Landscapes in portrait

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 11:04pm

Tonight at the camera club was the judging for the April “Landscapes” competition. Three of my four entries were actually portrait. By this I mean that the entries were of the landscape topic, but were framed in the portrait orientation.

I had difficulty finding images as I don’t shoot that many landscape images. In fact two of the entries were from a day trip along the McDonalds Track in Gippsland, while the other two were from the road trip to the Snowy Mountains over the Australia Day weekend.

This late afternoon shot up the Snowy River from Jacks Lookout received a merit:

Snowy afternoon

Processing three exposures as HDR really saved the bottom half from being too dark and I was sure that the judge would point out that the change in light broke the image in two. He didn’t.

A midday shot looking north from the McDonalds Track at Mount Worth received a merit:

From Mount Worth

HDR came to the rescue again as the sun was quite harsh. When picking this image it was a close call between this and one in landscape orientation that showed more to the right. I went portrait with this one to try and have the viewers eye follow the trees in the valley up the image.

My other printed image was from surge tank looking over Lake Jindabyne:

Reaches of Jindabyne Lake

The judge pointed out that the sun reflection was blown out. As this was also HDR I should have noticed that before printing and manually brought back detail from the -2 exposure.

My other printed image was from earlier in the morning on the McDonalds Track:

Rolling hills

At this time the clouds were a bit more defined and were casting shadows over alternate hills. Again this is HDR from three exposures and in hindsight I should have actually gotten out of the car to take this shot as I would have been able to leave out the fence at the bottom.

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