Photography Travelogues: Imperial Shag

March 8, 2012 by 2 Comments


Bleaker Island, Falklands

It was a bleak morning on Bleaker Island in the Falklands. However, if you like photographing birds, then the Falklands is a great location no matter what the weather is like, although transport from island to island isn’t without its challenges. Although there are small airfields dotted around, most people visit as part of an expedition ship and I was no exception, travelling with Peregrine Adventures.

Where we landed on Bleaker Island was home to two colonies of birds, Rockhopper Penguins and the Imperial Shag. The weather was cold, overcast and very windy. We even had a couple of snow showers pass over which was great for atmosphere, but not particularly helpful for photography.


As usual, there were strict rules as to how close we could get to the birds and our group was strung out along a fence line. It was hard to know what the island was like in fairer weather, but I have no doubt it would be very picturesque!

At the end of the fence was a colony of shags who used a stretch of land just in front of us as a runway. The birds would gather speed and throw themselves into the wind and out to sea. It was a perfect location for shooting the Imperial Shag on the wing, but I confess to shooting several hundred frames of which only a couple were satisfactory.

And then, of course, there was the unsatisfactory nature of the light. It was dull and lifeless, so I figured this was a time I could use Capture One to breathe in some colour and excitement!

The first adjustments made in Capture One were to crop the image so the bird was positioned in the centre of  the frame, rather than on the left side. I’d actually prefer there to be a little more room on the left than I have – and that could be easily arranged later in Photoshop. I also adjusted the exposure and contrast to produce as much detail in the shag as possible, being mindful that its white and dark feathers had to be carefully managed.

In this way, the Imperial Shag is natural and honest. This is what I saw. Now, I may get into trouble with the purists for the next few steps!


My first Local Adjustment layer darkens down the sky, with a soft edge brush just above the bird.


I then repeated this with a second Local Adjustment layer, but I positioned the adjustment brush a little higher. I find two or more small adjustments usually produce a better result than one larger adjustment.


Then I added my third Local Adjustment layer and lightened the eye and surrounding feathers. From other photographs I have seen of the Imperial Shag, I think these colours are reasonably realistic – I haven’t added in any colour saturation, just increased the contrast and exposure appropriately.


The fourth Local Adjustment Layer darkens down the top and right hand edges a little more to contain the eye – some people will like this vignetting, others will not. I like it! And at this stage, I stopped, because I figured I couldn’t get into too much trouble for the adjustments I had made. However, the image still lacks a little punch…


So I couldn’t help myself! The final Local Adjustment layer reduces the background exposure and increases the colour saturation, which brings up the colour in the blurred grasses in the background and further darkens the sky. I have masked the shag so that its colours and exposure are not affected and I’m quite happy with the result!

If you’d like to see in more detail how I worked on this file, you can access a short video on the Better Photography website by clicking here.

Peter Eastway is a professional photographer and photography magazine publisher based in Sydney, Australia. To see more of his photography, visit http://www.petereastway.com/. Peter also offers an online Landscape Photography MasterClass. Details can be found at http://www.betterphotography.com/.

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Photography Travelogues: Gentoo Penguin

March 1, 2012 by 3 Comments

Carcass Island, Falklands

Carcass Island in the Falklands is owned by Rob McGill. It’s tiny and, if you can get there, accommodation is in the owner’s house and meals are taken with the family. This isn’t at all surprising as there are no streets, shops or other amenities – and that is undoubtedly the attraction.

We disembarked at Carcass Island as part of our Peregrine Expedition through the Falklands, South Georgia Island and Antarctica. It was only a whistle-stop in the afternoon with just enough time to walk across the isthmus to the windward side. Here we saw Magellanic penguins, but it wasn’t until I returned to the beach on the lee of the island that I met lots of Gentoo penguins.

Walking along the beach, we looked down at the penguins who barely acknowledged our presence. One of the highlights of visiting these remote locations is that the wildlife are relatively unafraid of humans. However, a human perspective creates a relatively boring camera angle. One of the best angles for a penguin is around penguin height, so I lay down on my stomach and put my camera to my eye.

The issue on this day was the wind-blown sand which added to the atmosphere in the photographs, but worried me a little as I had several weeks left and I didn’t want to lose a camera due to mechanical failure! However, I needn’t have worried as the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III and 300mm f2.8 telephoto had sufficient weather-proofing to handle the little breeze on Carcass Island!

As always, time is short. You are always balancing your opportunities: do I stay here longer and hope to get an even better photograph, or do I move on and hope to discover something else?

Back on board the Akademik Sergey Vavilov, I would look through my files for an image with a difference. Everyone had great photographs of penguins (although using a telephoto with the lens wide-open at f2.8 helped to create a slightly different look to a compact camera), so I was relying on my subjects to provide the sparkle!

I’m not sure how you view and edit your photographs, but I really like to start with a file that is precisely focused. It annoys me when my focus is slightly out and although you can try to salvage it with unsharp masking techniques, nothing beats an image that is focused correctly in the first place.

However, enlarging each image in turn to see if it is sharp around the eyes takes time. It’s not slow if you have a fast computer, but it’s time consuming nevertheless. This is where Capture One Pro 6 really helps. Turning on its Focus Mask feature, Capture One colours areas of sharp focus with a green mask (you can change the colour of the mask to any colour you like). This allows you to instantly recognise if a photograph is sharp or not.

For instance, with the series of a Gentoo penguin making a call, I could tell instantly if my subject was in sharp focus or not.

Of course, if you have several great shots, it then becomes a matter of which one do you use? I felt I had two contenders – one with the Gentoo’s head back and beak open, a second with the head thrust forward but the beak closed. I’m still not sure which one is the best…

The original raw files were quite acceptable, but lacking a little in contrast and colour. Fixing them was very straightforward using Capture One. If you’d like to see how I worked on this file, you can access a short video on the Better Photography website here.

Peter Eastway is a professional photographer and photography magazine publisher based in Sydney, Australia. To see more of his photography, visit http://www.petereastway.com/. Peter also offers an online Landscape Photography MasterClass. Details can be found at http://www.betterphotography.com/.

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Photography Travelogues: Black-Browed Albatross

February 16, 2012 by 5 Comments

West Point Island, Falklands

I’m not an expert wildlife photographer, but I love photographing wildlife! And they say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I know enough to know I’m just a beginner when it comes to fauna and flora.

As with so many genres of photography, to be a true expert requires thousands of hours in the field and, for wildlife, a good understanding and knowledge of your subject is a great help. I know next to nothing about birds, least of all the majestic Black-Browed Albatross. Its huge wing span is deceptive and it isn’t until you’re up close to these birds that you realise just how large and impressive they really are.

The cliffs of West Point Island, Falkland Islands

As part of my Antarctica circuit with Peregrine Expeditions, we left Ushuaia in Argentina and sailed north east to the Falkland Islands. The Falklands is an amazing group of hundreds of tiny islets, many only a kilometre or so wide. Some are almost completely flat, others have towering cliffs, many are inhabited. One wonders what people do to survive as the nearest town (Stanley, the capital of the Falklands) can be easily a day away by boat!

And the weather is so changeable that you simply can’t predict it. During our few hours on West Point Island, we experienced rain, hail, snow and brilliant sunshine. It was wonderful!

Looking across the bay to the tiny farm on West Point Island

West Point Island has a generous harbour around which the four or so farm dwellings stand, but it is on the other side of the island where the Black-Browed Albatross has its colony. It’s possible to get remarkably close to the birds’ nests, but there are strict rules against approaching too closely.

One thing that’s certain on these expeditions is that you can never get intentionally lost. This is because most of the passengers are wearing bright red suits to keep out the elements. I guess the birds have become used to the strange crimson characters that walk carefully around the outskirts of their colony!

I found a spot on the edge of a cliff looking over the colony and the sea below. Every now and then an albatross would glide effortlessly past and so I set myself the task of tracking the birds with my camera and lens. I used a Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III with a 300mm f2.8 telephoto. The combination feels a little heavy towards the end of the day, but the results are spectacularly good.

What I enjoyed the most sitting on the cliff edge was the opportunity from time to time to look down on the albatross. So rarely am I above birds that I found myself intentionally waiting for one of the huge albatross to soar below. It’s not the perfect shot, but I like the way the broken water and cliff edges are slightly blurred. The only element within the frame that is tack sharp is the albatross – the 300mm f2.8 is very good wide-open and the 1/2500 second shutter speed (helped with the lens’s Image Stabilization) ensured there was no motion blur either.

The Film Strip mode in Capture One makes sorting your files very expedient.

Of course, not every photograph I took was a winner. In fact, my success ratio was particularly poor, which is why I like the Filmstrip Viewer in Capture One – it lets me slide through my photos and I press ‘3’ every time I think I have a good one. Once rated, I can have a closer look later on!

To show how I worked on this file in Capture One, I’ve made a little video which you can access here on the Better Photography website.

Peter Eastway is a professional photographer and photography magazine publisher based in Sydney, Australia. To see more of his photography, visit http://www.petereastway.com. Peter also offers an online Landscape Photography MasterClass. Details can be found at http://www.betterphotography.com.

Another angle of the amazing black-browed albatross

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Photography Travelogues – Papua New Guinea 3/3

January 12, 2012 by 2 Comments

Dragon Dancer, Watam Village, Papua New Guinea

There are two dozen men inside this elaborate costume, the head is a heavy and ornate dragon’s head. It shuffles and groans with a procession of minders on either side. They dance and sing as the dragon makes its bumpy way down a long grassy colonnade. When you look at the head closely, it is an incredibly detailed and sophisticated piece of work made of grasses, shells and feathers.

And it must be incredibly hot inside.

We arrived on the shore by zodiacs to a rapturous welcome – the whole village had turned up for our visit, including many honorary policemen in uniforms. However, these were just nominated members of the several clans who had made their way to Watam for the performance.

A policewoman was assigned to carry my camera backpack and another to carry my Elinchrom Ranger Quadra on the end of a boom arm. A few quick instructions and I was able to dart in and out as the dragon walked forward with my lighting assistant.

Not that I was darting too quickly. The temperature was well over 40 degrees Celsius, and the tropical humidity was enough to make your head spin. I can remember thinking this was one of the most intense shoots I had experienced, but the excitement of the dance was contagious and I quickly forgot about the heat.

There were two thoughts behind my approach. With the strong sunshine, shadows were going to be a problem, so using a flash through a softbox provided fill-in illumination. I wanted to see the wonderful detail and using flash certainly allows that.

The second thought was to get a sense of the dance associated with the costumes. Using an extreme wide-angle lens and shooting from down low, I tried to show what it was like to be among the dancers as they performed. And the way the wide-angle distorts the dancers on the edges of the frame I hope adds to the sense of movement.

As there were a lot of other people watching the performance, it was a matter of running in and taking a single shot, then backing out quickly. This worked fine as it allowed plenty of time for the flash to recycle, but as with many action subjects, there is a lot of hit and miss.

I find Capture One very useful for quickly editing my files. Using the star system, I view each image in the shoot and give photos that I think have some merit three stars. Then I sort the shoot by ‘Rating’, so all my three stars are now at the top. I then run through these images and promote the best ones to four stars, and maybe demote some of the three stars that aren’t quite so good now that I have edited the whole shoot.

One of my personal favourites is this photo with one of the young boys standing right in front of the camera, proudly wearing a European soccer jersey. It seems no matter how remote you think you are, there is always a connection to ‘civilisation’ if you look closely enough!

Peter Eastway is a professional photographer and photography magazine publisher based in Sydney, Australia. To see more of his photography, visit www.petereastway.com. Peter also offers an online Landscape Photography MasterClass. Details can be found at www.betterphotography.com.

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Photography Travelogues – Papua New Guinea 2/3

December 29, 2011 by 2 Comments

Tami Islands, Papua New Guinea

There aren’t many places in the world as remote as the Tami Islands. On a map, they aren’t that difficult to find and anyone with a ship or a yacht can get there, but in terms of interaction with the outside world, few people are lucky enough to visit a tropical island paradise like this. No hotels, no shops, no transport. Perfect!

There are just four small islands arranged around a central bay. I visited the Tami Islands with Orion Expeditions, a luxury ship that is based in Australia and travels the world. What’s great about Orion for a photographer is the access it gives you to remote locations. The ship and a number of small communities along the Papua New Guinean coast have a relationship where the locals dance for the ship’s passengers, and the passengers purchase carvings and artefacts that generate the income the locals need to send their children to school. It seems to work very well.

After watching a series of wonderful dance performances, we were free to wander around the small island and I headed down towards the beach. I love the ‘old’ canoes which still appear to be made the way they have been for hundreds of years (although I am sure the green paint on one of them is a more modern addition).

However, children being children, who also haven’t changed for hundreds of years, are incredibly curious and as soon as I pulled my camera out, I had both an audience and attentive subjects. In fact, it was hard to take a photograph with just one subject in the frame and if it did happen, I had to work quickly.

What I love about this portrait is the ‘old man’s pose’ adopted by the young boy. Using a walking stick he doesn’t need, he simply sat down as you see him.

An 80mm lens with the aperture wide open at f2.8 is like using a 50mm lens at f1.4 on a full-frame DSLR camera. It throws the background out of focus so that the lines of the canoes on the beach don’t compete too strongly with the subject. I also like the line of the overhanging tree in the background as this is one of the features I really like about the Tami Islands.

Photographically, this is quite a contrasty lighting situation. One of the disadvantages of expedition cruising is you are rarely on shore for first light or even last light, so you use what you can. To deal with the strong sunlight, in Capture One I set the Curve under Base Characteristics to Film Extra Shadow. This provides a softer starting point for my adjustments, which essentially means I have detail in the shadow areas which I can retain or remove later on as required.

The original doesn’t have perfect light, but my subject is top lit from behind and the potential is there if I can lighten the subject relative to his background. For the background layer, I darkened the exposure to ensure the sky was correctly exposed, then I added in three local adjustments. The first lightened up all of the foreground up to the horizon line, the second lightened up the boy’s face, and a final local adjustment darkened the sand back down a little.

Peter Eastway is a professional photographer and photography magazine publisher based in Sydney, Australia. To see more of his photography, visit www.petereastway.com. Peter also offers an online Landscape Photography MasterClass. Details can be found at www.betterphotography.com.

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Photography Travelogues – Papua New Guinea 1/3

December 19, 2011 by 6 Comments

Young Tufi Warrior, Papua New Guinea

While we might smile at a youngster in warrior garb, a few minutes earlier his spear-wielding father appeared a lot more serious as he marched intently towards us, screaming and yelling at the top of his lungs! And as much as I’d like to tell you how we travelled for eight days along an inhospitable Papua New Guinean coast, in sweltering heat and dripping humidity, and then paddled the last two kilometres up a narrow, twisting creek under a dark jungle canopy in a local dugout, I wouldn’t be telling you the full story.

And perhaps I shouldn’t.

This image was made on a second trip to a private location where the Tufi clan hunts and harvests. In the dugout I carried my camera equipment in a backpack, a tripod in my left hand and a small Elinchrom Ranger Quadra lighting kit in the right. In front of and behind me, two of the Tufi clan were paddling quietly and purposely, the low wooden craft cutting through the shallow waters at a surprising speed.

I had asked permission to take the young Tufi warrior’s portrait on the previous trip and had already sketched out where I wanted to shoot. There was around 15 minutes to set up the lights, reassure my subject and take the photograph. Fortunately, for many of the local men and women watching me, attaching a soft box to a long support pole made me just as much a novelty to them as they were to me.

My choice of camera was perhaps unusual for a portrait: a 23mm Rodenstock Digaron on an Alpa TC with a Phase One P65+ behind. However, to me it made sense as the location was just as important as the subject, and if I left the subject in the middle of the frame, there would be very little distortion to worry about.

The exposure was 1/125 second at f8, ISO 50. I took a number of shots, many allowing the young warrior to rush at me and hurl his spear, but this is the photo I had in mind. The other exposures simply allowed me to interact with my subject so I could get what I wanted.

The straight exposure has detail in the background and the controlled light of the softbox can be clearly seen on the subject. However, the intention was always to have a very dark, moody background. Some of the fine detail may be lost on the internet, but it is certainly there in the print.

To achieve this using Capture One, I darkened down the base exposure. While this isn’t a good starting point for an exposure, when working on a raw file in Capture One it works very well and it allowed me to set exactly the amount of detail required for the background.

The next step was to lighten up the young boy. As with a lot of ‘dodging and burning-in’, you don’t have to be pixel accurate with what you’re adjusting. The masks that I paint using the Local Adjustment brush use a soft edge (usually with a hardness setting of zero) and are approximate. You also need to add in a little ‘spill’ effect to make it look natural. For instance, if the young warrior really were being illuminated by a break in the jungle canopy above, the rays of light would also lighten up the water surrounding him. For this reason, my mask (shown in red on the screen grab) spills onto the water as well.

Further layers were added to increase the exposure on the warrior’s head, to add more detail into the rocks below the water, to desaturate the background and finally to tone down highlights on the warrior’s chest, so this area didn’t compete with his head.

Oh, and the real story? I was travelling on a luxury expedition ship, Orion, and so at the end of each day, I could return to my air-conditioned stateroom and enjoy a drink at the bar each night. And while the warriors were simply re-enacting how they used to live, it did take me eight days to get there.

Peter Eastway is a professional photographer and photography magazine publisher based in Sydney, Australia. To see more of his photography, visit www.petereastway.com. Peter also offers an online Landscape Photography MasterClass. Details can be found at www.betterphotography.com.

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Photography Travelogues – The Great Barrier Reef 2/2

November 9, 2011 by 8 Comments

Whitehaven, Whitsunday Island, Great Barrier Reef

They say Whitehaven Beach on Whitsunday Island has the whitest sand in the world, although on my last trip some of the broad silica beach had been washed away by a tropical storm. Still, it looked pretty good to me and the northern end of the beach which ends at Hill Inlet appeared as it always does, an amazing pattern of water channels cut into the hard sands below.

Walking along Whitehaven Beach at the opening to Hill Inlet is a wonderful experience. The shallow waters are home to small rays which you’ll see scurrying across the sandy bottom as they feed, but despite the wonderful warm water and sheltered location, you don’t really get a sense of how beautiful Hill Inlet is without a higher vantage point.

There is a lookout on the headland behind the Inlet which offers the classical tourist viewpoint (shown here). A popular technique is to take a series of images and stitch them together for an impressive panorama. You can see the different colours of blue and aquamarine in the water, indicating different depths. At low tide, the lighter areas become exposed sand bars.

However, it’s not until you take to the air that you get to see how magnificent Hill Inlet really is. Helicopters can be hired from nearby Hamilton Island, but there are some height restrictions for flying as Whitsunday Island is a National Park. However, this simply means using a slightly longer focal length for tighter angles.

An obvious trick for getting good photographs from the air is to ask the pilot to take the door off so you’re not shooting through glass or Perspex. Next, you need to be sure your shutter speeds are high to avoid camera shake as helicopters are great sources of vibration. Some experts suggest a shutter speed of at least 1/500 second, but this depends on a number of factors and I generally prefer shutter speeds shorter than 1/1000 second. On this particular shoot, there was a strong wind blowing which came straight through the cabin, so even at 1/2000 second I found hints of camera shake in my files. Of course, this could also be because I was shooting with the new IQ180 and 80-megapixels will quickly reveal any shortcomings in technique!

I used the new Schneider Kreuznach 55mm leaf shutter lens. Although it has an f2.8 maximum aperture, my lens performs best between f5.6 and f8. And although the IQ180 has a native sensitivity of ISO 35, I would need a faster setting than this to keep my shutter speeds up. Some compromises were required! I settled on an aperture of f4 and ISO 200 which gave me shutter speeds between 1/800 and 1/3200 seconds, depending on what I was shooting.

While the overview is a crowd pleaser, my favourite shots of Hill Inlet are of the sand patterns just below the water surface. I will ask the pilot to fly up and down the inlet a couple of times, pointing my lens directly down. Every year the sand has moved, creating wonderful new shapes and lines.

The original file was taken when the sun was behind cloud. Sometimes this is better than full sunshine as it can reduce the reflections off the water, although depending on the time of day and the position of the sun, a polarising filter can be useful for this as well. However, a polarising filter reduces the light reaching the sensor and you lose a shutter speed or so.

Even starting with a flat file, there are lots of potential. The screen grab above shows Capture One open with the original file in the preview window. There isn’t a lot of colour, nor a lot of contrast, but the basic pattern and composition is pleasing to my eye.

Down the side of the Capture One screen, the thumbnails show several variations (using Capture One’s variants), and all of them have used increased contrast to bring out the sand patterns more strongly.

One of the tools I like to use for low contrast subject is the Levels tool under the Exposure tab. By grabbing the black and white point sliders and dragging them into the edge of the histogram, the image comes alive. Then it’s just a matter of fine tuning the exposure with the grey or gamma slider in the middle.

For the final edit, I refined my white balance, increased the colour saturation and used a local adjustment to lighten the top of the image.

If you’re interested in the photography workshops I present on Hamilton Island, or you just want an excuse to visit Australia’s tropical north, please visit www.hamiltonisland.com.au for more details, or visit my site at www.betterphotography.com. It’s a great excuse for a week on Hamilton Island!

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Photography Travelogues – The Great Barrier Reef 1/2

November 2, 2011 by 8 Comments

They say that daylight has a colour temperature of around 5500 K, but out to sea under a blue sky, this isn’t always the case. It’s funny how our habits as photographers change – or should I say, how my habits have changed. When shooting film, I’d usually have an ultraviolet (UV) filter on my lens ‘to take the blue out’.

While invisible to the human eye, ultraviolet radiation generally records as blue on colour film and as haze on all films. It has a similar effect on digital sensors as well, but of course, many of us don’t believe in using filters anymore.

There is an argument that states, why would you want to degrade the quality of your lenses by placing another piece of glass (or, heaven forbid, plastic) in front. If the lens designers thought a filter was a good idea, surely they would have included it as part of the design. This argument fails in several places, of course, but even so, given digital photography allows us to adjust our image files so easily, many ‘essential’ filters are no longer used. And in any event, the majority of UV filters were sold for ‘protection’ of the front lens element, and you could clean them with a dirty sock if you had to because, if scratched, they were not as expensive to replace as the front lens element.

Not that I ever cleaned my lenses with a dirty sock. Ever.

Here’s the original exposure with the white balance in Capture One Pro 6 set to ‘Shot’ mode. In other words, this is the white balance setting suggested as a starting point by my camera. Of course, capturing raw files means I can change the white balance to any setting I like when converting the file. According to Capture One Pro 6, the Kelvin is 7943 K and the Tint is set to 3.0.

Note, there are no adjustments made to this file at all – it is effectively straight out of the camera. However, you can see quite clearly that it is ‘daylight’ over Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, so what happens if I set the white balance in Capture One Pro 6 to ‘daylight’ (or if I had set the white balance to daylight on my camera)?

At a 5500 K daylight setting, the photo is considerably bluer. And this isn’t what I remember seeing, either. The human eye when coupled to the brain is an incredible imaging device, not only adjusting the ‘exposure’ but also filtering out colours. I remember very clearly how strong and vibrant the colours over the shallow reef were compared to the darker blues of the deep water outside. This colour contrast is lost due to the overpowering blue colour cast.

I’ve taken a dozen helicopter rides over the Great Barrier Reef and every time it is different. In August, I was on Hamilton Island, giving a workshop with David Oliver and Bruce Pottinger. We do this every year and one of the highlights is the helicopter ride over Whitsunday Island and then out to the reef.

On this day, there was a strong southerly wind and the air was very hazy, which means that the images are lacking in contrast. The greater the distance, the more haze you look through and we’re at around 1500 feet (from memory). So, while I didn’t have an ultraviolet filter with me, I could use Capture One Pro 6 to tweak the colour temperature (just a little warmer) and increase the contrast. I also added an adjustment layer to darken down the sky at the top.

If you’re interested in the photography workshops we present on Hamilton Island, or you just want an excuse to visit Australia’s tropical north, please visit http://hamiltonisland.com.au for more details, or visit my site at http://betterphotography.com. It’s a great excuse for a week on Hamilton Island

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Photography Travelogues by Peter Eastway – Antarctica 3/3

September 1, 2011 by 2 Comments

Skontorp Cove, Paradise Bay, Antarctica

When you visit a location called ‘Paradise Bay’, you have certain expectations. We were having a barbeque outdoors on the lower deck of our ship that evening (something I still think quite strange for an Antarctica voyage), so hopes were high for a clear sky and a wonderful sunset, but it wasn’t to be. As we steamed into Paradise Bay, we could only guess what lay behind the low cloud that shrouded the entire Peninsula.

One of the challenges of transient travel is making the most of the lighting conditions you’re given. We jumped into the zodiacs for a ‘cruise’ around the foreshores and motored slowly into Skontorp Cove, one of the most picturesque locations in Paradise Bay. So I am told! However, while the cloud prevented us from seeing the spectacular mountains surrounding us, it created a very moody and appropriate atmosphere. Sheer cliffs of ice would suddenly collapse into the waters, breaking the absolute quiet, and occasionally we’d see glimpses of ridge lines high above.

And the reflections were marvellous. Not mirror smooth which has a charm of its own, but slightly mottled, like good quality marble. Keeping the camera low on the edge of the zodiac, it was a matter of asking everyone to be as still as possible so as not to create too many ripples on the water. As everyone was sitting in awe of our location, this was a lot easier than you’d expect!


Sometimes with low contrast photographs like these, it’s good to move away from the easy to use Exposure sliders in Capture one and experiment with the Levels and Curves dialogs. In Levels, I grabbed the black and white points and dragged them inwards to the edge of the histogram, and then moved the middle gamma slider to adjust the overall brightness. This improved the image, giving it more contrast, but not quite enough.

Moving down to the Curves dialog, I selected the ‘Mid-tones Darker’ preset which increased the contrast and improved the image even more. Using the Curves presets, you can just drag your mouse over them and watch the effect on the preview, so it’s easy to experiment.

As with most landscape photography, the sky is the brightest area in the scene, so I set the background exposure with this in mind, and then I used the Local Adjustment brush to lighten up the foreground. I clicked on the Local Adjustments tab, clicked the ‘+’ button to add a layer and then pressed ‘B’ to select the Adjustment Brush. After setting its size and softness, I painted in the foreground (shown as the red area in the screen grab above). You can set the red mask to appear only when you’re painting it in, and then it disappears so you can see what your adjustments will do. I lightened the foreground using the Exposure and Contrast sliders.

One trick I have found with snow and ice, especially on overcast days, is to edit the file with local contrast. In Capture One, this is the Clarity control. I added in another Local Adjustment layer, brushed over the ice wall and its reflection, and then dragged the Clarity slider to a setting of 80. This is higher than I am normally comfortable with, but it shows that so often the adjustments we use are dependent on our subject matter. I also used the Exposure slider to lighten up the ice wall.

To see more of Peter Eastway’s images on Antarctica, visit his website at http://www.petereastway.com/showpics.taf?portno=57&PortName=ROCKHOPPER%20EXHIBITION

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Photography Travelogues by Peter Eastway – Antarctica 2/3

August 5, 2011 by 10 Comments


Malcolm, Neko Harbour, Antarctica

It was steep. Really steep. Well, at least that is my memory of a mid-morning stroll that turned ugly. I was wandering up to the top of a headland for a view over the glacier that falls into Neko Harbour, Antarctica. It wasn’t a difficult walk, but you had to dig the edges of your shoes into the snow to stop yourself from slipping backwards. A good pair of snow shoes would have been helpful, but I was in the waterproof Wellington boots needed to make the wet landings. We’d leave the ship once or twice a day in inflatable zodiacs and usually you’d disembark into shallow but icy cold water on the beaches. The Wellington boots were perfect for that, but not ideal for snow mountaineering!

I found a great view of the glacier at the lookout, but within a few minutes, the weather deteriorated badly. Catabatic winds, produced by the micro climate over the now hidden glacier, played havoc with everyone. In fact, the winds were so strong many people decided to slide back down the hill, rather than risk being blown over the edge!


I had a little Panasonic Lumix GF1 tucked in my jacket, so I sacrificed it to the elements and took a few photos of what was an amazing scene. Looking out from inside my hood and jacket, with the wind at my back, it was easy to imagine I was in a cinema watching a movie, except my feet were a little cold!

I photographed Malcolm, one of the photographers with me on the expedition, walking up to the lookout. He was struggling against the winds and each step appeared laboured, as though he was walking in slow motion. Holding his camera and tripod over his shoulder, he reminded me of a mountain climber with a flag, about to claim a first ascent.


The Lumix GF1 shoots raw files and the file quality is great. However, as expected, the original capture was relatively flat. After all, this is exactly what the scene was like – flat and lightless – but a little bit of contrast fixed that. What I was most disappointed about was how sedate the hill appeared. It looked flat, nothing like the steep incline I remembered!

I must have tilted the camera awkwardly at the moment of exposure – at least that’s my story! And it’s a good thing Capture One has a few tools to correct such poor camera technique!

I selected the Straighten tool in the toolbox at the top of the Capture One screen. By holding down my mouse on this tool, a small drop menu opens and I selected Rotate Freehand. From here, I clicked in the preview window and dragged my mouse down and around – the image rotates and crops automatically. Most importantly, I was able to recreate the steepness of that mountainous trail that led up to the lookout.

Within the image was a marker and another climber, so I changed to the Crop tool and removed them from the photo. A few more adjustments were made in Capture One and then the image was exported to Photoshop for some final fine-tuning.

To see more of Peter Eastway’s images on Antarctica, visit his website at http://www.petereastway.com/showpics.taf?portno=57&PortName=ROCKHOPPER%20EXHIBITION

Filed under Capture One Tips & Tricks, Photography Travelogues Tagged with , , , ,

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