Just north of Broken Hill is a New South Wales State Park called The Living Desert.
And within The Living Desert is a series of 12 sculptures known as The Sculpture Symposium.
This was another of those things on this trip that really needed bye shot at either sun up or sun down, not in the middle of the day.
So, Max and I got up at 5:30 and drove out there only to find the gate locked. The sign said it would open at 6:00.
We sat and waited, and sure enough, at a couple of minutes to six o’clock, up rolls the Ranger’s vehicle.
Not knowing how far we had to drive to reach the sculptures, I was starting to worry that perhaps we wouldn’t get there in time to catch the first light.
As it turned out, it was only a kilometre or so and we got there a minute or two after the sun had started to come up.
The early morning light was gorgeous on the sandstone artworks.
Yet, despite the fact that yesterday was in the mid-40’s and today would be the same, at 6:00am, it was quite chilly!
I grabbed a few frames and we both rushed back to the car to warm up.
After breakfast, we headed back out toward Silverton to do a tour of the Daydream Mine, a former silver mine which is now only used as a tourist operation.
After a tour that lasted almost 2 hours, we continued on to Silverton to visit the Mad Max 2 museum.
Unfortunately, you were not allowed to video or photograph any of the exhibits inside the museum. Thankfully though, you were allowed to shoot to your heart’s content any of the vehicles and dummies making up the outdoor portion of the display.
After we’d had a good look through the museum, we headed back into Broken Hill, where Cath was interested in going to check out the Royal Flying Doctor Service base located at the airport.
I’m glad we did, as I found it quite interesting too.
The promotional video which they play in the small theatrette was very informative, and had its humourous moments.
For the photographers reading this, I’d like to draw your attention to the final image in this set.
Those who know me or have ever listened to Shutters Inc will know that I am a firm believer in shooting RAW.
This final image absolutely solidified that belief beyond reproach.
When I looked through the viewfinder, I knew that the view outside of the hangar would completely blow out to white pixels if I was to meter for the plane itself.
So, I went aperture-priority and used the highlight on the top of the plane (that part of the bodywork which was reflecting the light from outdoors) as the metering point.
At f11, I got a shutter speed of 1/45sec.
And sure enough, the viewfinder showed a huge white rectangle in the top right of the frame, and the histogram suggested somewhere around 1-1.5 stops of clipping.
Mentally, I wrote the shot off there and then.
It was only when I returned home and was able to open the RAW file in Lightroom that I was able to drag the ‘highlights’ slider all the way to -100 and… voila!… there was all the detail of what was outside the hangar in the sunshine.
If this had been a jpeg, there would have been no hope for this image at all. Those highlights would have been gone forever.
If you’ve never shot RAW, make this the day that you give it a go. Sure, you have to then convert your images to jpegs later on in order to put them on your phone/facebook/G+/twitter/website/whatever, but there are plenty of tools (both free and not-free) to automate that process. You might need to adjust to the added workflow, but you’ll never regret having those extra ‘bits’ of digital data to play with!
Day nineteen
