In the Gardens, Part I

The wife and I took a day off recently and headed down to Werribee Mansion. It’s a huge old stately home which has been turned into a public attraction, and has some enormous and very beautifully manicured grounds. We spent the afternoon enjoying the patchy sunlight and exploring the gardens.

The home itself is an attractive piece of grand architecture which makes for a nice backdrop to the flower beds. The light was challenging- but this made it interesting. Shifting clouds meant that catching enough light on the foreground to reduce the difference between light sky and darkened ground (dynamic range) was tricky- but when it worked, the cloudy sky was full of movement, interest and contrast. There were a couple of classic old greenhouses beside the flowerbeds, starting to sag a little round the middle, and they made for interesting subjects as well. The day’s photoshoot was a fun mix of portraiture and scenery, full of colour and soft lighting.

Here are a few of my favourite shots, these ones of the grounds themselves:

Forest Footlights

Taking photos in forests is a tricky prospect. I’ve talked a little elsewhere about the fact that the key to outdoors photography is the balancing of light and shadow- and when light is on one part of the frame but not on another, there has to be a compromise- either one part will become too light, or another too dark. The best thing to do is wait until the light has hit the bit that you want to be nicely lit, and then take your photo- which is, of course, a luxury we can’t always afford.

Forests are especially difficult because of the extreme contrasts in light and shadow. Although we don’t really notice it because our eyes adjust instinctively to differences in light and shade (and have a much broader dynamic range than cameras do), in fact forest floors are habitually shady places. That means if we take photos of forests and expose for the forest floor, chances are, we’ll be exposing for the shade, and the sky will burn out- become just a white haze between the branches, even on a nice sunny day. The alternative is that the foreground becomes very dark and you lose a lot of detail for the sake of exposing the sky, not a good prospect for a forest photo.

The photographs I love from forests are the ones where sunbeams are catching in smoke or mist. We’ve all seen these sorts of shots- they’re phenomenally atmospheric, with shafts of light split by boughs and branches to form beautiful patterns. I haven’t yet succeeded in taking any of these, but it remains a goal. Shots of trees- especially Australian eucalypts with their pale trunks- in the mist also make for really pretty images.

Other, simpler alternatives include shots which exclude the sky altogether- so that the entire image is exposed for the darker undergrowth. You often need to do more close-up photography or angle the lens downwards to do this- and because the forest is often quite dark, you may need a tripod. A lot of long-exposure shots of forest streams are taken like this, and it can work well. Alternatively, especially in a place like Australia where the white bark of the gums is so stark against the blue sky, shooting skywards when trunks are illumated by sunlight can look quite good- although this sort of shot is rarely very eye-catching once displayed, and I tend to find looks a lot better through the viewfinder than it does on the screen.

As with my earlier post on light on cloudy days, waiting for a stray sunbeam to make it down to the forest floor will allow you to get a better balance between the light and dark areas, but because of the nature of a forest (lots of canopy cover), these sunbeams are usually pretty spaced out, which means small areas lit and lots of areas of shadow-still not the best look. For these two shots of the Porongorups, in Western Australia, I really lucked out because not only was there a big enough gap in the canopy for light to be hitting the forest floor, but there was also a gorgeous spray of vibrant undergrowth which contrasted nicely with the bark of the tree trunks. The overall image was one that was well lit from sky to soil, and I was able to expose it easily. This is a rare success story, and I have to say that nine times out of ten, I rarely break my camera out while I’m walking through the bush- so few shots actually turn out well.

Incidentally, the Porongorup Ranges is a beautiful and understated region to visit.  A low line of rounded hills that boasts some of the geologically oldest rocks on the planet (about a billion years old, for those nerds among you) and an extremely diverse and unique biome consisting of a large number of plants unique to the area, there are numerous walking trails that wind their way up through the forest to the ridgeline.  Once on the treeless ridge top, the views in three hundred and sixty degrees are spectacular- the vast flat plains of South Western WA broken by the Stirling Ranges some twenty kilometres to the north, and far to the south, the Southern Ocean.  When we were up there, we had the hills largely to ourselves, and it was peaceful and exposed and dramatic- a fantastic area to explore.

Down at the foot of the hills, the Porongorups are navigated by one main and mostly-sealed road that connects nowhere with nowhere else.  It’s a sedate area, with the hamlet of Porongorup forming a hub around which are spread vineyards and farms, and an incongruous Thai restaurant that’s also worth a visit.  The A-Frame cottages of the Porongorup Chalets, where we stayed, are delightful.  Set in pretty woodland backing straight into the bush, they are comfortable and cozy inside, and well catered for.  For a quiet weekend away you’d be hard pressed to find a more relaxing milieu.

Whistle-Stop Western Australia

Well, not all of it, naturally.  WA is kind of big.  When I say ‘kind of’ I mean ‘really’.  Just getting to Perth from Melbourne takes four hours flying.  Yup, you fly for four hours and you’re still in the same country.  It’s 2.6 million square kilometres in area.  You could basically fit 4 Frances into it.  More than 10 Great Britains.  Or about 63 Switzerlands.  It’s half as big again as Alaska, and four times the size of Texas.  In fact, it’s the second largest sub-national administrative division on the planet (the largest being the Sakha Republic, half a million square kilometres larger and making up a significant proportion of Siberia, in Russia).  Which is all just a roundabout way of pointing out just how stupendously big Western Australia is, and that when I say we did a whistle-stop tour of WA, I really just mean a teensy tiny corner thereof.

[See what I'm like with facts?  I just love that stuff.  I'm sure it's not healthy.]

The teensy corner we chose was the south-west corner of Australia, marked at its northern apex by Perth, it’s south-eastern apex by Albany, and its south-western apex by, well, a lot of ocean really.  A little over 300km to one side.  I travelled with friend Pam, erstwhile photographic subject and companion on previous travel adventures in Thailand as well, and we had five days in the state.  A mutual friend Viv had given the suggestion that the Stirling Ranges was a nice spot to visit at this time of the year (read: the cold and blustery depths of winter) for it being a dramatic landscape frequented by attractive light.

After a day seeing friends in Perth we drove south and east across a whole lot of largely-nothing before finding ourselves meandering through the Stirling Ranges themselves.  The landscape really was dramatic, with a broad horizon broken by low but striking mountainforms.  The sky was overcast but broken by strong sunlight, so that the mood changed with the minutes, brightly lit one moment, plunged into cold shadow the next, all beneath a deeply textured sky.

We spent two nights at the hamlet of Porongorup, little more than a picturesque service centre at the base of the Porongorup National Park.  The Porongorups (which I’d never heard of before this trip) are a line of ancient granite hills sticking out of a vast flat plain, renowned (among those in the know) for being a little island of biodiversity, with unique and unusual plant life in considerable quantity.  It’s also immensely pretty, and in the winter light, full of character and gentle appeal.  We hiked, took photographs, drank wine, and generally explored the countryside.

From Porongorup we headed to the coast at Denmark, pausing to take in the Valley of the Giants treetop walk outside Walpole and taking an exploratory detour to the picturesque and remote Mandalay Beach set among the jagged shoreline pounded by a relentless ocean.  The rain chased us on, and after swinging through Margaret River, we spent the last night in the town of Dunsborough before returning to Perth to catch flights to our various homes.

The weather was by parts the most delightful and disappointing aspect of the trip.  I don’t complain for an instant.  We were forecast five days of pouring rain, and instead got perhaps a day and a half.  The lighting gave both land- and sky-scapes wonderful depth.  We were practicing photography, and the varied and rapidly-changing conditions kept us on our toes, and perfectly illustrated all sorts of photographic truths (some to be shared at a later date perhaps).

Best of all, with every rainstorm came a rainbow.  And for once I’m not speaking figuratively here.  I’m not sure how many rainbows accompanied us on our trip, but some of them showed up at times when the weather looked to have closed us out of photography for another few hours, and they were spectacular.

This is just a quick sprinkling of some of the photos I came back with.  I’ll share some more as time goes on.

Photos:

1. Road Trip: Chester Pass Road cuts through the Stirling Ranges National Park

2. A Place in the Hills: The little A-frame cottage we called home for two days

3. Troubled Skies: The Stirling Ranges beneath a cloudy skyscape

4. Ranges: The Stirlings from another viewpoint

5. Porongorup Granite: Rocks near the summit of one of the walks we did in the hills

6. Treetops: Karri trees in Porongorup National Park

7. Moody: Fields cringe beneath a glowering sky

8. Silver Lining: A rainbow breaks between showers on Mandalay Beach

9. Fruit of the Vine: Winery outside Porongorup

10. Morning Meadow: Porongorup scenery after dawn

Splitting Seconds

I shot these two frames roughly a second apart.  They were shot as RAW images on exactly the same camera settings, and have been exposed from the digital negative using identical parameters.  What this means, in short, is that the amount of light able to get onto each frame is the same.

The shot on top just happened to be taken as a tongue of lightning flashed through the thick monsoon clouds overhead.  The shot below, a second later when the lightning had faded.  This isn’t the most dramatic lightning shot ever.  And I really do want to get into photographing storms.  Especially as a good buddy of mine is a storm-chaser and meteorologist.  Gotta spend some time with him.  But I was pretty chuffed with how this worked out.  A bit flukey (though with the amount of lightning these storms bring, if you’re snapping around, sooner or later you’ll get a flash on film.  I should point out however that unlike the majority of lightning shots you’ll see, which are shot on tripods and over long exposures (at least a second or two), this was a handheld shot at around 1/15th of a second.  So it really was a bit lucky.  I liked that I was able to get two almost identical images so you can really see the difference in the sky with the flash.

That’s all.