Landscapes offer such a wide variety (no pun intended) of photographic opportunities. Quite often too they invite you to sharpen your cropping skills to get rid of unwanted blemishes or if they are ‘wilderness’ shots, to get rid of the signs of any human presence. Often, those signs are on the edges of images so the crop instead of savage post processing is the way to go.

I took the following image on the edge of one of Australia’s vast arid plains. As you can see, on the left hand edge towards the horizon there is evidence of a road.

What to do? Attack with Photoshop’s clone stamp tool and replace the road with shifted pixels. No, in this case the smart and rapid way is to crop. Not much of the image will be lost and the sense of isolation will still be there. Here’s the outcome of the crop:

The sense of space and isolation remains, time has been saved and the integrity of the work has not been compromised.

I can’t resist the temptation to pop in a couple of other Australian outback images. We live on a particularly arid continent, with vast areas of flat, sparsely populated country. Never the less we do have some outstanding landscapes. Here is another example:

As you can see, it’s pretty flat, so when it does rain, the run off is minimal. I bet you can see why we call it the ‘Red Centre’.

Of course we do have occasional hilly country in the outback, and not too far away, as the crow flies, there are some pretty colourful hills we call ‘The Painted Desert’.

We also have what we call ‘The High Country’, it’s thousands of miles from where these last four images were made. It snows in ‘The High Country’ and there are ski resorts nestled amongst our mountains there. They can be reached by sealed highways or the adventurous can take the bush tracks through some great scenery and landscape photography opportunities. Here is one such opportunity, taken from a spot along the ‘Davies Plains’ track:

I know it’s in the mountains, but please, don’t ask me why it’s called ‘Davies Plains’ track. Just let me say it’s the Aussie way.

With the exception of image No2, all of these photographs are straight off the camera.

Thanks for being so patient. I love the place and have to show it off whenever I get the chance.

Hoo roo for now.

PS: How could I forget about my hero, Ansel Adams. This is how he may have photographed the last two of my images: