 Diamond Beach an hour or so after dawn with the sun still low on the horizon The weather is going to be terrible. Just prepare for it. Absolutely bloody awful. Iceland is renowned for the fickle moods of its weather. For the island, weather is like a petulant teenager, blowing hot and cold with gale force tantrums and days and days of melancholy gloom interspersed by moments of extraordinarily beautiful sunshine. At least that’s how the theory goes. In fact in 2018 the year’s weather held pretty much to this pattern. When we arrived in June of last year we were greeted with 2 days of half sunshine. “Oh, you’ve seen our summer”, exclaimed a waiter who was serving us at the famous Ork Pizzeria. So, drenched and cold we visited and shot waterfalls and mountains, streams and extraordinary vistas in the drizzle and downpour.
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 I am admittedly stubborn when it comes to post-production. Although I am a firm advocate of continuously learning new techniques, I do tend to be late on the uptake. As is the case with Adobe’s Merge to HDR pano feature in the latest version of Camera RAW (version 11.3). For a long time I have had a tedious, but effective, workflow creating HDR panoramic both for my own images, as well as for clients. The technique has involved layering images and selectively blending them into individual frames which are then stitched together to form a panoramic. The technique was long-winded, difficult to learn, easy to mess up, but extremely effective. Then Adobe gives everyone the ability to do it at the click of a button. It seems almost like cheating it’s so easy.
Here is the new process in a few easy steps:  One of the headline features when Capture One Pro 12 (C1 announced earlier this year the ability to create luminosity masks and apply adjustments in a layered fashion to an image). This is a fantastic addition that means there is one reason less (potentially) to dive into Photoshop. It isn’t quite as accurate as working with luminosity masks and layers in Photoshop itself, but it is close enough that for many photographers it can negate the need for the fully fledged bitmap editor (PS).
 It is quite an eerie experience when the silence is so profoundly deep that it roars in your ears. The vastness of space seems to swallow everything and you are left feeling tiny; insignificant against the towering walls of red sand that enclose the vast arena where you stand. Still and silent, the skeletons of trees long dead raise their boughs to the sky in a kind of preparation; a graceful slow dance with its movements in epochs rather than moments. Time slows.
Photographers who do a lot of landscape photography are well aware of the dirt and debris that can build up inside the tubes and locks of their tripods over time. It actually isn't that difficult to strip and clean a tripod, but a lot of photographers are nervous about doing it. Below is a short video outlining the easy steps to dismantling, cleaning and re-greasing your tripod to ensure a longer life and better handling. Enjoy.  One of the easiest ways to improve both the speed with which you work on your images, as well as your overall experience when working with an editing app, is knowing the shortcuts. So, we've put together the shortcuts that we use the most when editing images. Yes, there are going to be some shortcuts that are missing from this collection. These are the ones that we use all the time. You can also see the full set of shortcuts that are available to Lightroom isn't as customizable out of box as Photoshop is unfortunately. If you want to change keyboard shortcuts you have to do so via the actual operating system (Windows/ Mac OS) by diving into System Preferences. It's easier to get used to the shortcuts on offer quite frankly. The trick to learning shortcuts is to choose one shortcut for a tool that you use regularly and force yourself to use just that one shortcut instead of the menu item for that day (e.g. use the key B instead of selecting the brush tool from the tool palette). In almost no time a muscle memory will start to develop and you will soon forget how to find the tool through the menu (this can be equally frustrating though). Still, I personally prefer knowing the shortcut and not knowing where it is in the menu to having to menu-dive every single time I work in PS. Below is a downloadable files for both Mac Os and Windows PC versions of our Lightroom Shortcuts that matter. Let us know if they help. 
 The hard red dirt feels almost like concrete underneath the feet. Despite the hardness, loose dust is kicked up in the air as soon as the hard ground is broken. Apart from a thin, barely visible line of clouds on the horizon, the sky is an open blue expanseless blue. Groups of men, their skin shades of chocolate, their eyes, lost under the shade of every variety of hat and cap, walk in conversation with one another. Herds of long-horned cattle, the famous Zebu of Madagascar grunt and low as they are coralled and herded into tight groups under the gaze of the elder men.
 One of the easiest ways to improve both the speed with which you work on your images, as well as your overall experience with working with an editing app, is knowing the shortcuts. So, we've put together the shortcuts that we use the most when editing images.
 Before any major workshop we usually send out a suggested equipment list. The emphasis here is on the word ‘suggested’. One can always bring more or less on a workshop. Indeed, there are professional travel photographers who travel only with a Fujifilm X100t, an iPhone and backup hard drive. Being geared more towards landscape photography we tend to pack a little more into our camera bags. The kit below is the equipment that Emil would take with him to Madagascar, Iceland or Namibia for landscape photography (an important addition is a Macro lens which is not pictured here).
Recorded on location in Spitzkoppe, Namibia, this is a basic workflow to create a stitched panoramic image in Adobe Lightroom. The movie is a resource for photographers on the Nature's Light Composing The Dunes Workshop. |
Nature's Light
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