced. Mother nature took care of the rest with a gorgeous sky.
Photo of the Day: Golitha Falls
Today’s image is another from Cornwall, specifically, a perfect spot called Golitha Falls.
As tranquil as could be, this perfect forest full of gnarled, moss-covered trees at the edge of Bodmin Moor is home to a babbling stretch of the river Fowey. It’s a short walk, but every view along the way is picture perfect.
This shot, though it may not look it, is actually a panoramic stitch of about 15 images. I actually expected it to come out more horizontal than vertical, but this crop worked best of all. The scene really did sweep around me, but the resulting panorama doesn’t necessarily capture that. That’s not to say I’m unhappy with the shot. Far from it!
To get it, I did have to perch somewhat precariously on the edge of a rock, but the risk proved worthwhile.
Overcast days are good for shots like these. With less light on the scene, it’s easier to get a longer shutter speed to blur the motion of the water and you also avoid any nasty hot spots on the ground.
Photo of the Day: Godrevy Lighthouse
I’ve been back from Cornwall for a few days now, but unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to go through my photos. A few people have been prodding me to see some images, so I’ve picked one out that should satisfy folks for a little while at least.
This lighthouse sits off the edge of Godrevy Point in Cornwall. Nearby beaches are surfer friendly and local, wannabe stuntmen find high rock outcrops at high tide and launch themselves into the ocean. That’s all a bit more cheery than the photo below. I was going for a bit of a dark, Shutter Island feel with this image and I think the blue of dusk combined with the ominous clouds manage to give the jagged rocks and distant lighthouse the right mood.
POTD: Desert Sand
The dunes within the dunes of Zagora are here lit with a flashlight in the dead of night. The fascinating textures ripple across the larger dunes to form miniature landscapes.
POTD: Marrakech Souks
Light beams filter through slats to illuminate the smoky air of the Marrakech Souks where you can buy everything under the Moroccan sun. The smoke from grills cooking succulent meats mingle with the exhausts of motorbikes speeding through alleys far too narrow for vehicular traffic to create a hazy aura in the market.
POTD: Football in Fez
If the city of Fez originated in a design, it was designed to confuse. Each road shoots off into another narrower alley that branches into ever more constricting passages to eventually lead a new visitor into a state of bewilderment.
Couple that with the general pummeling your senses take at the hands of the masses of people and their wares and the city takes on the character of a dream.
In a city like this, open spaces are a rarity. For kids that want to have a game of soccer, there aren’t a lot of wide areas where a game can take place. So, they make do and you get a scene like today’s photo where kids kick around a ball in while being closely hemmed in by the walls of one of the medina’s wider avenues.
POTD: Chefchaouen Women
As with this recent shot, today’s photo of the day comes from Chefchaouen, Morocco.
Chasing the light through the narrow, blue alleys was good fun and sometimes resulted in nice backlit shots like this that give a nice rim light to the people. I love both the weathered walls and weathered, character filled faces.
POTD: Koubbat as-Sufara Crypt
This shot is from an enormous crypt located below the Koubbat as-Sufara in Meknes. Though it might look like a dungeon, it was actually used for grain storage.
This is another of the images lit with multiple speedlite bursts in multiple shots. Using the lights in this way ended up giving a lot more depth and texture to the shot than I might have gotten otherwise.
POTD: Volubilis Ruins
This is the last of my little experiments at Volubilis of lighting the ruins with a number of bursts from a speedlite.
This one was taken during an overcast day which allowed me to stop down and overpower the ambient light with my flash. Again, a moody, atmospheric image is the result.
I took a number of other images at the ruins, but no more of this type. I do, however, have another of these multiple-flash composite shots for tomorrow from another location.
POTD: Volubilis at Sunset
As with yesterday’s photo of the day, today’s was taken at the Roman ruins Volubilis, Morocco using the technique of lighting various areas with a speedlite and then compositing them together in Photoshop.
This one turned out even more surreal than the last. It’s difficult to visualize what whole will look like when you can only see a part at a time, so half the fun of creating a shot like this is seeing it come together.
POTD: Volubilis Roman Ruins
It would have been easy to let a magical sunset do all the lighting work at the Roman ruins of Volubilis in Morocco. The light was as perfect as could ask for, but I felt like I wanted to do something a bit more.
So, in addition to the light of the sunset, I decided to light the ruins myself. I ran around with a speedlite popping of flashes and after assembling about 20 or 30 shots in Photoshop, we have a slightly surreal view of the place that couldn’t have been seen otherwise.
I’m actually quite pleased with this little light-painting experiment. The scene takes on a dramatic, strange feel that wouldn’t have been there had I not run around like a crazy person in the few minutes that the light was perfect.
POTD: Ait Benhaddou Star Trails
Perfectly-preserved Ait Benhaddou and its lack of electricity made an ideal location to try out a half-hour exposure to capture some star trails.
The Moroccan village keeps its UNESCO world heritage status by maintaining a way of life similar to what was present hundreds of years ago when the group of forts was built. That means no electricity lights up the buildings at night. There are a couple of lights visible in this image, but one is either a lamp or a candle and I think one is a flashlight. At a half hour exposure, they look like someone snuck a generator inside the complex.
This shot points directly North, so the stars appear to revolve around Polaris to create a nice swirling effect in the sky.
POTD: Medersa Bou Inania
It took me a little while to warm up to Meknes. It wasn’t immediately apparent to me what it had going for it that might be different from the other cities I had already visited.
Eventually, it revealed its charms and one of those was the Medersa Bou Inania where intricate stone carvings hosted a gorgeous dance of sunbeams one fine morning.
Darby Sawchuk is a Canadian-born photographer who currently resides in Manchester, England. He has travelled to over 40 countries and is always adding more to the list. He creates stock for multiple agencies and is available for assignments.
+44 0790 992 8932
