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Mellowness of the Soul

Posted by
Darkelf Photography (Perth, Australia) on 10 June 2024 in Landscape & Rural and Portfolio.

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Staying in the blue hour mood, this is another long exposure from Milford Sound in New Zealand. It is a follow up to a previous photo, Perfect Storm, which I posted not long ago. We arrived at this location late in the day, and we were lucky to find that we managed to be there at low tide, just before the water started to rise and covered the rocky foreshore. As we walked around, I was fascinated by the rock patterns and detail, and I was looking for something interesting to use as the foreground in this photo.

There were various tree stumps and logs scattered around, and they made for some interesting possibilities, but I was hoping to find unusual rocks to anchor the composition. I did manage to find a few with the ones here attracting my attention the most. I liked the stripe patterns on the two foreground stones. They looked really unusual (for me at least). For this image, I wanted to get low to the ground to give the rocks more emphasis and prominence. I was very close to the foreground and that meant that I would need to focus stack the scene to get all the depth of field to cover the distance all the way to the peaks.

To achieve this, I took four different frames with the first one focusing on the two rocks, two focusing further mid-ground, and the last one focused on the mountains. I then took a long exposure frame with the focus still on the mountains, to get the clouds movement effect that I was looking for. I took this photo some time after the one I posted before, so I already knew that the sky would look really good. In this instance, I also loved the contrast between the stillness of the landscape and that motion effect. When developing the image, I manually combined all the images in Photoshop for the focus stack, and then blended in the top part from the long exposure frame. It was actually a lot less work than is sounds. Now, I did walk up closer towards the mountains to see if a different perspective might word better, however, I found that the rocky ground was not quite as engaging there as it was further away.

There is another technique which some photographers use. It is called perspective blending where they take a photo of the foreground with a very wide angle, and then take another one zoomed in towards the background. They combine them together in post processing, and it is designed to give more scale to the distant elements. They would usually end up somewhat diminished when shooting the entire scene with wide perspective, especially when foreground is more prominent in the frame. It is not something that I tried as yet, however, I might experiment with it in the future.

It was getting steadily darker as we were exploring Milford Sound, but the light was still quite uniform and constant when I took images for this scene. I did not need to blend exposures on top of the focus stacking. I did bracket exposures though, as is my custom these days just to cover myself in case of a blown highlight or two. For the photos I take, this has been a lifesaver on many occasions, as you would know from my descriptions in the past. I often look at my earliest landscape photos, and wish I did the same back then. But anyway, it is what it is.

I think I went a little crazy with long exposures on that evening. This was all due to perfect conditions for that type of images. The clouds were moving fast, light was easy to judge, and foreground was very still for most of the time. I actually shoot fewer long exposures these days but I think that evening rekindled my love for them, and I will look to include them more in my planning during our next travels.

Canon EOS R5 240 seconds F/8.0 ISO 200 15 mm

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