A painted croc

A good lesson for me regarding keeping my image files organised and backed up etc...  I lost the original file for this photo - my best and favourite crocodile photo.  I only have a low resolution copy of it which is fine for the screen but not much good for print etc.  I have no idea what happened to the original... I discovered it missing a couple of years ago.

So one way to get something decent out of it was to create a digital painting out of it - where detail isn't so critical.  So I enlarged it a lot in photoshop to get a printable size but it was very pixelated,  and then ran Corel Painter over it to produce this picture which smudged out all the enlarged pixels.   I like the result but wish I had the original still!

Here is a higher resolution cropped part so you can see the painting effect better.

More storm photos from Darwin Harbour

Had some interesting weather and storms around Darwin harbour yesterday evening.  Most of it was fairly distant but we got some incredible "crawlers" travel along distance over top of us.

Here's a few of the better shots.

Epic Anniversary Storm

Well my wife and I went in to have dinner at the beach for our 23rd wedding anniversary yesterday evening.   We were sitting peacefully at Nightcliff watching the sunset when I heard some angry distant rumbling behind us...  alas the mother of all storms was advancing from the east!

Well we ducked into town to Fisherman's Wharf to get a better view and it really was an awesome sight.  The bureau sent out a Severe Thunderstorm Warning as it had some pretty wild winds and lightning associated with it.

Pity about the rain on the lens for this one!

Storm season is kicking in!

Got up at 2.30am this morning when I heard some distant thunder and headed into Nightcliff.  Got some keepers as a little storm went by just off the coast.

Cape Le Grande Roos

Often I find when I go back and look at old photos I see an unloved discarded one that I now see potential in.  These kangaroos were at Cape Le Grande National Park near Esperance Western Australia.  We had driven down the West Coast from Darwin and were heading across to Adelaide to drive up the centre.  This was an awesome place but we unfortunately only had half a day there - I plan on going back there some day.

My best lightning shot revisited

Tried darkening the shot a bit to get the lightning standing out more... and also cropped off the right edge as it was empty space...  does it improve things a bit?

Bayview Strike

Got my best close-up lightning capture just before dawn this morning.  Was awoken by thunder at around 5am and saw on the radar that it would be a home in Palmerston within 10 minutes or so.  I decided to try and get ahead of it a bit and rushed into town and ended up at Fishermens Wharf. 

Got a few ok shots as it came in but nothing really good.  I had horizontal drizzle straight at me wetting the lens and decided to pack up.  I was just driving out when I noticed the rain eased a bit and a big bolt landed to the north of me.  I grabbed the tripod out again, didn't even extend the legs and setup as quick as I could and got this one good bolt before the really heavy rain chased me back into the car.  I could put the camera side-on to the wind for this shot so water drops on the lens wasn't such an issue.

Wound the aperture all the way to F18 as I knew it would be very bright - and the exposure was perfect.  Luckily it was as I was somehow accidentally in jpeg mode and not RAW as I normally am - forgot to check that as I rarely change that setting!

At F18 it sure highlighted all the dust spots on my sensor with the big depth of field - so I had to clean up the image somewhat - also added a bit of contrast.  This shot is not cropped except for a bit of tilt to fix a slightly crooked horizon.