I think it’s the most beautiful of the lot! The Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban, South Africa dominates the city skyline making almost ever photograph shot before its completion last year, obsolete. The graceful steel centre arch, based on the South African flag, is 106m high and a cable car designed to take visitors up to the highest point where they can take in wonderful views of the city operates daily. The arch is 350m long and weighs 2600 tons. During the 2010 FIFA World Cup™ it will seat 70 000 people reverting to 54 000 thereafter.
We stayed at a very convenient B&B in Durban North called Annies Place (http://www.anniesplace.co.za/) just a few kilometres from the stadium. We did quite a few panoramic shots of the Durban Country Club with the stadium in the background and stitched these together in Photoshop CS4 after doing the necessary tweaks in Lightroom. What an amazing combination. In many instances these days I don’t even worry about using a panoramic head. I simply lock the focus, exposure and white balance and go click, click, click, allowing about 25% overlap and voila. Have a look at some of the images we did over the few days we were in Durban before the cloudy weather moved in again.
While we are chatting things photography, we’ve a few more spots available on our Photographic Safari to Madikwe Game Reserve in May 2010. Have a look here for more details. These are amazing fun! http://www.africaimagery.com/workshops_madikwe.php
Wow! What a Photo Graphic Safari that was! We had 5 people join us at Jaci’s Camp in Madikwe Game Reserve in South Africa’s North West Province – Lousie Donald (Publisher of Pix Magazine), Tim and Yvonne Driman, Hilary Baak and Mike Rickard out from the UK. The idea was to try to photograph the African Wild Dogs that Madikwe Game Reserve is so well known for but, as so often happens with wildlife photography, the dogs were not quite as cooperative as they could have been. We did see them a couple of times though and we did get some pix. Everything else seemed to be doing their best to be photographed – we had great times with elephants (and had a couple of charges to keep out attention going), lions and
Lilac Breasted Roller at Madikwe Game Reserve
general game and also managed to play with some scenic after sunset.
We followed the usual format of early morning and late afternoon shoots with image analysis and other photographic discussions in betewwn and the VERY attantative and helpful staff at the lodge forced deliscous food and drink down our throuts a regular intervals. While the standard of photography at the start of the workshop was pretty good, I must say that after 4 days of intensive work on images, techniques and Photoshop, some very fine images we starting to appear. Have a look at some of the images we shot here:
This workshop was so successful we’ve scheduled some more with 2 people having already booked onto the March one. Book you place now. Have a look here for more details. Louise Donald of Pix Magazine very kindly put this video together.
It’s interesting how similar issues raised themselves in batches from time to time. Recently I have had quite a few enquiries from people wanting to know which version of Photoshop to use. What I am finding with my own work is that most of my image processing is being done in Adobe Lightroom with only some of the more advanced edits having to be done in Photoshop.
When Adobe launched Lightroom 2 (and it’s now up to version 2.6) the addition of adjustment brushes increased the processing power of Lightroom to the extent that Photoshop has
A raw image as its was shot before processing in Adobe Lightroom
almost but not quite become redundant to processing images. I would guess that something around 90% of my raw images don’t need much editing at all other than levels correction, a bit of dust removal, perhaps a little local adjustment (which is where the brushes come in) and may be correcting a skew horizon or two. I find that I’m only using Photoshop to stitch together panoramic images or work with layers when I need to. And even here I do most of the edits in Lightroom, right click the image, then select edit in Photoshop. Lightroom converts the image to a 16 bit TIFF file, opens it in Photoshop, where it or you do the necessary reprocessing and at the end of it, it opens the image in Lightroom again as a 16 bit TIFF. It stacks this new file with the original so that you can easily find them.
What I am suggesting to people now in is that instead of buying one of the top Photoshop versions, they rather get Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop Elements which has the added advantage of being a little more affordable. And yes I know that
Here the images has been processed in Lightroom only.
Photoshop does have a raw converter that is a perfectly competent editing program and actually is the same raw converter engine that is found in Lightroom but in my opinion, working with in Lightroom is very much more user-friendly and logical.
So just a short one this week and if you have any specific queries in this regard is feel free to contact us.
We’ve just finished another of our Howick Photography and Photoshop Workshops held again at the delightful Yellowwood Cafe just outside town. We had some old friends along – Fran, Nick and Doug who have all done at least one of our workshops before, as well as a number of first timers that we hope will become old friends. Judging from some of the comments it was enjoyed by many and certainly Pat and I had a fun time. It always is when you in amongst people that are passionate aboutphotography. The first morning we simply worked Yellowwood Café’s gardens including their “small animal” farm. They have a number of miniature farm animals (and I don’t mean young- I mean small in stature) that made excellent subjects as did the flowers that John Handman, the clivea farmer, brought along to do some macro work on. It was then into the centre to evaluate the images and work through some Photoshop. That afternoon we drove out towards the Karkloof to the very beautiful Karkloof Falls where we played for a few hours shooting pix of the waterfalls, reflections, trees and so on. The light improved as the afternoon wore on and we finished up alongside the river, chatting photography, dealing with some queries and sipping wine. Not a bad finish to a day full of photography! Early the next morning we met up with a couple of young mountain bikers – Bradley McGee, the son of friends Mike and Karen and a pal of his, Joel Grobler. The guys rode up and down the forest trails, pulling wheelies, skidding sliding and jumping until the light got bad. We, on the other side of the cameras, blazed away, experimenting with slow shutter speeds, (using blur to illustrate speed) high shutter speeds (to freeze motion) and different camera angles. It was great fun in spite of (or maybe because of) the dust.After sessions of photo theory and Photoshop we had a very pleasant afternoon working with two young models, Carmen Watson and Caroline Zuma. We did images indoors using the windows as a lovely soft light source and then went outside and in the late afternoon sun, experimented with reflectors as a way to light a model. The next morning we had a practical session in Photoshop, learning how to improve the texture of skin, take away a blemish or two, add a littlesparkle to the eyes etc.One of the interesting things on the workshop was the camera one of the participants – Maria Andrzejejewska – was using. A simple Sony point and shoot. It had virtually no controls and just look at 2 of the images she got! Who says that you need a camera with a gazillion pixels and more brain power than NASA when they put men on the moon! Have a look at the other images that were made on the workshop here.
If you’d like to know more about our workshops please visit www.oldcanvasexpeditions.com or e-mail me at roger@africaimagery.com. We are doing another of our Howick workshops in October (8 to 12) and on this one we’ll be working a little more with Photoshop to improve editing skills.
