Posted by: Kaisa in Red Epic, photography, equipment on
Nov 24, 2008
Oh, what we could do with this!
There have been rumblings on The Luminous Landscape and elsewhere about digital cameras and video morphing into a new generation of high-end photographic equipment for some time. The volcano has now started to erupt. Witness:
The possibilities of the Red Epic 617 Mysterium Monstro gives me goosebumps. This is a 186 X 56mm, 261 megapixel sensor, digital stills movie camera, apparently an iMax competitor. Oh, what we could do with this! Imagine DOF image stacks, stitched panoramas... all combined in unbelievable macros as big as a house and as sharp as a tack. I'm dancing in my seat with frustration.
Yes, we are far away. Further away than we initially thought we would be. We'd planned to blog as we go, yet most places we find ourselves in have no mobile or internet reception whatever. If there is any, it's very sporadic and drops out in a few minutes. So we're sorry if you're checking in for updates and tutorials—there won't be any till we are back in civilization! Photography is going crackers. Crazy daisies up north of Perth, lightning storms and whales and prostrate banksias down south. Every kind of imaginable flower and seed pod and leaf in between! It's been fabulous. We'll just have to keep on photographing and catch up with the website soon!
We are currently around the Walpole area of southern Western Australia. Big trees at last! We are very, very happy with the material we have gathered along this trip. We hope to present some truly amazing photographs of Western Australian wildflowers as they have never been seen before: almost a bee's-eye-view, in some cases. It's astounding—some flowers you would dismiss from the roadside as rather uninteresting; yet up close (which is our arena) you see the most glorious details. Worlds within worlds... there is so much out there. If you only take the time to look. We've had many table-thumping conversations about this lately: who really does stop to look? We are all so busy going so fast, we only have time to have an "expert" interpret for us whilst we're on the run. Just give us a few, easily digestible morsels to give us an impression that we've been there... How few of us have the trust in our own instincts to just sit; without guidebooks or guides; in nature and absorb and interpret it for ourselves?
We're off north of Perth! Wildflowers are starting to appear. The further north we go, the more there is. Looks like we'll be catching the wave of flowering at the right time. Thankfully, there's been bumper rainfall, heralding better than usual wildflowers. So far (as far as Green Head) there are unbelievable fields of wattle as far as the eye can see, dense clumps of smokebush in Leseur National Park, featherflowers, cat's paws... and initial work with expanded depth-of-field (focus stacking) looks great.
Preparing to hit the roadPlans are now in place for our big adventure to Western Australia to begin our Biodiversity project—photographing for a new series of fine art prints and a book about our impressions of wildflower country. We'll be calling upon all our new skills in HDR, focus stacking and panorama techniques in the production of this work—very exciting! We will record our progress and methodology as we go along in this here blog, and will include workflow notes and tutorials, new software developments & the use thereof, and eBooks about specific techniques and the creation of selected images.
