reflections - colinmunrophotography.com/blog

Pacific Harbour Lagoon at dawn

May 14, 2020Written by colinmunro

Pacific harbour Lagoon, Viti Levu, Fiji. The story behind one of my favourite images and a link to buy fine art prints and wall art of this image at colinmunroimages.com

Some of the photographs I am most pleased with come completely unexpectedly. I found myself in the tiny settlement of Pacific Harbour, on the south coast of Viti levu, Fiji’s largest island, not to take landscape photographs but to try and capture images of bull and tiger sharks with the nearby diving operation, Beqa Adventure Divers. The dives went ahead, and were very successful, the dive operation was extremely professional and I gained some excellent shots. But that story is not what this blog is about. This is about the shot below, and how it came be.

Sunrise over Pacific Harbour Lagoon, Viti Levu, Fiji. Fine art print for sale. — Sunrise over the Pacific Harbour Lagoon, Viti Levu, Fiji

After dinner the previous evening I had retired to my room to begin preparing my camera equipment. For every professional photographer this is a ritualistic affair, and especially so for underwater photographers where one un-noticed hair across an ‘o’ ring seal, or one grain of sand lurking in the shadows of a machined seal groove can not only result in you gaining no images whatsoever, it is also likely to spell the death of your very expensive camera and lens, rendering irretreivably seizing delicate mechanisms and shorting multiple electronic circuits. By the same token, the camera is controlled by a series of sealed buttons, levers and gears, all precisely aligned to facilitate operation through the metal housing. A millimetre misalignment in setup, and one can find oneself frantically operating a control at a crucial moment … with nothing happening and no way to resolve the problem underwater. So cleaning, assembling and checking camera systems becomes a quasi-religious ritual. Once finally satisfied with my endevours, I retired for an early night. Adrenaline was coursing in my veins however, so despite the previous days long road journey I woke early. Through the glass doors of my room I could see it was still dark, with just a slight reddish tinge low in the sky. But I was wide awake and the pre-dawn was filled with sound; frogs, insects and birds I did not recognise croaked, chirped and called, irresistibly beconing me out. So I dressed quickly, grabbed my land camera, my first digital SLR (my underwater camera was still a film camera back then, the iconic Nikon F4). I checked the settings and battery power and headed out. Padding across the dew laden grass I arrived at the edge of the lagoon in only a couple of minutes. I could see mudskippers perched on the roots of mangroves, plopping into the water below as soon as I approached. At that point I had no clear idea what I wanted to photograph. As this was planned as purely a diving trip I did not have a suitable lens for capturing small mudskippers or any shy wildlife with me. It was more about enjoying the early morning and having a camera with me, just in case. As I stood at the water’s edge, watching mudskippers and fiddler crabs feeding on the soft mud, I could also see the sky change. The sky above me lightened to a deep cyan, while just above the silhoutted mangroves and palms it turned deep burned orange while whispy clouds stood out deep gunmetal blue. And all this was reflected in the still lagoon waters. I took shot after shot. Every minute the sky would look quite different from the previous. Back then digital SLRs did not have the electronics to to produce noise free images at high ISOs, so I was shooting at ISO 125 to keep the images clean and faithful. To compensate in the low light I was shooting with the lens wide open at a 50th of a second, stabilising myself against a tree. I remained there for what seemed like an hour but was in fact no more than 20 minutes; the sun comes up fast in the tropics. As the sun cleared the trees I headed back to my room and the breakfast.

The rest of the day was a frenzy of activity. The shark dives can wait for another blog, except to say that I did indeed flood the housing of my underwater video (but not my stills camera) through some carelessly missed specs of grit in the seal. Only the third time in my life I have done that after around a thousand dives. So my video camera became a beautifully machine piece of Sony engineering reduced to scrap metal and glass. It was almost a week later I was finally able to download and start to go through the images I took at dawn. Although many were extraordinarly beautiful, the one shown here, for me, was the stand out. I photograph dawns and sunsets rather a lot, and often in quite remote and magnificent locations, but I have never since observed a dawn quite like that morning.

Fine Art Prints and Wall Art

If you like the image of Pacific harbour Dawn, it is available to purchase in a wide range of media and sizes directly from my website. These include as traditional giclée prints, stretched and flat mounted canvas, metal prints (dye directly infused on sheet aluminium) and acrylic, from 8 inches up to 48 inches across. My prints are produced by Bay Photo Labs in Santa Cruz, California. I choose bay Photo Labs for the excellence of their quality, with over 40 years providing printing services to professional photographers, their constant innovation, combining the latest technology and innovation with the finest traditional techniques, and their committment to the highest environmental standards using green technology. You can buy my prints directly here at www.colinmunroimages.com. If you are outside of North America, and would prefer a printer in your region, please contact me directly. I will be adding printers in Europe and S.E. Asia soon.

And the shark dive? Okay, here’s one image.

Fine Art Prints, Uncategorized Art prints, beqa lagoon, buy fine art prints, dawn pacific harbour, Fiji dawn, fine art prints, light on water, Pacific Harbor Fiji, Pacific Harbour Fiji, photographic fine art prints, reflections

Reflections on water

May 21, 2011Written by colinmunro

Yachts silhouetted just before dawn, San Diego harbour. Image MBI000899.

San Diego Harbour just before dawn. San Diego, California, USA. Image No. MBI000889. Please email me, quoting this number if you’d like to license use of this image.

Those of you with way too much time on their hands may have noticed that reflections on water is a recurring theme in my images. I know its a cliche, but hey! Cliche images only become so because they work. The images I’ve uploaded span a good few years; although most were taken in the past four, the Loch Ness image pre-dates that by quite some time. Consequently the pictures include both digital and film originated images. I’ve also chosen pictures from around the World: from San Diego’s bay-side to rural Devon,Southwest England, through to the Navua River creek at the southern tip of Fiji’s largest island Viti Levu, and back to the northern hemisphere to the shores of Loch Ness, northern Scotland during a particularly hard winter. You won’t find a great many bright summer days amongst my pictures. Not that I don’t enjoy the sun as much as anyone else, but it’s rarely dramatic. I much prefer the low light of dusk and dawn or winter days when the sun bobbles along the horizon, creating light and shadow that I can play with. Although I cut my teeth working underwater with a purely mechanical camera devoid of even a light meter, I’m not really a purist and will use Photoshop or whatever tools are at my disposal to enhance an image. To me it is not that different from dodging and burning photographic paper. However, you don’t great create a good image from a mediocre one straight out of the camera. For me at least, what I see through the lens in 95% of the final image and getting that image on to the camera’s sensor is 95% of the work. Everything after that is dressing. Two of the photographs were taken in the 30 minutes or so before dawn. For me that’s a magical time; very still, the World haven not fully woken. A not-so-magical time is when my alarm goes off at 4:30a.m., but if I do force myself out of bed it is often well worth the effort. The final image of Exeter historic quay was actually an evening shot, around 9p.m. on a warm evening in early June. The sun had just set, leaving a dramatic sky but with most of the quayside in deep shadow. To bring out this detail I created an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image as a composite from four seperate images covering (if memory serves me correctly) six full stops. The images were then processed using Photomatix and Photoshop. The hardest part of compilations like these are what to leave out. Thus reflections is a theme I will no doubt return to, with a ‘Reflections’ gallery up soon. All feedback, including reports of any gliches, most welcome.
Colin

The Turf Locks Pub, Turf Lock, Exeter Canal, Devon, England. Image No MBI000900

The Turf Locks Pub, Turf Lock, Exeter Canal, Devon, England. Image No MBI000900. Please email me, quoting this number if you’d like to licence use of this image.

Yachts reflected on the calm waters of Exeter Canal on a winter's day. Image MBI000775.

Yachts reflected on the calm waters of Exeter Canal on a winter’s day Image No. MBI000775. Please email me, quoting this number if you’d like to licence use of this image.

Sunrise over the Navua river near the mouth at Beqa Lagoon, Viti Levu, Fiji. Image MBI000583.

. Sunrise over the Navua River, Viti Levu, Fiji. Image No. MBI000583. Please email me, quoting this number if you’d like to licence use of this image.

Frozen birch trees and snow-capped mountains reflected on the waters of Loch Ness, Scotland,. Image MBI000124

Frozen birch trees and snow-capped mountains reflected on the waters of Loch Ness, Scotland. Image No. MBI000124. Please email me, quoting this number if you’d like to licence use of this image.

Exeter quayside at night. Exeter's historic quayside. Devon, England.

.Exeter quayside at night. Exeter’s historic quayside. Devon, England . Image No. MBI000890. Please email me, quoting this number if you’d like to licence use of this image.

High Dynamic Range Photography, Landscapes, Reflections on water, Sunrises, Uncategorized, Wild places California, Colin Munro, Colin Munro Photography, Devon Landscapes, Exe Estuary, Fiji, HDR photography, Navua river, reflections, San Diego, silhouettes, yachts

Boats and wind and winter skies

November 26, 2009Written by colinmunro

We’ve just had around ten days of stormy weather here in southwest UK; a series of deep lows have driven rain-laden westerlies out of the Atlantic and up the English Channel. I’ve spent this time trying to effect repairs on my deck between squalls, while winds howl through the rigging. Trying to pour molten pitch into leaky seams between planks, each seam rather less than quarter of an inch wide, in a force eight gale is somewhat akin to attempting to juggle ping-pong balls whilst standing in the downdraft of a helicopter. A stream of bubbling pitch carefully aimed at a newly raked out seam will unexpectedly slew sideways to decorate my newly sealed deck with a long string of tarry sine waves. I spend the next ten minutes scraping off rapidly solidifying pitch, then retire to my laptop as the next squall arrives. Days like this can make me long for the blue skies of summer. When trying to work outdoors on the water, winter offers relatively few advantages. It does offer others though. Whilst sun-kissed beaches and clear blue skies look pretty, I generally prefer my landscapes to look dramatic. Dark skies and storm clouds with shafts of sunlight breaking though are, to me, intrinsically more interesting. Very often the look of a landscape will change dramatically in seconds as cloud cover waltzes light and shade across the terrain. It’s the opportunity to capture these ephemeral patterns that makes me climb out of bed early on winter mornings, pile camera gear into the cab of my old Landrover and try to make it to my selected vantage point in time for sunrise. Okay, sometimes it does; and sometimes I’ll hit the ‘snooze’ button on my alarm, turn over and reassure myself there’ll be other mornings like this.

Landscape photography is one of the few areas where I still on occasion use film. In terms of workflow and cleanness of image 35mm film no longer compares with current DSLRs (to be brutal, spatial resolution, signal to noise ratio and even the old weakness of dynamic range are all better on good DSLRs than 35mm film equivalents), but there is something about producing images by initiating and influencing a chemical reaction on a medium you can touch and feel that has a magical quality about it. I no longer process my own film; cutting, mounting and scanning slides is enough of a chore. Yet exposing images on film still feels closer to the spirit of Louise and Auguste Lumiere’s autochromes or Hurley’s Paget Plates than allowing photons to kick electrons up the energy escalator in layers of silicon.

Given the wintry weather we (in the UK) are experiencing at the moment, I thought a local winter scene would be an appropriate image of the week. This one was taken a couple of years ago, on a chilly November afternoon on the Exeter canal near where it joins the Exe Estuary. The sun was getting fairly low and boat hulls were shining brightly against the dark water. It was very still, and where the canal widened to allow vessels to moor alongside, just in front of the first lock (the Turf Lock) a perfect mirror image of the moored boats reflected of the water. It may have rained later that day but I’m really not sure. It’s the moment I remember.
Link to image of the week Read More

Devon Landscapes boats, Exe Estuary, Exeter Canal, film, photographic technique, photographs, reflections, Turf Locks, winter, yachts