Eaglereach Resort, Hunter Valley

[thegableguy]

A year ago I took my family (wife and two baby daughters) on a little 3-night stay at Eaglereach Resort, about 2 hrs north of Sydney. One of the photos I took won a competition the resort ran, which meant we won another two nights. Just got back!

I took my NEQ6 and ED80 but my lack of skill, lack of guiding, lack of ability to see much either due east or west from our cabin and my lack of battery (thus inability to leave the cabin where the power was) all combined for a frustrating hour with no images to show for it. Ah well.

The first night we had a little cloud; second night was absolutely magnificent skies, some of the clearest I've ever seen in my life. Just wonderful. Unfortunately the cabin next door (about 30 meters away) had all its exterior lights on, so not quite the shot I was hoping for. I was planning to go down the hill a little way, but it was cold and my wife was in the jacuzzi so yeah nah...

[OzEclipse]

Chris,

Might not be what you were hoping for but it looks pretty good to me! I presume the neighbours lights are causing the light from the left. But that has created nice side lighting and especially the striated lighting on the roof, side lighting the palings on the balcony and does a great job of lighting the trees, what might otherwise have just been a silhouette covering more than half the picture.

Joe

[thegableguy]

Thanks! Some of the lighting is actually a little battery LED I use to see in the dark; I positioned it off to the right to help balance the very left-side-heavy light.

This was shot at ISO 2500 at f/4.5; had it been darker I would have doubled the ISO and increased the aperture thus getting darker trees, a more natural look to the cabin and a brighter sky. Never mind, it wasn't to be this time around. We'll be back!

[OzEclipse]

Chris,

Assuming you captured raw you can wind the exposure slider right down 2-3 stops and get the natural dark foreground you want, export it as a 16 bit PSD or tiff.

Then do one as you have presented it here and export it as a 16 bit tiff

Then blend the darker foreground with the brighter sky in Photoshop, GIMP etc.

You can also do it in Lightroom albeit in a less sophisticated way.

Joe

[thegableguy]

Yep - this is already edited in Lightroom. Darkened the whole image, changed the contour and brought up the sky a little.

If I just darken the foreground it'll look weird because it's so brightly lit on one side only, ie very high contrast, as opposed to a very low level coming from multiple directions as you'd get on a properly dark site. My guess is that messing with it further will neither make it look better nor be worth the bother - it's not that good an image to warrant the time & effort!

I'll just cross my fingers that next time we go to Eaglereach (because we're definitely going back), we get the same skies without the friggin' Batman signal next door.