Cyclone Bianca - Perth Photography
Bicton Forshore, Western Australia - Prepares for cyclone Bianca
With news of the impending cyclone Bianca coming to wreak havoc on the city of Perth, Western Australia i was salivating at the thought of the capturing Perth's best storm photography since the storm that tore through Perth's Western Suburbs in March 2010.

Fortunately for Perth and unfortunately for storm photographers cyclone Bianca had faded dramatically by the time it hit Perth and we received little more than a good soaking for our lawns.

What cyclone Bianca did provide was some dramatic cloud formations that i knew would create powerful landscape images.  Heading out on Saturday i was looking for a good vantage point to capture the sky's looking into the sunset.

My first stopping point was Point Walter, though with the focal point being either the Sandbar facing North or the Jetty facing East, it wasn't right.  Moving on i started heading to either Leighton Beach / North Fremantle or Cottesloe where i knew i could look straight over the Indian Ocean as the sun set.

On the way, I stopped in-between Blackwall Reach in Bicton and the Bicton Baths.  This beautiful stretch of river is so scenic and the wind had died down making for ideal conditions for landscape photography.

The image above is at a little beach landing where people store their boats.  This shot is a 9 image stitch created in Photoshop CS5.  I also used a neutral graduated filter to help emphasise the power that mother nature can create when angry.

As with all my photographic expeditions lately, whenever i seem to get a landscape that I'm really happy with i manage to break something in my rush to get the photo.

This time shortly after this set of photos was taken the leg of my tripod wasn't secure and it my canon DSLR smashed onto one of the boats smashing the graduated filter.  Little damage for a great shot unfortunately but i must remember to not rush so much and enjoy the landscape photography experience a little more.


 
 
Well folks.  Adobe creative suite CS5 has been out for 2 days now and im trying to find out the good, the bad and everything inbetween.  One of the major improvements has been Adobe's changes to the lens correction feature which is now a lot more user friendly.  This appears to be great news for all real estate and architectural photographers, especially those who shoot with 35mm or digital SLR's.

The refine edge tool offers time saving in selecting specific parts of an image as well as enhancements to RAW processing including specific colour profiles for specific lens.  Which lens are included, im not sure on but apparently the focus is on common Canon and Nikon lens for the time being.

HDR (High Dynamic Range) feature now has a "remove ghost" option that eliminates any object that moves inbetween shots. This i believe should be very useful for me as i've always struggled with this.  How effectively it works is yet to be determined.

Overall it looks like there will be some features that make this a winner and better than CS4 which aside from technical bugs that were never solved, didn't really push the boundaries from the prevoious version CS3.

If anyone has CS5 (in particular  CS5 photoshop) i'd love feedback as to your thoughts?