Finally I have received a few author’s copies of a book “The World through the eyes of a blogger” where I wrote a chapter about Australian outback. As a travel photographer I’ve got photos published in books, booklets, magazines etc. I also have a couple of articles published in local magazines, but this time it’s different. It’s a full story with photos. It was published in Russia (yeah, in Russian as well) with support from National Geographic Traveller magazine and LiveJournal – one of the most popular blogging platform. The book consists of 27 stories illustrated with photos about interesting places around the globe; most of them are off the beaten path. The cover story about our planet was written by Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin. Other stories in the book are about Namibia, Vietnam, Syria, Mongolia, Holland, Singapore, India, Papua (province), Iran, China, Tibet, Yemen, Botswana, Bulgaria, Algeria, Israel, Columbia, USA, Ecuador, Egypt, Costa Rica, Tunisia, Norway, New Zealand and Alaska (yeah, it’s USA, but it’s toooooo far from the mainland) are written by different people – professional photographers, businessmen, artists etc. Very different people, very different approach to writing and showing the world around us. But it’s quite interesting book and I’m proud to be a part of that team.

Also I received a gift from russian travel photographer Michael Vorobyov – his photo-book about Huangshan (Yellow Mountains) and Li River in China. The whole story behid that is that my wife is a travel writer and after we spent a few weeks in China she wrote a series of articles about travelling in Huangshan and Zhangjiajie mountains, Longji Rice Fields and along Li River, explaining all itineraries, where to stay, providing maps, describing hotels, where to buy tickets, prices etc. So Michael used these articles for his photo trip and once he came back home he published a photo book and sent a copy to me as appreciation of the articles. For those of you who wants to read the articles I’ve got a couple of notes: 1) All articles are in Russian, however in the right-upper corner you can select a desired language and Google will translate it for you. Hopefully it translates correctly. 2) All maps are in English. Maps for Huangshan mountains have sunrise/sunset locations. If you are planning to go there it’s worth reading the articles. Hope that’ll help you in your trips to China. And Japan as well. And may be South Korea, New Zealand and Australia. Who knows. She has articles on that too.

A glorious sunrise lights the morning sky over the Bunyeroo Valley and Heysen Range in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia as it’s seen from the Razorback Lookout. This view is one of the best views in the Flinders Ranges. It is especially magnificent at sunrise.

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More images: Flinders Ranges Stock Images | Desert and Outback Landscape Stock Images | Landscape Stock Photography

A great way to see Wilpena Pound in Flinders Ranges, SA, Australia is from the air. This puts it into perspective and enables you to appreciate the vastness of its formation. It is the ‘must do’ experience for all visitors. Scenic flights over the Flinders Ranges, Wilpena Pound, Arkaroola, Lake Eyre and the outback of South Australia are very popular with travellers who have only limited time to explore this ancient land of vast distances.

It is claimed that the word ‘wilpena’ means ‘place of bent fingers’ or ‘cupped hand’ in the local Aboriginal dialect. ‘Pound’ is an old English word that means ‘an enclosure for animals’, which was how the pound was in fact used by early pastoralists. Today, the Adnyamathanha people translate the word Wilpena as Ikara meaning ‘meeting place’. The Aboriginal Dreamtime story tells that two giant serpents ‘Akurra’ (or ‘Arkaroo’) created Wilpena Pound (‘Ikara’). The walls of the Pound are the bodies of the ‘akurra’ and the head of the male serpent forms St Mary Peak, the highest peak in the Flinders Ranges at 1170m, and Beatrice Hill is the head of the female serpent.

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In different landscape photography articles I often see a recommendation to use very small aperture like f/22 to get maximum depth-of-field (DOF) have every thing in focus from “you nose till horizon”. (This also known as “near-far composition”). While this is absolutely right I cannot agree with that advice. Why? Simply because the quality of the picture will be much worse than with using aperture f/8 or f/11. All lenses are designed to have the best possible image quality at so called “sweet spot”, which is around f/5.6 – f/11. That applies to old lenses and that applies to modern super-quality lenses like Nikon 14-24/2.8. The graph that illustrates the quality of the images at different apertures is below.

This graph is not for a particular lens. But all lenses behave in the same way Carl Zeiss, Nikon, Canon, you name it. As you can clearly se we have quality degradation at f/22. How much? That depends on the lens. Quality degradation is caused by diffraction around aperture blades. Also that depends on the medium we are using for capturing photos. Back in old film days photographers could easily use f/22 to get max DOF because the only diffraction they had was around aperture blades.

Now in modern digital world we have diffraction in CCD/CMOS sensor in cameras as well. And the amount of diffraction depends on pixel dimensions. Pixel dimensions depend on the size of the sensor and amount of pixels. The bigger your sensor the bigger pixels the sensor has and therefore the smaller aperture you can use. But at the same time more megapixels you have on the sensor then the smaller your pixels the sensor has and therefore the larger aperture you have to use to prevent diffraction. If you haven’t read about that please check article on “Lens Diffraction and Photography” on Cambridge in Colour photography tutorial site. It has a nice calculator so you can check your sensor against different apertures. Note, the Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera has pixel size 6.4µm and pixel area ~41 µm². It’s not in the list in the calculator, but you can use Canon EOS 20D/350D instead with roughly the same pixel area 41.2 µm². If you wonder why Canon EOS 20D/350D have the same pixel size as Canon 5DMkII please bear in mind that even if it has full-frame sensor it has much bigger resolution that makes pixels smaller.

The image above shows diffraction in Canon EOS 5D Mark II sensor at different apertures. Again as you can see stopping down to f/22 causing image quality degradation. I can clearly see the difference between f/11 and f/16. I don’t want to compromise photo quality in landscape photography and therefore I do not use apertures smaller than f/16. Usually it is f/8 or f/11. So what is the solution if we do need to have max DOF?

Well… there are 3 options:

1. Get sharp foreground and leave horizon slightly out of focus. That works quite well due to peculiarity of human perception.
2. Get closer and shoot with wide lens. By using wider lens you are increasing DOF.
3. Capture a few frames with different focus and then stack them in Photoshop. Its complicated but it gives excellent results. As an example this photo of Cascades on Eurobin Creek was made from 6 frames at 100mm and f/11. How to stack images you can find on NaturePhotographers.net site in great article “Blending Exposures in Photoshop” by John Williams.

Hopefully this information helps you to achieve better quality with maximum depth-of-field and using best lens apertures.

PS. Also if you want to read more about maximising Depth-of-Field and better understand hyper-focal distance please have a look at the following article: The best and useful “Depth of Field” explanation.

PPS. This post was already ready and scheduled in my blog when I saw an article “Lens Diffraction” by great landscape photographer Ian Plant. Well… that’s just a coincidence.

By the way he has a few great eBooks on landscape photography, composition and light. Definitely worth reading.

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After some nice and cool magic light at Cape Bauer heavy clouds covered entire sky and we decided to go back to a motel at Streaky Bay. It was absolutely unexpected when the last rays of sun streaked through the clouds and highlighted evening sky. We stopped our cars and feverishly tried to find a composition. Well… We were standing on a road in a middle of nowhere – what composition you could create if you have only a road and a sky? Not too much choices. It was a breathtaking and spectacular sunset show from start to finish with a wide variety of colours and cloud formations. The moral of this story is never leave a nice place at sunset even if it is cloudy and until it’s completely dark – there could be a little present from the mother nature for patient photographers.

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For the first time in the last seven years I do not want to go anywhere during Easter holidays. No, I do not want to say at home, but do not want to drive 500-1000km per day as I’m really tired doing that and I’ve got so much to do here at home in Sydney. I want to re-shoot some interresting locations on Sydney’s Norther Beaches and NSW Central Coast. After reading Simplifying Composition by Bruce Percy I was really inspired by his approach and right now I’m re-thinking my approach in landscape photography. And our famous beaches are perfect places for trying that. Don’t know if there would be some nice photos after Easter holidays but it’s definitely good time to try something new without any rush and long drives. So stay tuned.

And Happy Easter to everyone! See you next week.

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