Storm Warning!
Recently, I spent 3 weeks working at the Orpheus Island Research Centre situated just off the Nth. Queensland coast. It is a University Research Centre,that hosts marine researchers from all over the world, studying all sorts of things from the effects of climate change on the Great Barrrier Reef to the amount of fishing gear left behind by fishermen amateur and professsional.
Incidentally, this is also where Les Walkling conducts a yearly photographic workshop and I got the chance to see some of the images produced by Les, very nice indeed! Unfortunately, due to work hours and inclement weather,(I think I saw 4 days of sun in all the time I was there!) photographic opportunities were scarce.
This is a storm that came roaring across from the mainland on my first night!
Amazingly, it veered and went around us!
The processing of this image was done in LR3 and Nik Colour Effex 4 which has a neat little process called Detail Extracter, does amazing things with cloudy skies!
Hungry Beast
David Bettini and Mark Stothard have been posting some great shots of storm clouds they have encountered during their recent trip along the Kimberley Coast. Once again I have been inspired to have another look at a stitch of an awesome looking storm that swept across Prince Frederick Harbour. Decided to do a monochrome version as i was having trouble getting the colour version to look just right.
This place seems to be a storm magnet and as Master of the vessel I was on, I was watching this pretty closely as we were in the middle of passenger tranfers by Helicopter!
As it turned out, it passed by with little effect but I got some great images while it was around. Hope you like this one!
Three posts in one week!? I’ll be taking over from Mark soon if I am not careful!
Old Gum Tree
Just looking through my files and I found this image of the same tree but with a looming storm in the background. Whatever the conditions, that tree seems to draw your attention and to me both images are quintessentially Australian!
Fire in the Sky
This was taken the same evening as my last post. A little difficult to create an interesting foreground out of featureless sand flat but hopefully the sky and reflection make up for it
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Hope you all have a safe & happy Xmas & New Year!
Ho Ho Ho!!
At the End of the Day
This is an image I shot the day before my recent visit to hospital. It looked like a thunderstorm might be building so I drove down to Wilson Beach which is about half an hour away, in the hope of an interesting sky.
Dead low tide which meant extensive sand & mud flats. An interesting cloud formation in the western sky looked like it might be worth shooting but there was no interesting foreground apart from the reflections in the still water.
I hung around for about an hour shooting some panoramics whenever the cloud texture looked vaguely interesting but the light didn’t really fire up as I had hoped. Still it was nice just watching the cloud change shape for a while.
Just as I was thinking about heading off some fishermen came around the corner to the boat ramp and suddenly I had a foreground just as the light got interesting!
Shot about 4 quick frames as they were waiting for the trailer and it turned out that the fishing was a bust for them.
I walked away with a couple of nice images!
A stitch in time…
I was just looking through the images I took in the hope of stitching at a later date and came up with this. I know you’ve alll seen this storm before but not quite like this.
Courtesy of LR2 and a neat little plug-in called the SIAS filter.
StormFront
Still playing with the stitching program. Until I have something worthwhile to post it is back to single frames for a while.
This is one I shot in the Kimberley when another mean looking storm poked it’s head over the hills. just as i thought we were going to cop it, it parted and went around us. Managed to get a couple of decent frames and took this one for a ride through Lightroom.
I like the patchy lighting which is something I look for all the time. “Chiriasco” I think is the term for it, nice when it appears!
Sometimes, you get lucky!
This is another one of the storm that didn’t immediately jump out at me until I started playing with it in Lightroom. I remember thinking at the time, “wouldn’t it be cool if the sun illuminated the headland against the dark sky!”
As they say, “F8 and BE THERE!”
Apocalypse
This a wider shot of the same storm featured in the post “I Survived”. It looked mean and nasty! At the time we were doing helicopter transfers between Naturalist Is. and the Mitchell Plateau! As it turned out there wasn’t much in it. I was lucky with the patch of sunlight on the cliff face. Sometimes the light falls just where you want it.
Island Images Photo Blog 