A four hour forest walk

I’ve really enjoyed coming here over the years. Although its only 10 minutes off the main road that goes through the Blue Mountains, you can, as I did only come across one other person the whole day. I don’t live here anymore so the trip isn’t as predictable as it used to be. Weather forecasts can’t be relied on…

A lot can change over time and this area was strewn with fallen trees and likely subject to some flooding. Nevertheless there were cool little spots for testing a Zeiss 18mm f3.5 lens (on a Sony A7RIII). Some superwide lenses with leave you with stretched corners which I find particularly unpleasant and distracting in a landscape scene. Not to mention very difficult to correct in post. Most photographers don’t seem to even bother. The photo below as with others in this blog were edited with the ‘auto’ selection and ‘Adobe landscape’ profile in Camera Raw. I found I had to reduce the saturation a little though. For the most part they were shot at f11. Although I focus stacked many of them I can’t see the necessity of using the other exposures.

It was overcast for most of the day so exposures were upto a couple of seconds. For these a tripod was used of course. I’ve gotten used to working with manual lenses and not having much info at my disposal. I don’t find it matters much although I don’t always remember which lens was used. On this day though - was the Zeiss 18mm and another piece of Zeiss glass which doubles as an excellent close up lens - 35mm f 2.4 Flektogon. The reason I like traveling to this location is that all these features were within a 500metre radius.

BTW, I would have moved this log resting on the tree root if it wasn’t so heavyand quite long.

This one is quite bizzare…