Dreamtime 2012 Version
Dreamtime 2010 Version
Last week, for unknown reasons, I decided to dig out one of my older landscape photos “Dreamtime”. Perhaps I was feeling nostalgic. Maybe it was the wilderness calling out to me; it’s been a few months since I’ve been in a natural setting. Or it could have been the feeling that I had unfinished business with this particular image. It’s one of those photos which has always felt like a work in process. Even when I completely revised it a couple of years ago, I had expected to revisit the image in the future when my post-capture became more advanced. In any case, I decided to dust off the file and see where I ended up.
This particular scene has special meaning for me. It reminds me of my roots as a photographer. I have lived in big cities all my life. When I visited Tasmania’s Cradle Mountain national park in 2005, it was my first wilderness experience. Situated on Australia’s tiny island state, Cradle Mountain is the country’s most photographed peak. Tasmania (in fact the whole of Australia for that matter) does not boast any lofty alpine areas, but what the mountains lack in height, they make up for in character. The experience of seeing this striking peak reflected in the tranquil waters of Dove Lake on a completely still morning had a profound effect on me. It gave me a new appreciation of what is truly important on this planet. The beauty of being alone, awestruck by my surroundings, away from the distractions of city life would be something I became drawn to from that moment.
Overland Track
Over the next few years I would often return to this mountain and explore the surrounding areas, including the country’s greatest walk, the Overland Track. I was inspired by past and current Tasmanian photographers, in particular Chris Bell, Rob Blakers and the great Peter Dombrovskis. To this day, I consider the latter to be my favorite landscape photographer. Here is an artist who makes his statement in a quiet powerful manner, far removed from the current trend of shouting and bombast.
While Mount Wellington was Peter’s greatest muse, Cradle Mountain would be mine. I have photographed it under the stars, during a blizzard and in all four seasons. “Dreamtime” represents it at the most beautiful I have seen and it was the last time I visited. After all these years I think I’m finally content with the image. Truly great shows of light are not all that common at Dove Lake and the photo now transports me back to that windless morning. Mist hovered over the mirror like surface of the lake like spirits broken from my view point by two lichen encrusted boulders. In the distance, the slopes were peppered yellow by the deciduous fagus in autumn. With sunrise, wispy clouds took on an intense pink hue. It remains my last memory of an old friend.
Technical considerations
Technically this was a very tough photo to shoot in a single frame. The tonal range was very wide and the irregular shapes of the mountain and reflections made grad work difficult. Current best practice would be to shoot this scene in three exposures for highlights, mid tones and shadows for blending by hand afterwards. However my approach is to photograph landscapes is a single frame if at all possible. I think the result shows that good results are still obtainable using grad filters and just one exposure.
I often receive emails about how achieve results like this without an obvious grad line passing through the mountain. The answer is that through experience and experimentation I have learned to use multiple filters simultaneously and manipulate their positions during the exposure to avoid those tell-tale lines left by the use of a single strong hard edged grad filter. One other consideration complicating this photo was the fact that I wanted to maintain the reflection darker than the mountain itself. In the case of a sharp reflection in still water, I think that this rule of physics is a good one to observe in photography. Where there is moving water and a blurred reflection, this may be impossible to achieve since flowing water tends to become more light with log exposures. Since the effect is surreal anyway, I don’t see the need to keep the reflections darker. In “Dreamtine”, I positioned a soft grad over the reflection but above the foreground rocks to prevent the former from being exposed too brightly.
Check out a large version of “Dreamtime” here. More in my next blog article on the current state of my digital workflow.
Cradle Mountain Sunset
