The dry season is sowing drama in the rural landscape around my town. The mornings are still cool, but the amount of fog is decreasing significantly and the first light of dawn is visible on the horizon. So it's good to walk the plains to the north and take pictures when the sun is just appearing...
📷 01- "Savannah beyond the fence"
📷 02- "Ancient road"
📷 03- "First glimpse"
And well, as always... Whether it's street or rural photography, there I am with my camera, painting the surroundings with melancholy, giving them a bit strange titles and recording as much as I can with my camera to then dedicate myself to edit these images at length and share them with you here in #Hive. ;)
📷 04 - "Sun, silhouette and horizon I"
📷 05 - "Sun, silhouette and horizon II"
📷 06 - "Sun, silhouette and horizon III"
I took all these pictures today (January 14, 2024)... I woke up before 5 AM (I usually do it this way) and had a piece of bread and a cup of hot coffee for breakfast. I left my house just before 6 AM and by 6:30 AM (approximately sunrise time here according to weather channel) I was in the countryside waiting for the sun to rise. This place is only a couple of kilometres away from my home, so it is not difficult to get there for me walking at a good pace... The roads were lonely and the silence was remarkable. I had no trouble getting through a couple of wire fences and finding locations for my photos. Most of the landowners on this side of town know me, so they won't mind waking up and seeing me shooting a bit inside their land. These are some of the advantages of shooting in a place where you've lived all your life, I guess.
📷 07 - "Looking north"
📷 08 - "The mist going away"
📷 09 - "Yes, drought is here"
📷 10 - "Returning home"
Black & white versions
Seems to me that it is always a bit complicated to edit photos of rural landscapes for black and white versions. It usually can't be done directly from the resulting JPG in colour, because when desaturating the image using almost any method, it is common to generate overexposed white areas. So what I did this time was to under-expose the JPGs in colour, vignette a bit, and then desaturate and adjust levels. I find that it can avoid most of the overexposure that would have occurred without doing those steps... So here I have for you the monochrome versions and I hope you like them too!
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| 📷 04 | 📷 05 | 📷 06 |
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| 📷 07 | 📷 08 | 📷 09 | 📷 10 |
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ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTE: Photographs captured with my Nikon D7000 DSLR camera in RAW format, then processed in Adobe Camera RAW for adjustments regarding light, sharpening, contrast and depth... The shots are then exported to JGP format on which minor modifications such as straightening and adding watermarks were carried out using PhotoScape 3.6.3.
Thank you very much for your visit and appreciation!
"We make photographs to understand what our lives mean to ourselves." - Ralph Hattersley.
Lens:AF-S DX NIKKOR 35mm f/1.8G