Under pavilions of trees

Click here to view the whole image, at 1000 pixels wide.

I'm back at Hahndorf with this image ... and it's summer. You can tell at a glance because the trees are so lush. These are massive old deciduous trees; they turn red and gold in fall, and in winter they're skeletal, even though there's no such thing as snow in Australia ... well, not in this part of Aus, at least! Not even in the dead of winter. The trees make an incredible arch across the road. It's as if you're driving through a pavilion -- not just for a few meters, but for a long distance. This welcomes you as you enter the best-known small German town in the antipodes! The image was captured through the windscreen; the shutter speed was fast (to stop the action -- the car is moving!) and then the panorama was cropped out of it and digitally enhanced. See Gone Bush for tips and tricks on how to get great "through the windscreen" shots. Photo by Jade, 2006.

Rooms with a view

You're viewing part of this shot; click here to view the whole picture.

I love this kind of photo. I call them "texture shots," because you feel like you can reach out and touch ... they're practically "tactile," and to me they convey more of the feeling of actually being there than the wide landscapes. I take both, of course, and reinforce the landscapes with the texture shots. It's a result I find very evocative. The conditions were incredibly bright at Hahndorf, South Australia, when I got this picture. It's the top half of a shot taken from the car window as we drove past a roadside cafe. Under the vines at the bottom of the picture, there are actually tables in the deep shade and people enjoying brunch! I used a very fast shutter speed to get this, but the light was so bright, the picture has plenty of "substance" left. The camera was the Fuji Finefix S5600fd, and IrfanView was used to crop, adjust the gamma and ultra-saturate the color, for best effects. Photo by Jade, 2006.