An Article About Addo

And so enters the month of September 2010...is it just me or has this year just gone faster than the previous one? Things are really steamrolling along this year. The much anticipated Soccer World Cup 2010 has come and gone, and I think our country has done itself proud. Unfortunately there are now a few things in the aftermath that could unsettle all the momentum our wonderful nation has built up.

But enough of that before I change this blog into a socio-political one..

We have just returned from an amazing (albeit short) road trip which took us to areas we had not visited in quite a while. As a big fan of South Africa's National Parks and a big fan of the self-drive safari (maybe it's because of budgetary constraints as well hehe, but I DO so love finding my own sightings and making the most of them photographically), I was happy to make my first real trip to the Addo Elephant National Park in the Eastern Cape province. I had only been there once in the past for a quick drive-through en route to elsewhere, and this time we managed to book a 2-night stay in one of the safari tents of the Main Rest Camp.

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The narrow escape with the Lionscape...

So, I am back from a very exciting and fulfilling trip to Dullstroom and the Madikwe Game Reserve. Not only were there loads of mind-blowing photographic opportunities, but I got to spend some quality time with my wife, a few good friends and like-minded photographers like Gerry van der Walt and Kerry de Bruyn.

I thought you might get a good chuckle out of the story I want to share, as well as have even more appreciation for the image it produced upon reading it.

We set out on Tuesday morning at 5AM to drive to a section of the Madikwe Game Reserve called the Madikwe Plains...a vast open stretch of African savannah that is reminiscent of the Serengeti in many ways. We got there well before the sun peeked over the horizon, and there were some wildebeest and springbok visible on the plains, with nice mountain ridges and some clouds that were adopting glorious colour tones from the rising sun.

In a great mood to make the most of this landscape, Gerry and I hopped off the Land Rover with our cameras and tripods and started setting up in front of the Landy in the dirt road, looking to the West to capture the colours of the sunrise on the plains. All of a sudden my darling wife asked: "What's that in the road?"

When I turned my head, a cold shudder ran down my spine and tingled in the tips of my toes...even though the sun hadn't completely risen, the shape that was lying about 20 meters up ahead in the road was unmistakeably that of a full-grown male lion...and he was looking straight at us. We could certainly have broken some kind of record for high-jumping with our attempts to scramble back into the vehicle! All the while the lion was just lying there, minding its own business. It's kind of funny when you look back at it now...

Here is a shot I snapped very quickly after we'd hopped back into the relative safety of the game viewer...

As we drove closer, it turned out to be one of a coalition of 2 brothers who were dominant on these plains, but this one seemed to have bit on the short end of the stick in a scuff with his brother recently. The next moment he broke out roaring right next to us! 

A few moments later his brother answered from across the plains.


It was quite a surreal experience...they kept roaring at each other periodically, and we kept trying different photographic compositions. In the end, one of my favourites from the trip is this last one. I held my camera way down the side of the Land Rover, went ultra-wide with my wide-angle lens, and snapped 3 exposures, of which I used 2 to blend this final image together. One exposure was used for the sky and mountains (underexposed) and one for the lion and plains (zero exposure).


Here is my lion in high dynamic range...(remember to click on the images for higher res viewing)

 I would love to hear what you think about my "experience" and the resulting shots! :)


Thanks for keeping a watchful eye on my meager blog...


I will be changing the overall content of this blog to cover more of my photography than just "HDR" or "blending" since I am in the process of constructing an official homepage and will link this as the official blog to my page.


Keep shooting!!


Morkel Erasmus

Valley of Winelands - Paarl

For my first post in February 2010 (my does this year rocket past - even faster than last year!!) I thought I'd share another image from our trip in December 2009 to the Western Cape province of South Africa.

This area plays host to some of the best scenery, best wine estates and best restaurants in the country.

This 3-exposure HDR was shot from the wine-tasting lawn on the Seidelberg Wine Estate near the town of Paarl. The view looks over the Simonsberg mountain and the Franschhoek valley to the far left.

I hope that, if this serene scene finds you behind your desk wishing you were somewhere on the road to a beautiful place, that you will feel as if you could be on this lawn, tasting the fine wine, looking out over this lovely valley.

(remember to click on the photo for a better viewing size)

If you stumble across this post - please drop a comment telling me where you are now, and what you are doing! This way we can all share a moment in time.

Keep healthy and productive and keep clicking those cameras wherever you go!

Morkel Erasmus

There be giants here...

This past December we spent some time in the Kruger National Park - oh wait, it's now called the 'Greater Kruger Transfrontier Park'. The summer sees the bushveld transformed from the dull yellow and brown of winter into a lush green paradise. This also makes spotting the wildlife a little trickier, but it also brings a lot of beautiful migrant birds from the Northern Hemisphere.


We headed north to avoid the hustle and bustle of the southern part of the park. The north is quieter - not just in terms of visitor numbers but the game is also more spread out. But the sightings you DO get are a lot better since most of the time there isn't a traffic jam at any of the sightings.


The north of Kruger is also where most of the larger elephants roam. The vegetation suits them - and if you ask me - the smaller number of tourists also suits them...


We came across this bulky bull north of the Shingwedzi rest camp on a rainy day when we were the only ones driving out.

Applying HDR to this picture helped me pull a lot of detail from the moody rain clouds behind the elephant, as well as from its skin texture. I also quite like this shot as a black and white conversion.

As you travel to the utmost northern part of Kruger, you meet less and less people, and you also wind your way to a magical place called 'Pafuri'. This is a region of lush riverine forests, exotic birdlife and the ruins of ancient civilizations. The Levuvhu river winds through a dense fevertree forest and ends up joining the Limpopo river at a junction called "Crook's Corner". This 'corner' gained its notorious name from the fact that many fugitives from justice came here to escape the arms of the law of South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia). At the time the place was literally a no-man's land and all the fugitives would sit and watch as the law-enforcement from the 3 countries fought over who could arrest them.

Here are some shots I took while driving through the area. You are not allowed to get out of your car so these were all taken from the car window.

I could spend hours in these tranquil forests.


So, the next time you book a trip to Kruger, don't just hang around the nexus of Skukuza and Lower Sabie, even Satara. Head north, and let your soul unwind...


Till next time...take care.


Morkel Erasmus

The Kalahari - where your tired soul can find rest, red sand and respite...

Hi everyone...

As promised, I've got a lot of catching up to do on trips I've done in the past year!

In September 2009 we were fortunate enough to go on a marvellous 8-day trip to the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in South Africa. This unique National Park straddles the border between South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, and you can actually enter it from either of these countries.

The Kalahari is a funny place...if you've never been there, you wonder what makes people go back there time after time and can't figure out what the hype is about. But - if you've been there - you keep finding your heart aching to get back there, gaze upon its red sand and endless skies, and drink in the thundering silence.

The sunsets were just fantastic - glorious splashes of light falling onto a piece of earth that reflects it beautifully.

The first clouds of spring rain were building up during one morning of our trip, but unfortunately for the fauna and flora it never really rained that week - although the turbulent clouds made for some dramatic contrasts against the red sand and golden grass...

The cornerstone of life in the Kalahari is the Camelthorn tree...this tree provides life and sustenance and much-needed soil minerals to many of the animals which call this arid semi-desert home. You will see it standing solitary against a dune in the photo above, and also in the shot below as the road leads you between two of them.

As you can see in these photos - the clouds can be really something in the Kalahari...and as a landscape photographer this really helps you fill the frame with elements that engage the viewer's eye, and in some cases, serve as leading lines to lead you through the image.

At sunrise and sunset the clouds also help to capture and reflect that sweet golden light that every photographer hunts after. This sunrise shot was taken early one morning behind our tent:

The beauty about HDR photography is that it's not limited to only landscape shots for example...I have and am still continuing to explore new ways to apply this to the kind of shots I find myself taking. My first love photographically has always been wildlife - and it was only obvious that I should start dabbling with wildlife HDR shots.

As an example - here is a shot taken on the dunes in the Kgalagadi one evening as the sun set behind a herd of grazing oryx.

As this blog progresses I will show you more of what I mean when applying this to different areas of photography such as wildlife photography...

Thanks for reading, and keep watching this space...! :)

Morkel

Storms on the Highveld...

Most of you who've been to the Highveld of South Africa know what it's like. Endless rolling plains and knolls - green in the summer and brown in the winter. Lots of power lines, pylons, smoke stacks and eucalyptus trees (which is an intruder species in South Africa by the way).

But what you can also find on the Highveld, especially in spring and early summer, are enormous thunderstorms. And I do mean some mean storms.

I happen to live in a town called Secunda on the Highveld region of Mpumalanga, and went out to a nearby farm the other day to do some landscape photography amidst the brewing of another belter of a storm.

This particular farm offers some respite in terms of just seeing the power lines and power plants on all sides on the horizon, particularly since there are old ruins standing there. As the rain started pelting me (I had to keep wiping the lens clean), I had a great time trying different compositions and takes on the scenery around. The grass is already quite green from the continuous rain.

The clouds opened for a brief respite in the distance, and I took my shot:

I love how these ruins stand against the storm, weathered and worn, but withstanding for another year, until gradually the elements take their toll and all the man-made clutter starts to fade away.

I've always said that if I had a farm, it would be in the bushveld or the Kalahari...but being on this farm made me realise - any darn ol' piece of land to call my own outside of the confines of a town or city would be just FINE!!

I walked around some more since the rain was only coming down in spontaneous droplets crashing into my face every 10 seconds or so...(made me think of Forrest Gump, the legend, talking about "big ole fat rain"). There was a cattle pen nearby in which a lovely whitish-grey horse was trotting around listlessly, with its reign (made of nylon ski rope) dangling loosely in the sweltering wind.

As I saw this beautiful animal within the small pen - the wires around it being easily clearable with a single jump - and its reign flapping in the wind, it made me wonder how comfortable we've become in our 'cages', knowing freedom is just within reach, yet being fearful to take the 'leap' because we do so love the comfort of our chains and boundaries...hence this photo was born, one of my favourites - entitled FREEDOM...

I will leave you at that for now...some more interesting shots to be seen from this location, as I continue to explore Southern Africa in High Dynamic Range.......

Welcome to SAFFAscapes...

WELCOME!!

Hi everyone, and welcome to the SAFFAscapes Photo Blog...

I find myself constantly traveling to various parts of Southern Africa, either on holiday, on business or for the heck of it...

My fascination with photography in general, and more recently with HDR photography as a medium, has spurred me to start this blog to showcase the awesome natural beauty of God's creation as seen in Southern Africa, conveyed through the art of HDR photography.

Now you might as...what is HDR photography??? Quite simply put, it is a modern technique in digital photography whereby we attempt to convey a scene in a way that more resembles what the human eye would have seen if you were there with me. Oftentimes you stand with a lookout on a magnificent vista, taking it all in and being awed by it - but when showing the photo to your friends after explaining the grandeur of it all, they just don't seem as awed as you would've wanted them to be....which is understandable given that the human eye can take in considerably more light and dynamic range than a camera can with just a single exposure.

Onto the scene comes HDR - High Dynamic Range - photography. Now, you take a few different exposures of the same scene (read TRIPOD or STEADY HAND ;)), exposing each time for a different part of the scene (e.g. the sun/sky, the background, the foreground) to get the most dynamic detail out of each section of the scene. Finally, you blend them together to create a combined picture that brings together the best parts of your different exposures.

Capeesh??

Let's take an example.

Me and my wife and a couple of our friends were very privileged to be able to hike the Fish River Canyon in Namibia earlier this year (May 2009). Before starting our hike, we set off to the main view point to take in all we can of the magnificent view of the Canyon.

I took a photo of the scene we saw. It was quite hazy, and it was raining over the far reaches of the canyon. The colours and textures of the rocks were amazing. Somehow, the single photo just doesn't do it justice...here it is (with some basic tweaks in Photoshop):



Now, you can see just how hazy the camera made it look - but in fact we saw much more than that - our eyes allowed us to see fine detail in the canyon and also cut through the haze to see into the distance.

Here is the final result of my HDR blending (and some other tweaks in Photoshop)



I'm sure you can see the difference. There are actually many ways to produce an HDR image. Many people prefer doing manual blending using gradient masks in Photoshop, while others prefer Photomatix, an app specifically developed for HDR imaging. I tend to use both, depending on the shot and the end-result I envisage. In this example, I used Photomatix to create a full-blown surrealistic HDR, and blended this back with the original shot in Photoshop to enhance the details and colours of the brooding clouds and the eroded earth.

Well - that's an overiew of what I want to accomplish/share with this blog. There are some developments coming up (which I'll share later) which will allow me to travel much more and hopefully make many interesting additions to this blog.

I already have so many images and experiences to share from our trips during the past year...so if you would like to read and view some more, please subscribe and go on this journey of our wonderful part of the continent with me...

You are especially welcome if you currently live/work abroad and just need that intermittent reminder of where you come from...:)

Blessings,

Morkel Erasmus