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Author Topic: Mungo - Walls of China  (Read 3918 times)

Josh-H

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Mungo - Walls of China
« on: January 31, 2011, 11:27:46 pm »

I just got back from a few days photography at Mungo and the Walls of China in New South Wales (Australia). Amazing location for photography - if you can stand the heat of the day (40+ degrees celsius), the annoying blow flies by day and the vicious mosquitos at dusk and nighttime. Really, the place doesnt give you much of a break  ;D For anyone interested I have a back story to the trip on my blog at http://blog.jholko.com (was quite the epic getting there)

Anyway- that aside, this was my first trip into the Mungo area and the Walls of China features are wonderful for photography. This was taken around ten minutes after sunset. You can still just see a faint mauve glow in the eastern sky and the walls features are softly illuminated from light reflected off the high cloud.

Comments and thoughts welcome as always.
« Last Edit: January 31, 2011, 11:30:16 pm by Josh-H »
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Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Mungo - Walls of China
« Reply #1 on: February 01, 2011, 02:08:58 am »

Ahh... so lovely in its otherworldliness! Great colors, patterns, and composition. Great to see there are still some unseen sights on this planet (at least for me).

John R Smith

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Re: Mungo - Walls of China
« Reply #2 on: February 01, 2011, 05:50:17 am »

Josh

What an extraordinary landscape. I admire your tenacity in getting to this place and returning with amazing pictures like this. And the light is magical.

John
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Dave (Isle of Skye)

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Re: Mungo - Walls of China
« Reply #3 on: February 01, 2011, 08:30:08 am »

Hi Josh,

Great shot and I love the colours but (sorry there has to be a but) it seems to me that the line between the sky and the landscape does not look real, and so indicates to me, that this is a replacement sky, or the sky been cut out to a seperate layer and tweaked quite a lot before being pasted back into the image - please do not get me worng, I am not criticising your work per se, but if I can tell you have done this, then so can many others and so here is what I suggest you do to make the blend between different layers that bit more seamless and realistic looking.

When you have the edited sky layer situated behind the edited landscape layer, add a mask to the landscape layer and using a relatively small soft edge brush at somewhere between 2% - 10% or so (you will need to experiment here to find the best setting for that particular image), just gently feather (fade slightly) the landscape's edge until it looks natural and so part of the same image.

If I am right about the sky being a replacement and you do try the technique outlined above, then I would love to see the revised version and hear your thoughts on whether you agree that it looks more realistic.

Photobloke
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Eric Myrvaagnes

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Re: Mungo - Walls of China
« Reply #4 on: February 01, 2011, 09:46:11 am »

Josh,

Absolutely stunning. I'll echo the comments by Slobodan and John.

Eric
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RSL

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Re: Mungo - Walls of China
« Reply #5 on: February 01, 2011, 10:15:28 am »

Congratulations, Josh. It looks as if it was worth the pain.
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Eric Myrvaagnes

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Re: Mungo - Walls of China
« Reply #6 on: February 01, 2011, 01:05:41 pm »

Congratulations, Josh. It looks as if it was worth the pain.
Especially since you suffered the pain, while we get to enjoy the results.  ;)

Eric
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tom b

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Re: Mungo - Walls of China
« Reply #7 on: February 01, 2011, 01:14:52 pm »

Great shot Josh.

I remember the tourist shops in Mildura had signs saying that there were no tours during summer as it was just too hot to go out there in those temperatures.

What is amazing is that they ever considered having sheep farms in such an extreme environment.

Cheers,
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wolfnowl

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Re: Mungo - Walls of China
« Reply #8 on: February 01, 2011, 05:29:26 pm »

Looks like a really intriguing place to be.  We appreciate the results of your efforts!

Mike.
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Josh-H

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Re: Mungo - Walls of China
« Reply #9 on: February 01, 2011, 06:58:11 pm »

Gents, thanks all very much for the comments and kind words.

PhotoBloke - NO. I most definitely have not done any sort of the heavy handed manipulation like cutting in skies. I have a brief post on my blog (I think it was from a few months ago) about what my ethical standards are in relation to processing my photographs - but in short, I don't do this kind of heavy manipulation (or HDR). I have thousands of photographs in my LR library where I felt the sky (or whatever in the shot) was not up to snuff; hence the shots have languished unprocessed - I either get it in the field, or it doesn't see the light of day. This photograph is as shot with only lightroom standard development adjustments. The sky (and photograph as a whole) are as shot. I did use a 3-stop LEE Soft ND grad for this shot. The contrast between the sky and ground could be responsible for what you are seeing.

Edit - This was also shot at F8 on tripod with a very sharp lens, mirror lock-up, self timer, with a depth of field effectively out to infinity.

Thanks agin though to all for the feedback.  ;D
« Last Edit: February 01, 2011, 07:15:52 pm by Josh-H »
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Dave (Isle of Skye)

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Re: Mungo - Walls of China
« Reply #10 on: February 02, 2011, 08:16:44 am »

OK Josh I am really sorry for that and I am more than happy to stand corrected on this. I agree with you that it must be the light that is causing what I thought (wrongly) were the slight hard edged halos between the land and sky.

Please accept my apologies.  :)

Photobloke
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usathyan

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Re: Mungo - Walls of China
« Reply #11 on: February 02, 2011, 09:16:49 am »

The photos do justice to your travel woes...Both the story and the images are amazing. Thanks for sharing! For a while there initially, I thought this was shot in China...but, thanks for the writeup for us the less traveled ones :)
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Riaan van Wyk

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Re: Mungo - Walls of China
« Reply #12 on: February 04, 2011, 07:10:56 am »

Lovely photo Josh. The colours and texture is sublime.
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