Just Posted Another New Blog Post On My Live Site

If you are reading this, you are on my OLD blog site.
I just posted a new posting on Inspirational Light Painters and Night Photographers.
Head over to brentpearson.com.au to read all my new blog postings.

My List Of Most Inspiring Landscape Photographers

My blog has moved.

I just did a new posting on my new blog site. You can see it at http://brentpearson.com.au

Don’t look at this site any more!!!!!

It’s dead!!!

My Blog Has Moved!

Hi Folks

I’m pleased to announce that my blog has moved.  I have finally built a “proper” web site which is much more organised and will give other photographers better access to resources that they might find useful.

So this blog site will no longer be updated!

Here’s some of the features of the new site.

 

I have already started posting new blog postings and tutorials on my new site, so please adjust any bookmarks that you have.

Click here to head over to my new website  http://brentpearson.com.au

I hope to see you there.  I look foward to hearing what you think.

Brent

New Workshop Dates Announced

Hey folks

For those of you that were interested in my next workshops, I have now confirmed the dates.

• The next Seascape workshop is on Sat 11th Feb 2012 and Sun 12th Feb 2012 in Mona Vale
• The next Off Camera Flash workshop is on Sun 5th Feb  in Alexandria.

More information on each workshop can be found in the tabs at the top of this blog.

Regards

Brent

Photoshop Tutorial – Postprocessing The Deadvlei

Here’s a real quick photoshop tutorial that shows how I post-processed this iconic image taken at the Deadvlei in Namibia.

Because this is such a surreal location I wanted to reflect this in the post processing.  Because of it’s iconic nature, there are plenty of wonderful natural-looking images of the Deadvlei, so I was trying to do something a bit more abstract in the post processing to put my own mark on it.

 

I hope you enjoy this short tutorial.

Brent

Namibia – Abstract Landscapes

 

One of the highlights of my trip to Namibia was visiting the Deadvlei near Sesriem.  From the time I first saw photos from this amazing place I said to myself “this is somewhere that I just have to photograph”.   The textures of the dry lake bed…. the abstract shapes of the petrified trees….. the beautiful red/orange sand dunes surrounding the lake are all like something out of a Dali painting.

A light painted image taken at night.

I ended up doing three shoots at this location.  A sunset shoot, followed by a sunrise shoot, and then a sunset/night shoot.  Similar to Kolmanskop, this location was a photographers dream… lots of different ways you could approach the shoot.  Different compositions, lighting and post processing all combined to make this a pretty special and surreal landscape.

I deliberately went pretty hard with the post processing.  The reason for this was that there are plenty of lovely “natural prints”,  however because this is such a surreal landscape, I wanted to add a bit of surreal processing to the post production to create an image that was a bit different to everybody elses.  The top image looks incredible when printed large on fine art paper (and on super glossy).

 

I’ll follow up with a tutorial on my post processing for some of these images in a few weeks once I have finished my image processing.

 

Namibia – Portraits

Note: Please click on theses images to view them full-size… they go a bit fuzzy when reduced down.

On my trip to Namibia there were three genres that I wanted to photograph;

1. Ruinscapes (Kolmanskop etc.)
2. Landscapes (Deadvlei, Wolverdens etc.)
3. Portraits

I was particularly excited at the prospect of spending five days living with and photographing the Himba tribes of NorthWest Namibia.  While I had seen plenty of natural light photography, I really wanted to try to make different types of portraits of these photogenic people.

Inspired by the incredible personal work of Joey Lawrence, I packed my trusty Paul Buff Einstein light and my two favorite modifiers (Paul Buff 64″ Silver PLM and Westcott Apollo softbox) and decided to really try and make some stylistic environmental portraits using off camera flash techniques.

I had a ball making these images and I’m pretty happy with the way they turned out.  The beauty of the Einstein is that it throws out plenty of light and I can easily overpower the sun.  When I combine it with the ultra-efficient Parabolic Light Modifier (PLM), then I can easily get well over f64 of light out of the light setup which allows you to do some interesting environmental portraits during bright daylight.

Here's our rig in action. Jimmy (our translator) is holding the monopod.

Sometimes we used the sock over the PLM, and other times we shot with the straight silver bounce.   Most of the time we had our light on a light stand, but occasionally we put it on a monopod (as in the photo above).  While this is a 240v light, I use the Paul Buff mini vagabond to provide 240v on location… It’s incredibly small and light.

I also used my neutral density filter with some of the shots to open up my aperture and reduce the depth of field…. again to create more of a stylistic image.   I hope you enjoy the images.