Posts Tagged southern africa

The African Cosmos | TimeScape of Winter Solstice 2012

Every Winter Solstice in South Africa for the last 7 years I have braved the cold evenings outside capturing the night skies. Last night I went for a full 12 hours of photography starting at dusk and finishing at dawn to capture the

2012 Winter Solstice from Southern Africa

.

I had visualized this timelapse in my head for some time and it turned out beyond my expectations making this a very memorable Winter Equinox for me. In between my camera and battery checks in the wee hours of this morning, I did manage to sneak a few hours of interrupted sleep as the Sun made it’s final move across the equatorial line. This morning I had several thousand images to deal with and process before I could complete this timescape of the

African Cosmos

.

So we are now officially in Winter in South Africa and we can start adding a few seconds each day as our days get slightly longer and as we move towards the Spring and Summer Equinoxes.

Actual construction of the final timescape took me several hours with some tweaking here and there and here it is now for you to enjoy

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The Light of Day | Lightning Landscape Photography

Lightning Landscape Photography

, like with all my photography, has always been about telling a story. For me photos of lightning strikes are a dime a dozen, just about anyone with some basic photography experience can capture a lightning strike, that part is easy. Exposing both sky and ground at night in a single exposure without a lightning strike blowing the exposure remains for me one of the most challenging forms of photography barre none and this is one reason I am still so utterly consumed by it.

Let me explain it this way. You’re out in the dead of night with a camera and an off-board flash that can fire at any time at either 5%, 50%, 100%, 500% or 1000% power output and you have absolutely no control over it. This is one reason why for years when people have asked me “what are your settings” I tell them my settings are meaningless. Unless you understand what it is you are trying to expose for you are wasting your time trying to dial in other people’s settings.

When I am out chasing a lightning storm, within the space of just 5 minutes my aperture can rapidly shift from f/2.8 to f/16, my shutter speed can shift from 2 seconds to 30 seconds and my ISO can shift from 100 to 1600 all depending on how I am reading what is happening and what “might” happen. So while

lightning landscape photography

involves a certain amount of luck, it does require your brain to be ticking over doing constant exposure calculations without as much as a light meter to assist you.

I came across this image in my catalogue last night from our past summer storm season and decided it was time for it to see

The Light of Day

. This past summer we had some great storms as we always do, our rains however were quite poor giving us barely a third of what we had received in the previous year.

This evening a very fast moving storm rolled in from the South which is not our normal direction for rain so I knew it would either pack a punch or just fizzle out on me. I headed out to the nearby sunflower fields that had only germinated about 14 days prior and decided to use the leading lines of sunflowers in the field as a foreground to complete this

Lightning Landscape Photo

. As the storm passed through it emitted a lightning strike big enough to illuminate the night sky as well as giving me that last little bit of exposure I needed to expose the field.

When I came across this image last night I felt it was time to bring this image out of the darkness of my catalogue and into

the Light of Day

. Enjoy

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Lunar Eclipse – Amazing Optical Photo Effect (South Africa)

Hi friends, here’s another image from the lunar eclipse over South Africa last night. An amazing optical effect if I say so myself. This image of the lunar eclipse over South Africa was taken at 9:02pm using an extreme wide angle lens. This image is not manipulated or modified in any way whatsoever, this is what came straight out of camera. Most likely caused by misting on the lens due to the heavy dew fall last night, even though I was cleaning lenses with an anti-mist cloth every 2 minutes. I am pleased with the resulting image. Taken from Magaliesburg, South Africa

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