New Zealand: My Journey Back to Paradise (2) – Aoraki / Mount Cook

Aoraki/Mount Cook is the highest mountain in New Zealand and Australia combined, reaching 3,754 metres. Probably it is also the most famous landmark of New Zealand, a place for so many photographers and artists to produce great works.

I went to Mount Cook in 2011 and made one of my best images there. Personally I will never be tied of going to this wonderful place and taking photographs. Mount Cook was identified as one major focus and also the second location in our this journey. Our plan was to stay three nights in Mount Cook, so that we would have sufficient opportunities to explore the area and take both sunrise and sunset photographs.

We left Queenstown in the morning of 28 August 2012, and would expect to arrive Mount Cook around lunch time. Nevertheless, this day turned to be the longest day for our entire trip. We made a careless mistake and drove all the way down to West Coast. By the time we found out, we had to drove another six hours to get back to Mount Cook. Fortunately, things were not too bad, in fact with some extra time, we enjoyed the wonderful scenery along the road so much. We arrived in Mount Cook after 6pm, and directly headed to Tasman River for night photography.

Crystal Giants

This photo was taken on the first night we spent in Mount Cook, it showed a special night in Tasman River, Mount Cook: these icebergs floated on the river surface while the moonlight shedding on them illuminated such beautiful color.

Hooker Lake

To make photographs in Mount Cook, it is hardly not to go to Hooker Lake, which probably is the closest ground location to view the peak of Mount Cook without doing a serious mountain climbing, though hiking three hours for this trip may not be an easy task for everyone. The lake looks not very big, but its one side ends with giant glaciers directly connecting to Mount Cook. On a clear and calm day, the reflection of Mount Cook in the lake provides an interesting highlight of this scenery.

We three photographers went to Hooker Lake on 29 August 2012. The sunset light was pretty flat with a cloudless sky. We were a bit disappointment for such a result after spending more than five hours on this trip. The next day, without knowing what the weather would be in late afternoon, I and another photographer decided to try our luck one more time. On 30 August 2012, after lunch time we hiked 90 minutes to arrive in Hooker Lake again, and patiently waited for our last chance. Finally, we witnessed that the peak of Mount Cook was lighten by the setting sun while beautiful clouds were moving across the sky. This photo recorded what we got on that day.

 

New Zealand: My Journey Back to Paradise (1) – Kawarau River

New Zealand has been my dream land for many years. Since I had my first photography experience in New Zealand in 2011 (see my blog “Making the Image “Moonlight”), I have planned to return to New Zealand at least once a year to fulfill my photography dreams. In August 2012, after a long time preparation, I finally returned to this beautiful land with several other photographers.

Our first stop was Queenstown – a town in Otago in the South Island of New Zealand. Although this was my second time to this small town and we mainly traveled along the previous paths that I had in 2011, there were still plenty of new and exciting photography experiences during our four days stay in Queenstown, and one such experience was shooting at Kawarau River.

Kawarau River is well known as the site of the world’s first commercial bungy jump. The river starts from Lake Wakatipu, and flows generally eastwards for about 60 km until it reaches Lake Dunstan near Cromwell. We stayed in a hotel just at the west end of Kawarau River connecting to Lake Wakatipu. One our team member found a position on a cliff above the river that provided a nice viewpoint of the river with the snowing mountains background. The scene was just magnificent!

I had two chances to make photographs at this location, both in early morning. For the first time, the sunrise light was wonderful, but its direction was not quite right and I did not want to comprise the composition. On the day we were leaving Queenstown, I decided to take the last chance. I went up before 5am, and came to this place in the darkness. It was surprising that the Milky Way was still clearly hung on the sky and the twilight was about to illuminate the surroundings, while two strips of red clouds were just across in the sky. This was my first to witness such a wonderful Milky Way when the sky started to change its colors.

Karawau River

I took a number of shots with ISO 1600 to focus on the sky that captured such beautiful Milky Way and clouds. But the foreground river and the right side mountains were completely under exposed. As I did want to have the river as the foreground in my final image, I had to wait until the sky was bright enough so that I could make proper shoots to capture the river and mountain details. Furthermore, the composition had to also be changed by lowering my camera body down slightly so that the frame contained all interesting elements around the river.

The post process was not too difficult. The final image was from combining three shots together – each with different exposure times: one focusing on the Milky Way (ISO 1600), one focusing on the right side mountains details, and one focusing on the river. The last two shots had the same composition containing a small portion of the sky. The blend was made in two steps. Firstly, the last two shots were blended together to reveal sufficient details of the mountains as well as river. Then this blended image was stitched with the first shot so that a square frame was finally produced to contain both sufficient sky and foreground.

As a final note, this image probably not only shows a very unique viewpoint of Kawarau River, but also presents a very special moment at this place.

 

Li River Sunrise

For many years, Li River has been viewed as an iconic symbol of oriental beauty. It is one of those a few places of China that is so popular by attracting lots of tourists every year but still remains its natural purity.

 

Li River Sunrise

This photo was taken in Xingping County along Li River on 11 October 2011. The local photographer said that it was not an ideal time to make pictures of Li River from October to April of the next year because an overcast weather over Li River was very common during this period. But there was an exception this time. I was told that it had been continuously raining for an entire week but just stopped on that day when I arrived in Xingping. Then I knew I probably would be lucky enough to witness some beautiful sunrise and sunset moments during my this trip. Indeed, on the third day, I encountered a spectacular sunrise over the beautiful Li River.

The image was taken with my Canon 5D Mark II camera and 16-35mm f/2.8L II lens. I used tripod Gitzo GT2531EX CF6X Explorer 2 (BH-55 Ballhead) to support the camera and lens, and a RC-1 canon remote release to trigger the shutter.

To balance the light between the sky and foreground (river), a Lee .6 GND soft filter and a Lee .3 GND hard were used. I found that this filter combination provided the best effect without causing any visible grey line between the water and mountains.

This image was also a result from blending three successive shots within 15 minutes. When the sky was getting to dance, I made a shot with aperture f/22, focal length 29mm, ISO 50 and shutter speed 20 seconds. This long exposure made the river have a peaceful and tranquil feeling, where the cloud reflection was also showed in the water. Soon after this shot, I found the clouds became even more dramatic, so I made the second shot focusing on the sky with aperture f/10, focal length 29mm, ISO 100 and shutter speed 1.3 second. Then a few minutes later, something interesting happened: a fisherman suddenly rowed into my frame – this was completely out of my expectation! I quickly made the third shot: aperture f/8.0, focal length 29mm, ISO 100 and shutter speed 1/13 second.

The first two shots were well planned, but the third shot was by chance, which eventually played the most significant role to produce the final image.

I opened three images raw files in Camera Raw 6.3, made a small adjustment for each of these files by just filling a bit light for the first two images increasing both clarity and vibrance to 12. Then I loaded them into Photoshop CS5.

In Photoshop CS5, I first blended the first two images together: the intermediate resulting image combined the first image’s water reflection (lower part) and the rest parts of the second image. Then I further blended this intermediate resulting image with the third image by carefully painting the fisherman and the associated water reflection into the earlier combined image. In this step, localizing the fisherman and his reflection was critical. Paint opacity should be not more than 5%, and gradually painting was carried on until the fisherman (reflection) smoothly appearing and merged with the rest part of the image.

After three images were carefully merged, a standard Photoshop processing was carried out. As an additional yet important stage, I further applied Tony Kuper’s mask luminosity technique to select “Expended Mid-tones Pixels” in Channels, and then select Curve to create a Curve layer. By adjusting this curve I could further enhance the contrast on expended mid-tones pixels, which made the overall image pop out nicely.

I was satisfied with the final image after processing. I think blending three images together was an important step to make an image illustrating such a beautiful scene of Li River that I have had in my mind for a long time.

On that day early morning, I traveled by a small boat for one hour to get to this location when the sky was still very dark, so I had plenty of time to set up my tripod and considered various compositions. From the dawn to sunrise, the light changed dramatically, and also local people started to work on their boats in the river. Under this situation, the first shot was critical to capture the stillness of the water when no one was there. To me, the impressive sky and its reflection in the water were the primary feature I wanted to capture, while the unexpected fisherman captured in the third shot just added an exceptional highlight to this image.

Overall, I believe that the following three things are important to make a good landscape photograph:

- Persistence. If you find a wonderful place to photograph, you probably have to visit there many times. In the last five years, I visited Xingping four times, and went to this specific location seven times. Only this last time I got the wonderful light. Visiting Li River also meant that I have to travel far enough each time (from Australia to China).

- Patience. In that morning, I thought I already made the best photos after the first two shots, while two photographers nearby started to move to another location. Luckily, I stood there a bit longer without moving my tripod, so that I could capture the third image with the fisherman coming to the right spot with the same composition.

- Always try different compositions if you have time. I believe that this is quite critical to achieve the best outcome. In that morning, after I made these three shots, I also took several landscape-oriented shots. It appeared to me that both compositions were equally impressive.

Visit Yan Zhang Photography for more images.

 

Shooting in Square

A professional photographer once told me that he saw the world in square: he used his medium DSLR camera to produce his square-framed photography works; and even if he used a 35mm full frame DSLR in shooting fields occasionally, he had to compose the scene in square in his mind. At that time, I didn’t really understand why the experienced photographer dedicated to such square ratio photographs. Since late 2011, I started to spend more time on making seascape photographs, and gradually realized that the traditional 2:3 ratio for a 35mm full frame DSLR camera indeed had some limitations from time to time.

Waking Up

One obvious problem with 2:3 ratio full frame DSLR camera is that it is just not sufficient to capture a big scene that you are interested. It is just like that you want to make a panorama photograph representing a wide landscape scenery, by cropping a single shot to a panorama ratio does not work at all. Another technical issue is the restriction of such 2:3 ratio. If there are both foreground and background elements that we want to stress in one frame, then quite often we probably need the same part or almost the same part of the space to represent them. A more complicated case is that there are foreground, middle ground and background that we want to give certain focuses on each of these parts. A situation like this often appears when we make mountainous pictures. In my view, a large square frame is a more rational option to handle these shooting circumstances.

The above photograph Waking Up is an example that I use this approach for seascape photography. This image was made through several successive shots in Sydney east coast in an early morning. Firstly, I focused on the foreground rock surface. It was a low tide period, waves were just washing on the rock bed surface that caused interesting wave traces. I took more than 50 shots in order to capture those interesting wave traces. When the sky started to change, I carefully tilted my camera up so that the frame covered about half sky and half water. By using a 3 f-stop ND, I was able to shoot using a relatively slower shutter speed, because I wanted the water far away to be smooth. Finally, I tilted my camera further towards the sky, with a proper shutter speed to shoot the dramatically changing clouds. The finally image was a result by stitching and blending these three shots together in Photoshop CS5. By the way, I prefer to do photo stitch manually, instead of using Photoshop photo merge function, as this gives me more flexibilities to make the final image.

Visit my photography homepage for more images.

 

Ocean Spectrum

2011 has been a very special year for my photography journey since I started landscape photography in 2007: I was first time being exposed to the beautiful New Zealand landscape, by attending Kah Kit Yoong’s 2011 New Zealand Photography Expedition; I visited the wonderful Li River at the fourth time in late 2011; and more interestingly, I have more landscape photograhy works been purchased by people from Australia and overseas.

I often said that doing landscape photography is more like doing scientific research in some sense, and these two have a lot in common. For instance, I think the simplest thing is usually the best yet hardest thing. This is true in both art and science. Simplicity is always an important goal in my photography. But it is also very difficult to achieve this goal. From December 2011, I started my new project which I named Ocean Spectrum. I try to shoot seascapes around Sydney area from a different perspective where purity and simplicity are the key criteria I want to meet.

This Moon Rise was taken in a clear night in South Coogee coast in early January 2012. My original idea was to take a starry sky over this small ocean pool. But when I arrived the place, just realised that it was a full moon time. It was a great experience to witness a golden moon rising from the horizon. Composition for this shot was challenging. I had to set up my tripod into the pool to achieve a lowest viewpoint – so that the pool edge merged with the horizontal line.

Moon Rise

A New Day was taken in an early morning in Maroubra coast. I went out at 3.30am when it was still raining. I just wanted to try my luck – if it kept raining till sunsrise, I would waste this trip, otherwise, the morning light would be possibly interesting. The rain stopped before the first light occurred from horizon. In 20 minutes, the light was just beautiful. This image was blended from two successive shots, one with a fast shutter speed and one with 4 minutes exposure time while a 10 stop ND filter was used.

A New Day

The following picture Alone was made in a saturday afternoon two weeks ago in Maroubra beach. It was a half sunny and half cloudy day. The beach was quite flat and I could not find anything interesting. Around 6pm, the sky started to change and an idea quickly came to my mind. Eventually, this image was a result from three successive shots: one with exposure time 0.6 second to capture the smooth wave line across the beach bed, one with exposure time 1/320 second to capture the man – that was myself, and the last one with 128 seconds long exposure to reflect the dramatic sky. The color version of this image was quite nice, but I found that turning it into black and white was much more powerful.

Alone

This image was taken in central coast of NSW – The Entrance. I have been to the Entrance countless times, because it has beautiful coast lines, beaches, a famous light house, and a big lake Tuggerah Lake. All these indicate that this place has infinite photography opportunities. However, getting a stunning shot in this location is totally another story…

The Entrance

I started my first blog in 2012 with Ocean Spectrum, I wish my photography journey will move further in 2012.

Visit my photography homepage for more images.

 

 

Enjoying Sydney Winter

Winter is my favorite photography season in Sydney because this season has the longest period of soft light in a day that makes many landscape scenes here so beautiful. From June to August 2011, I have not been to any places outside Sydney for specific photography purpose. Instead, I quite enjoy to explore some old locations in Sydney and take photos of them. I believe people living in Sydney are very lucky – it has so many beautiful beaches and bays on the east and north sides, as well as the famous Blue Mountains on the west side.

Vivid Sydney

2011 is the 3rd year of the annual Vivid Sydney event. On 13 June 2011, the last day of 2011 Vivid Sydney, we family went to Circular Quay. The above photo was taken in the rain which showed the beautiful Sydney Opera House under such amazing lighting.

From June 2011, I started to take photos on this tree in my campus again. My photography journey has come along with this graceful willow tree. Since 2007, each winter after all leaves fall down, this tree reveals its beautiful shape and becomes an ideal photographic subject. This year, I have come to this location more than 30 times, mornings, afternoons and nights. I probably have captured the more different scenes of this tree this year than previous years. The following picture is one of my favorite pictures I took this year. It was taken in a night where the starry sky was most spectacular.

The Touch

Sydney’s seascape is unique and magnificent. Since 2009, Sydney’s east and north coastlines have become my regular photography sites. The following photo was taken in an early morning of a weekend in August. Interestingly, I took this picture in a heavy rain while I had to use a small umbrella to protect my camera and lens. The filter in front of the lens was constantly wet because of the rain. It took me quite a while to make successful two or three shots without rain drops on the filter. The low and dark clouds at that moment were very impressive.

Under the Storm

The following image was made on 5 August (Friday) afternoon in Maroubra. I was expecting a dramatic sky there as the weather broadcast said it would be a possible shower. But the sky was quite clear when I arrived the location. Obviously, the original composition in my mind would not work under such weather condition. By searching new compositions, I found this location was interesting and only became a potential photographic site for such a very low tide duration. I decided to make an image on this scene and wanted to include the starry sky into the frame. Eventually, it was a long time (about 1.5 hours) to stand in this site – after I made shots on the foreground swirls, I had to wait enough long when stars appeared in the clear sky. During this interval, my camera and myself were soaked couple of times by incoming waves. Fortunately, my gitzo tripod was sufficiently stable and I finally took a good shot for the stars with exactly the same composition. That means, this image was a a result from shots at different times.

Ocean Symphony

Blue Mountains is one of the major attractions of Sydney, as I have described in my previous blog. From a photography viewpoint, on the other hand, I believe there are infinite opportunities to make great images about Blue Mountains, even for those iconic spots, such as Echo Point as the following photo shows.
During this winter, I have been searching for some new scenes in Blue Mountains including several waterfalls for photography. Almost every weekend, I packed my camera gears and took several hours walk along various trails in Blue Mountains. However, the following image with a classical composition is my favorite, because it presents certain interesting features about the light and sky at this traditional location.

Echo Point

 

Making the Image “Moonlight”

Since I came back from our New Nealand Photography Expedition (22 April – 10 May 2011), I have been so busy with my university work. But the idea of writing something about this great expedition has not been faded away. I will slowly start to refresh my memory about this photography experience.

Over many of my New Nealand photographs that I have been processed, the image “Moonlight” was one of my favorites. I clearly remembered it was the early morning of the day we were about to leave Mt Cook and it was the second time we came to Tasman River. The location itself had full of interesting subjects: rocks, icebergs, snowing mountains, rivers, etc.. However, to make a harmony and interesting image of them was quite challenging. My first day of photographing this place was not successful. This morning, when we arrived there about 6.40am, the moon was still hung on the sky, while the sunrise was about to start shortly. Comparing to the morning one day earlier, this time I was very impressed with the moon reflection in the flowing water of the river. I decided to include this “moon” into my frame and at the same time to also capture the moon in the sky. To make the moon reflection more visible, I set up my tripod into the water in order to get the closest viewpoint. One big challenge for this shot was the light difference between the foreground and the sky. I used my Singh Ray 3 f-stop reverse GND plus a 2 f-stop GND (soft). With a relative long exposure time, I captured the scene that was very closed to what I saw in the field.

The post processing was a bit tedious. While 2 GND filters had made the foreground rocks quite visible, the two sides of mountain backgrounds were still very dark. In Photoshop CS5, I used TK luminosity technique to isolate the two side mountains under “Super Darks”, and lifted the curve to make them brighter. Then through a layer paint, I kept the surrounding areas not been affected by such luminosity adjustment. The final result is showed below, and I am quite satisfied with it. “Moonlight” was recently published in 1x.com.

The shooting data as follows: Shutter speed: 30 seconds, ISO: 400, Aperture: f/5.6, Filters: Singh Ray 3 f-stop reverse GND, 2 f-stop GND (soft).

Moonlight