Showcasing the beauty of Mother Nature
Tsowa Safari Island was a beautiful place to stay in the Zambezi National Park in Zimbabwe. Getting there involved a game drive through the park, with some dramatic views of the river valley, and then arriving at a boat launch and transferring to a small craft for a short crossing to the island. The afternoon we arrived, we set out for a sundowner birdwatching cruise. While not a traditionally good time of day or direction for photos, I love seeing the sun peaking through the fluffy clouds.
During my recent tour in southern Africa, we headed out for a morning of birding, and started the day walking along the edge of Zambezi River. We were a few kilometres upstream of Victoria Falls, where the water was flowing at leisurely pace and we could safely walk along the rocky bank. While most of the group was focused on trying to find new birds, or spotting birds on distance sand bars and tree branches, I was enjoying the beauty of the sunrise and the rapidly changing colours in the sky. When we finished along the edge of the river, we returned to our vehicles for a picnic breakfast before a leisurely drive around some of the birding sites in Victoria Falls.
Even though it is the start of spring, it is still fairly colourless around my house, and still some sizeable snowbanks that are stubborn to fully melt. The last few days I have felt desperate for a bit of colour, so I tried to find a little in the images I still have left to edit.
I worry a bit that I will run out of images before I have the opportunity to travel or find something of interest locally to photograph, but I will cross that bridge if I get to it. Given how little time I can dedicate to photograph currently, it probably won’t be a problem any time soon.
Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.
I’m carrying on with the sunset images from yesterday, but this time with a monochrome twist. I think the texture of the clouds comes out really nice in a black and white image.
I’ve noticed a few days over the past week some absolutely beautiful sunsets on my afternoon walks, but I haven’t been in a place to capture them with my camera. Still, I have noticed the beautiful colours in the clouds and the sky, and stopped for a few moments to appreciate the beauty. I really think both sunrises and sunsets are far more spectacular when there are a few clouds in the sky.
I decided to look through my catalogue for some nice sunset images to share, and found a few from my two trips to Botswana in 2015 and 2017. That is one of my very clear impressions from the brief time that I have been fortunate enough to spend in Botswana; epic sunrises and sunsets, especially in the Okavango Delta.
Wishing everyone a fantastic week ahead!
I found a few more images that were similar to do some side by side editing between Lightroom and Capture One Express for raw processing. I continue to be impressed with the colour and detail that Capture One brings out of my Fuji files.
I edited these photos on different days and didn’t cross check to try to make them look the same, but just to bring out the best in them. I think the colour rendering is nicer on the Capture One version as it has less of a magenta cast, and generally it feels to me a bit richer with more depth.
Because I need to keep the file sizes manageable for the webpage, some of the differences that I see when looking at the images within the editing programs doesn’t reflect in the versions I post online, but, I think these give a good example of what I am experiencing with this new (to me ) software.
Have a great week everyone!
I’ve had a lovely five days off of work (and school) which has given me a great opportunity to dig into a bit of editing. I found a few images that I had shot with my infrared filter to work on, which has been a lot of fun. These were taken on different days, and I didn’t try to make things consistent between the images, but instead just edit them how they felt right to me.
I had an email from Fuji a couple of days ago advertising a new version of the free Capture One Express software, and decided to download it and give it a try. Since I can’t go anywhere to take photos, playing around with new software at least gives a different spin to what I have already been looking at for some time.
I’ve been pretty unsettled with my photo workflow; I used Lightroom for years, then switched to On1 Photo Raw, and then switched back to Lightroom. I have other photo software as well, such as Topaz Studio and Luminar, but found that neither suited my purposes as my basic editor, though both have their place as a secondary editor through Photoshop.
I’ve watched a 7 minute quick start video on Capture One and then decided to edit a couple images using that as my starting point, and a couple others from the same area in Lightroom to see what the difference would be. While the Capture One Express lacks some key features such as spot removal and watermarking capabilities, there are other options to do those tasks. What I was really interested in was what software made the images look the best they can. From my very brief test, it looks like it will be worth the time to explore Capture One in much more depth.
These images were all taken at the Potholes on the Panorama Route in South Africa. It’s an area with beautifully red tinted rocks and lots of small waterfalls. We were there just before noon so there were lots of deep shadows in areas and very high contrast.
These next two images weren’t in the exact same area, so there were actual differences in the colour tone of the rocks, it is not just an element of the processing software.
Comparing only two sets of images is definitely not enough to formulate any type of solid opinion on a new (to me) software product, but the results have me really excited to play around and see what I can create. Capture One Express, at first glance, has a much larger selection of Fuji film simulations compared to Lightroom, and I really like the look they give an image to start the editing process. For both of these images, I selected “Film Standard” curve in conjunction with the ICC profile that was pre-loaded for my camera.