plusphotoextract

Giddy up!

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Calgary, Alberta, Canada

This is my point of view riding the first horse I had ever gotten to know. She was almost exactly my age, and lived up until we were both 27. We were riding down this uneventful trail on somewhat of a bland day. But we were riding back, and she knew we were going home which means she would love to gallop home in order to get there faster. I noticed her beautiful mane flowing in the wind and thought it would be great to see what kind of photos I could get while riding.

Photographic Details
I wanted to create a sense of motion, so just like I often do, I think about using a ridiculously low shutterspeed. In this case, it's 1/20th of a second that does the trick for me. Don't get me wrong though, it's not easy and a lot of this is luck, I took nearly a hundred photos before I found one that captured the right feeling: the tossing of the mane, while maintaining enough blur in the right spots. This all helps create a much more dynamic feeling excitement while still being recognizable. It was also a thrill to try and stay on a galloping horse using one hand on the reins and another on my camera, yeehaw!

1/20th, f6.3, ISO 50 Canon 5D, Canon 16-35mm f2.8 Lens.

For #equinetuesday  curated by +Jillian Chilson.
#equinephotography   #horsebackriding   #travelphotography   #plusphotoextract  

Ghosts of South Georgia

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Gold Harbour, South Georgia, Antarctica The edge of the harbour that is home to 25,000 breeding pairs of king penguins. The sea is the key to life here, where penguins can bring krill and fish back to the mouths of their hungry chicks. This place was called “Gold Harbour” by whalers given it is full of large elephant seals and numerous king penguins. They were easy to capture and kill to be boiled for their blubber and oil, which was worth a lot of money in this last haven for whalers. In addition a lot of pyrite or “fools gold” had been found by Filchner’s German Antarctic Expedition in 1911.

 

Photographic details: I wanted to create a ghostly image with a lot of mood and drama, the long exposure technique works very well for this. With the extreme brightness of the mid day sun filtering through the overcast sun the longest exposure I could get was four seconds. In order to get the long exposure I wanted I had to mash 20 four second exposure images together to create a total of 80 seconds.

ISO50, f18, with a 5 stop ND filter, 20 4 second exposures combined into 80 seconds If you like this, do me a favour and please share!

Rainbow whale surprise

Antarctic Ocean Can you guess which species this is? I want to know how many whale watchers there are here, post your answers in the comments! I'll post in the comments later. Hint, it's a species seen often in the Antarctic, and if you've watched whale wars you definitely would have seen them before!

After an uneventful sunset mother nature decided to prove to us she’s always got something hidden up her sleeves. This is where travelling workshops is such an exciting thing. We are winding down for the night, some people have gone to bed, nobody is really expecting anything to happen on a calm evening. But we always have people posted on the bridge, and when something breaks through the waters surface it’s such a thrill to get on the ships loudspeaker and exclaim “There are whales off the starboard bow!”. The calm lull around the ship turns into a feverish buzz as people scramble for their cameras and hurry for the nearest exit to the outer decks.

As the cool evening air washed over me I had never seen such a stimulating canvas of colours painted onto the reflections of the sea. This whale was gingerly swimming around the ship, somewhat curious of what we could be. Talk about a perfect end to an evening.

Photographic Details: It was extremely dim outside given that the sun had already set, so I had to let in as much light as possible with ISO 1600 with a relatively slow shutter speed of 1/400th of a second at f5. This was the best I could do on a moving ship hand held with a telephoto lens. I just kept shooting away while this whale was bobbing in and out of the water.