Rodney Campbell's Blog

One spectacular aspect of the walk into Echidna Chasm at the northern end of Purnululu National Park is the amazing array of natural colour on the high gorge walls beside you.

Lava Cutting

NIKON D750 + 28.0-300.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 @ 48 mm, 1/50 sec at f/5.6, ISO 1250

As you walk along you will see the walls above you glow in striking colour variations. Warm tones of yellow through to orange and red blaze above you as the sun angles in and reflects off the higher walls up top. Down below in the more shadowed areas the hues tend more towards the purples and blues. These subtle colour variations and the warm cool colour contrasts are quite amazing.

Note: These photographs (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger – so click any of the images below to see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer.

Emerald Lifeblood

NIKON D750 + 28.0-300.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 @ 28 mm, 1/30 sec at f/5.6, ISO 1400

It’s actually very difficult to shoot in these conditions. Down at the ground level where you walk it’s almost darkness which means your camera wants to shoot at very high ISO’s to compensate. However anywhere where the light comes in from above, or if you get to see and want to include the sky itself – it’s obviously super bright. This incredibly large dynamic range makes it essentially impossible to capture everything in one clean shot even with such amazing technology and dynamic range as Nikon’s latest range of full frame sensors.

The only way around this is to bracket exposures and blend the good parts of frames in post processing. So I tended to shoot either 5 or 7 exposure brackets (at 1EV intervals) but sometimes even 9 frame brackets. Thankfully my new Nikon D750 allows me to do this completely automatically in one go. I now don’t have to use the painful weird exposure compensation tricks to shift the maximum of 3 bracketed shots around like I used to have to do on the D600 and earlier cameras to get the same overall cover – yay!!!.

On the way into the chasm I was shooting completely handheld. Basically because I really didn’t know how much time we’d have or what we’d see. This resulted in two things with my shots (above):
– they tended to be a quite high ISO’s – anywhere from the low 100’s up to 12,800 for various frames – luckily the D750 does very well with high ISO noise.
– I had to be very careful with my handholding technique when shooting brackets of 5 or even 7 images so they would align properly in post processing.

Once we reached the end of the chasm, I brought out the tripod and started taking my time shooting “properly” :).

Flames

NIKON D750 + 28.0-300.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 @ 40 mm, 2.5 sec at f/8, ISO 200

This is I expect reminiscent of what I believe the amazing Antelope Slot Canyons in Arizona look like. Though in this case we don’t get that lovely striped sandstone nor the array of shifting sand and fabulously sinuous wind worn curved walls. Here in Purnululu it’s a sedimentary conglomerate base for a much more angular, firmer and nodular feel but still with the fabulous colour palette.

The Glow

NIKON D750 + 28.0-300.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 @ 28 mm, 1/13 sec at f/8, ISO 200

Looking from the outside it’s easy to see where the warm coloured glow on the walls comes from :).

Purnululu

NIKON D750 + 28.0-300.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 @ 100 mm, 1/100 sec at f/8, ISO 110

Don't forget to Share...

Google

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin

Pinterest

Email

Print