Hallett Cove Conservation Park

This month’s display is based on a small selection of photographs taken at Hallett Cove Conservation Park, a region of native coast land south of Adelaide. The park has a number of interesting geological features, and has a marvellous atmosphere of freedom about it. It is a favourite place for me to go to and walk around in. It has well constructed walkways and interesting scenes everywhere. The landscape feels raw and free, and ancient, yet very much immediate. It is pleasing that such an area of land is kept in this way, instead of just letting developers destroy it so they can extend suburbia over it. The park is surrounded by suburbia, but fortunately, when one is inside the park, it feels like one has gone to a very special place.

Digital scan from a 35mm film negative, taken in May 2000.
View of the Black Cliff Headland from just outside the lower south entrance to the Hallett Cove Conservation Park.

This month’s display uses a very small selection of photographs that I've taken at the park, mostly taken on one trip to the park, on 26th February 2015. I have been going to this Conservation Park for many years, and have taken hundreds of photographs there. Most of the photographs presented in this monthly display were taken with an Olympus E-30 DSLR (with very good colour and tone reproduction). Many of the photographs I had taken at the park were taken using 35mm film. When I was at the park, I saw very nice combinations of tone and colour, and hoped to capture these things with my photographs, but when I saw the resulting prints, I was generally disappointed.

A typical example:

Flatbed scan of original print
(adjusted slightly to more accurately indicate the print's colours and tones).

I could see from the negatives that they contained much wider tonal ranges than the prints showed. I tried scanning the negatives using my film scanner and found a vast improvement in dynamic range:

35mm film photograph taken in May 2000
Look at the new detail and colours in the sky and in the shadow regions of the orange rocks!

When I went to Hallett Cove Conservation Park back in 2015, I took some photographs with an Olympus E-30 DSLR (using RAW image captures, and processing the RAW images with Olympus software) and found that the results were even better.

Digital photograph taken with an Olympus E-30 DSLR on 26/2/15.

Since taking the photographs for this month's photographs, back in February 2015, I have purchased a Sony A6000 digital camera and have been back to the Hallett Cove Conservation Park to take some photographs using this new camera. Some of these photographs can be viewed in Gallery 4.

This month's collection of photographs taken with an Olympus E-30 DSLR are still some of the best photographs that I have taken at Hallett Cove Conservation Park.