With the sun set for the day, the crowds along Darwin's shoreline had begun to go home, but some people stayed to enjoy the 'blue hour', a time when the sky provides some magical colour - if you keep an eye open for it. Or a lens….
This image is a composite of three images made while the camera was on a stable tripod, with each image being quite a long exposure, and then processed in Aurora HDR software.
The effect of the long exposures is to render a silky smoothness to what was actually a slightly choppy sea.
The blue hour is a great time for photography - different that the golden hour that occurs on the other side of the sun rise/set, and shooting both can provide some interesting variety in the space of a couple of hours.
Australia's Northern Territory has two distinct seasons - the Wet (Oct-Mar) and the Dry (Apr-Sep).The Dry Season features constantly blue skies, no clouds, and no rain. The Wet features some spectacular clouds, storms and lots of rain. The Wet Season is also a brilliant time to make photographs out in the desert - the rains bring colours, like the vivid reds, greens and blues in this image.
The Top End is an incredibly remote place - it is quite literally hundreds of kilometres from other major towns, and thousands of kilometres from cities of any real size.This image tells both these stories to me - the colours of the Wet Season and the isolation shown by the lonely railway tracks.These tracks are used by 'The Ghan', a weekly train service between Darwin and the southern city of Adelaide - some 3,000km (1850 miles) away.I created this image on my Panasonic Lumix GX7, using a Lee Filters polarising filter and a 3 stop GND to balance the mid-day light. A small amount of post processing was done in Luminar.
Wangi Falls in Litchfield National Park is a spectacular place to visit for great photography opportunities. During the Top End's dry season it is also a great place to swim and enjoy cool, clear water.Waterfalls provide an interesting range of shooting opportunities, with my preference being for silky smooth water as seen in this image.This image was created in the middle of a bright, cloudless day, so to achieve the silken look I used a Lee Big Stopper 10-stop ND filter. This resulted in a 25-second shutter speed at f/8.0. This slow shutter speed also resulted in a smooth surface on the lagoon, and enhanced the reflection of the waterfall.
