Ahh, Berowra Photography. This is a very personal place. And a quite poignant image as well in a way you might not guess. Why? – so what’s different with this image from my normal landscape photographs I hear you say? Well, read on….
What you don’t see
I saw a lot of trees and a lot of branches. Most of them were in the way!
I had been to this spot a couple of times before. It’s off one of the many Turner Road fire trail points, and, my! aren’t there a lot of them! Hampton Court Maze eat your heart out. It isn’t an obvious lookout at all, and I could not actually tell anyone how to find the exact spot… it’s just guesswork especially as the foliage grows year to year.
You need to stand on the edge of a sloping rock ledge, and poke your camera – and almost yourself as well – through trees to see this shot. It’s a loooong way down of the ledge, as well. I was there in the morning and it is of course Mossie Heaven due to a lot of nice sandstone rocks and nice damp grasses around. I got bitten alive. Real Berowra Photography 🙂
What I saw when I was there
I wanted to use the lines of the mist in the valley on the right hand side to lead the viewer’s eye into the ‘business end’ of the image on the left, being the sunrise. I included a little foreground as well to add depth. (Remember, all photos have a front, a middle, and a back, just like a book – read about it here).
This image is really all about lines, placement, and trying to get them all to work with, not against, each other. Even the colour of the clouds has some lines going on. I wasn’t quite as savvy then as I am now, and didn’t take a tripod. Yep, I admit it.
I shot a number of frames and tried to get the corners working as best as I could.
What I saw Afterwards
Back in front of the monitor I knew I had quite a job on my hands. The real challenge was that it was hand held. I had taken a number of frames on the camera’s HDR (High Dynamic Range) setting, and needed to get them to precisely line up. They almost did but not quite, but a little Google research into Photoshop settings fixed that. The processing after that wasn’t one-step but it wasn’t too difficult. A little blending of layers. The usual shadows/highlights layers. Then the use of a couple of masks to boost the whites in the clouds in the valley. Saturation (of course!) in the sky and there you go.
Well, not actually, as the original image was full frame and thus in a 3 to 2 ratio…. However, there was not really a lot happening high in the sky. So this is a crop to 2.4 to 1 ratio to draw the eye. It also uses the corners of the image with this crop. So it’s a panorama that actually isn’t! What ratio should I use I hear you ask? – well actually I don’t 🙂 but you can look here.
Am I Happy?
You bet. Technicalities aside it screams Berowra Morning / North Shore Morning…. That’s what you want in a photo, isn’t it? I call it Berowra Photography, or Australian Landscape Photography, North-shore style 🙂
9/10
And there was something else….
So what’s different I hear you say? Well, after nineteen years of my life dedicated to improving a well-known corporation’s bottom line by my endeavours, they told me ‘thanks but no thanks’ and that was it. Redundancy, redeployment, resource-action, whatever you want to call it.
So this image was taken on the very first Monday Morning of my new found ‘freedom’ – I literally got up at the same time as I had done while I was working, and instead of breakfast and drive to work, it was straight into the car, drive, walk into Berowra Valley National Park, take photo. And wonder what would happen 🙂 That was a couple of years ago, and what a journey since then…
Thanks for coming on my journey with me.
Thanks for reading this far
Andrew Barnes
The Berowra Photographer
The Image is in Berowra Valley Regional Park off the Turner Road fire trail – near the Great North Walk.
