Veebee

some great pano's Mr BARHUGGER

some great shots LTG. you really have the creative mind for photography.

Sigma's making some great glass. Just received my 150-600 C this morning with the USB dock. off to St Lucia & Hluhluwe in a few weeks so will get to test it properly then.

thanks. yes crop sensor for the extra reach. full frame for landscape and then also low light nature/wildlife shooting when I need to boost the iso to 6400 or more. I hired that Tamron lens to test it out, wide open it lacks some sharpness and f8 is about the sweet spot of that lens. But key with those shots is that I was really close to the birds and the bg was quite a distance away. I have just sold my canon 400 prime and bought the sigma 150-600 C this morning, needed that extra reach when using the 5D. Off to St Lucia next month so will get to test it out properly.

some birds. with settings Lilac Brested Roller - Canon 70D + 400L/5.6, iso640, 1/2500sec, f5.6, EV+1 Black shouldered kite. Canon 5d3 + Tamron 150-600, iso800, 1/400sec, f8 EV+1.3 south side view of a Pied Kingfisher. Canon 70D + Tamron 150-600, iso800, 1/1250sec, f8, EV+1.7

Thanks Bland. intentionally left the shadows this way to enhance the golden bit that was lit up at sunrise.

I think almost every shot will be processed, some less than others but most will run it through some basic adjustments. I always shoot RAW, and to be honest, settings won't help you much as every scene requires different settings... for landscape it is quite simple as you will shoot aperture mainly between f10-f16 [find the sweet spot of your lens], and iso on the lowest to avoid any noise.

Cathedral Peak from 1 of the trout dams in the area. Happy friday and a lekker weekend !

luckily I have no other half watching my finances, but I had to convince myself that it would be worth the $$$. I'm soo glad I did. I was riding cheap Diadora's for the past few months and experienced hot spots, and it stretched so much that I had a lot of play on my heel. First ride with new shoes was a 102km so no wear in period, but had no discomfort whatsoever and an immediate increase of power & speed with the carbon soles.

after being to a few local shops last week to try on shoes, I decided to go with the shimano r171's. Although in pics the black/white combo doesnt look all that good, I actually quite like it when its on my foot, clipped in.

Look at the attached price list from the agents of Kood SA. this is an older price list, but shouldn't have changed much. http://www.koodinternational.com/filters/p-fit.html K Price List.pdf Agents for CPT - http://www.dayprodigital.co.za/page4.html and Stephen from JHB can also assist. SGD Agencies CC 23 Triomf Street, Klopper Park, Germiston, , SA 0027 11 974 7844

the cheaper filters do work, but some have a weird colour cast, which gets worse if you stack filters or do long exposures. You can fix this in post quite easily though. I started off with Kood Filters a few years ago, a full set with holders and rings were like R800 which is not bad to learn and understand how they work.

there's many of the top guys that shoot without ND filters. by shooting multiple exposure's you will capture detail across the entire frame, and would then need to layer/blend. I think if you have advanced processing skills on both PS & LR then this would be easy, if not it would take hours or days to get right, and avoid halo's and weird transitions in the frame.

sounds and looks like a seriously great experience.

No you cannot blend on LR. The new LR 6 has a Hdr / merge function but I haven't used 6 as yet so can't comment on it.

sorry Gerald. Cant help with that. I don't and have never shot with a flash so have no knowledge whatsoever. But assume it has something to do with your shutter speeds vs flash duration speed. try shooting with a longer shutter speed and a short flash speed. and is the camera picking up the flash ? maybe a quick clean of the pins are needed as they sometimes get sticky when not in use.

an old image that I processed recently. Blyde River Canyon.

^^^ what Bland said. Remember you need a good, sturdy tripod for this. also get yourself a cable release remote to reduce any camera vibrations when you clicking away.

Yes for some reason we get sucked into all these damn expensive hobbies. If you shooting scene's where the horizon is not obstructed by anything then a hard grad will be the clear choice. But when you add mountains, tree's etc you will clearly see the transition lines. My opinion, don't buy sets as you will have almost no need for a 0.3 grad from either. Rather get a 0.6 & 0.9 HG and a 0.9 SG. The transition on a 0.6 soft grad is quite soft with majority of it actually being close to 0.3 - 0.45 so this does not serve much purpose. And you could also use the HG's as Full ND's if you shooting a lens with front element between 72-77mm.

it takes some time to get the hang of things. at first, shooting was easy for me but the processing was a huge challenge. Your shot in good, you just need to lift the exposure on the foreground. with "golden hour" shots, we always going to have a scene where the foreground is a few stops darker than the sky. Without the use of Grad ND filters its impossible to get it right in camera so you will have to shoot in bracketing, -1, 1, +1, if the FG is much darker then you would sometimes need to shoot +2 to get the colour and detail in. Thereafter you will need to merge or blend photo's. Photoshop CS6 would be a good tool to manually blend selected parts of the images to achieve a well balanced final product. If you want to work on single images, then you can use the grad filter or adjustment brush tool in Lightroom to edit specific areas. These guys are some of the best landscapers in SA. Check out their blogs and tutorials for some tips. Hougaard Malan http://www.hougaardmalan.com/ Mark Dumbleton http://www.markdumbleton.com/

Nice. this is something on my bucket list !! and would like to spend a night or 2 on the Amphi - attempted the Amphi before but the weather did a 360 so had to bail on that at the base of the chain ladders

The Amphitheatre. Shot at sunset, very flat sky with not much colours coming through so decided on a conversion.

Canon 70d+ 10-22, iso320, f13. Lee softgrad nd 0.9 + Bigstopper, single layer image processed in LR5.