This display is a small selection of 26 photographs taken at Hallett Cove Conservation Park, a region of native coastal 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, away from suburbia.

Taken in January 2017,
at Hallett Cove Conservation Park.

This display uses a selection of digital photographs that I've taken at the park, mostly on two trips made during January 2017. I have been going to this Conservation Park for many years, and have taken hundreds of photographs there, using a variety of cameras. All but one of the photographs presented in this monthly display were taken with a Sony A6000 mirror-less digital camera (with very good colour and tone reproduction).

Many of the photographs I had taken at the park were taken using 35mm film. When looking at the various scenes I encountered live there, 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 of the prints I received back from the processing lab. This example is of a scene with a particularly wide dynamic range of tones:

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

I could see from the negatives that the photographs actually contained much wider tonal ranges than the prints showed. I tried scanning the negatives using a film scanner and found a good improvement in the colours and tones recorded:

35mm film photograph taken in May 2000
(reproduced by scanning with a film scanner)

This was certainly a vast improvement on the prints I had been getting back. Note that the sky now shows clouds and colour information. The shadow regions are not as dark as they were, and show reasonable colour information.

I acquired an Olympus E-30 DSLR from my father in 2010, that I found captured much better results again than the 35mm film photographs I had taken. Part of the reason for the improved photographs came from capturing the digital photographs in 'raw' format and processing them afterwards using Olympus Viewer 3, or Adobe Camera Raw. This way, the exposure, contrast, white balance, and colour saturations could all be tweaked (within limits).

Digital photograph taken in 2015 with an Olympus E-30 DSLR as a RAW image, and developed using Adobe Camera Raw.

Wow! This was such an improvement!

This camera and development seemed to be capturing something close to the relationships I got excited about when seeing them for real at the park. Even though this image (and many others taken in full sunlight) was excellent, the Olympus E-30 camera had a number of problems, especially when photographing subjects in light that was anything less than full sunlight.

I was keen to see the results from a better digital camera, the Sony A6000, and I was keen to get back to the park - I hadn’t been there for about a year.

All of this display’s images were taken as ‘raw’ digital images and processed using Adobe's “Lightroom” software, which includes Adobe’s latest “Camera Raw” software.

Under each photograph, I include the time that it was captured, because I found that the angle of the sunlight was important for many of them. When I was in the park taking these photographs, I often went back and forth to capture a particular view at different times (different angles of sunlight) to see if one of the different ‘captures’ looked stronger. For this reason, the photographs are not presented in chronological order. I have instead tried to present them in an order that makes more sense in terms of the scenes encountered while moving through the park.

Following are small images from each page in this display.

Click on an image, or its title, to go to a page with proper reproductions and more details about the images on that page.

Once you are looking at the pages/images in more detail, you can use the ‘prev’ and ‘next’ links (at the top and bottom of each details page) to go to the previous or next pages in the monthly display, or return to this monthly display overview page.