Hi all

In a new idea for my site, once a week i’ll feature an old image and bring it back to life here and give some background and information on capturing and processing the image(s). I’ll mainly concentrate on images taken over the past few years, before my site was created so they won’t have been featured here before.

First cab off the rank is Comet McNaught (C/2006 P1). It’s a perfect subject to be featured this week because it’s exactly 2 years ago that it first made an appearance in our southern skies. It brightened rapidly to become one of the “great” comets, the best in 40 years and visible even during daylight. At its peak on the 20th January 2007, it had a tail that spread across over 40° of sky.

Comet McNaught, captured at IISAC2007 in the Hunter Valley of NSW

Continue reading to see more images of Comet McNaught and details about their capture and processing.

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On the night of the Smiley Face Conjunction, before the sun set and the conjunction was visible, I was able to capture some dramatic sunset scenes over Brisbane Water, from Yattalunga and Green Point on the Central Coast of NSW.

I captured and processed these using HDR techniques – a way of representing a greater dynamic range in a single photo by using multiple exposures of the same scene (under exposed, correct exposure, over exposed).

It’s a fairly new technique for me and not everyone is a fan of the type of images it can produce – sometimes producing unrealistic fairytale type images, or with halo artefacts, depending on the extent of the processing. 

Escape With Me

Please check out the rest of the photos and I’d love to hear what you think. I need more practise in both capturing and processing HDR images like these, so bare with me

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Wow, well last night certainly proved to be more stressful than was expected! After a beautiful and clear practise run on Sunday night, it was supposed to be crystal clear on Monday night too but high cloud and then thick low cloud came in during Monday afternoon which threatened to spoil the whole event for me.

News of the rare celestial alignment had made it to all the media outlets and it got quite a bit of coverage yesterday. I gave a short interview for the local Star 104.5FM radio station, and I saw it mentioned on news.com.au, and the TV news as well.

It did clear for me, just! Here’s the first of the many images I captured. 

Smiley Face Conjunction at Sunset (HDR)

The picture above is available for purchase as a print, matted and framed, or even as a greeting card at RedBubble. Please read on to see more..

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