It doesn’t take long to appreciate that Iceland’s creation is not yet complete. A few miles from the International Airport at Keflavik, the earth boils and gurgles in a cauldron of thick grey-ooze. The landscape, a palette of pastel hues, where great plumes of steam rise from earth’s unstable crust and the air saturated with the pungent odour of rotten-eggs. Raw energy of such immense magnitude to cause the ground to tremble beneath your feet. All evidence, if any was needed, that not far below more wondrous beauty is waiting to be unleashed; new mountains, lava fields, ash deserts and perhaps a new island to be formed.

In geological terms Iceland is quite young, the earliest rocks less than 14 million years old; the realm of the dinosaur had long passed before Iceland emerged from the depths of the mid-Atlantic Ridge. Volcanoes like Hekla, Katla, and the infamous Eyjafjallajökull; that caused havoc with air-flight throughout Europe in 2010, are still very much active, occasionally spewing mouton lava extending the land southwards. To the north, Landmannalaugar’s landscape is a manifestation of violent eruptions; an unbelievable range of colourful Rhyolite mountains. Water courses, heavily charged with fluvial-glacial silt, cut deep paths between the Highlands and the sea; impressive canyons that reveal multiple layers of geological history.

Here, In the south-eastern region of Iceland geology renders you speechless. Mountains with teeth, lush fertile pastures and fine black sandy beaches. Rivers cascade from the clouds at Seljalandsfoss and Skógafoss. Waterfalls are hidden in huge caves and vast expanses of sand deserts 80km wide. Beyond, the inspirational beauty of the Oræfi where landscape contrasts are sharply defined, it is impossible to appreciate the full extent of the Vatnajokull National Park, an area the size of Cumbria and the Yorkshire Dales combined. Glaciers hang from the sky and discharge millions of tons of crumbling ice that created the spectacular Jökulsárlon lagoon. Mirror-calm images of cathedral enormity, blue icebergs slowly drifting to their eternal destiny; ebony beaches strewn with ice-diamonds, all that remains of those once impressive ice-sculptures.

To the east, long fjords penetrate far inland, overlooked by magnificent mountain ranges like Estrahorn and Vestrahorn. Iceland’s beauty is not just skin-deep, it extends to the centre of the earth.

The dynamic force of ‘Wildlife in Pixels’ and ‘NatureFramed’ have combined to bring all these experiences together on a Landscape Photography journey of a life-time. Should you like to participate there is one last place available.

For details of our workshop to this amazing place please visit https://www.wildlifeinpixels.net/blog/iceland-photography-workshop/

Following on from my last video I want to show you a nice easy way to ‘burning’ using the same technique.

Again I’m using the Lumenzia masking plugin for Photoshop, but this time we’ll refine the mask from the outset by forcing Lumenzia to concentrate on just one color.

Dodging and burning is the one technique you’ll use to make your pictures stand out from the crowd by adding perceptual depth and leading the viewers eye.

In this video I introduce you to a really simple and highly effective way of controlled dodging of colour and brightness which you’ll find useful on any style of image.

In this video (26 minutes long!) I look at the problems of image and  processing “perception” that can be caused by using WHITE as your  background colour in Lightroom, Photoshop or any other image processing  software.

Viewing your image against a white background will invariably make you PERCEIVE it to be lower in contrast and somewhat ‘less bright’ and saturated in colour than it really is.

This in turn will lead you to add contrast and perhaps brightness – when in reality you do not need to.

I might drone on a bit in this video but please check out the perceived differences in all the images I show as you’ll be surprised!

If you like this video then consider subscribing to my YouTube Channel.

Many thanks to my supporters over on Patreon as it’s their donations that help me provide this FREE video content

In this video I show you why I invariably turn to Manual Exposure with Auto ISO for the majority of my high speed action bird photography.

**Please forgive the SHOUT at 3mins 30secs – I mistakenly had the mic between me and the GoPro and it came out very very loud!! The mic is usually the other side of me and so is normally MUCH quieter -apologies in profusion**

You can purchase my Bird in Flight AF Guide for Nikon and Canon by clicking the link below: https://wildlifeinpixels.net/shopfron…

Please consider supporting me via my Members Only site at: https://www.patreon.com/andyastbury#birdphotography#birdinflight#autoiso

Lightroom Update February 2019 – The Lightroom Enhance Details Feature & More Dropped OS Support from Adobe

So the February 12th 2019 update has seen a new trick in Lightroom – the Enhanced Details feature under the Photo menu.

We’ve only recently been forced to update our OS to cope with Photoshop, now we have another operating system version redundancy forced on us by this new feature.

And it this Lightroom Enhanced Details feature worth it?

Well, after spending a few hours with it all I can say is “Thanks Adobe for answering a question no one was asking”.  

I struggle to see any advantage to using this new feature, apart from choking your GPU if that’s what floats your boat 😂 

As you will see in the video there IS a difference – but you can only see it with a bit of Photoshop trickery.

***I forgot to mention in the video – the DNG produced by Enhance Details ended up at a grand size of 208.6MB – a lot larger than the original raw file but 10MB smaller than the TIFF from that raw file***

The Lightroom Enhance Details feature – could it be a bit like the Emperors New Clothes, or a portent of Adobe making us all switch to Mojave so they can save a small fortune in development OS compatibility?

#adobelightroom#enhancedetails#lightroomupdate

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In this video I demonstrate how to remove a tripod shadow from your images using Frequency Separation.

When a shadow is very distinct it can be removed with a modified luminosity mask, but sometimes shadows will be too indistinct to easily isolate with a mask.

Now obviously this method is a bit fiddly but seriously, on this image of Phils’ trying to use a luminosity mask selection would be impossible.

I’ve not been as careful or precise in the video as you would need to be when doing it on your own image – if I’d done the job to 100% perfection the video would have been 3 times as long!

Remember, subtlety is the key and as with any retouching it needs to be done slowly and methodically.

The next shots show how good the results are after another 10 minutes of careful work:

A few more refinements to brush opacity together with a bit more work with the spot healing brush to break up the more persistent dark areas and this shot would be good to go.

#frequency_separation

#shadow_removal

#photoshop