Dandenong Ranges, Victoria

I love this place, and have taken many pictures there. You have captured it as well as anyone. Thanks for bringing back some good memories.

Lovely vibrant colors.

very nice, the framing definitely adds to it, only criticism is I would prefer slightly less of the burnt-out sky.

Dammit I was there on the weekend. I only scanned the film last night. Curses, you've beat me to it! Very nice. And when I get my 6x6 camera I'll be up there again like a shot.

That's a lot of green in there, but it contrasts well with the brown tree trunks. Great stuff.

Beautifully balanced color, texture and composition. Looks like paradise.

An excellent photo as per usual. I like the fern in the lower centre half of this photo for some reason. At a landscape course I did last year, Grenville Turner, told us that good forest shots are difficult to find and generally come out as a jumbled mess. He advised to look around with one eye shut and this helps to find composition from the jumble (if one is there, that is). For me this part is easy as I have a dicky/lazy right eye, still does not help me too much though :-) Do you have any tips in the same way, as the blood, sweat, and tears .. folder ? Thanks .. Geoff

I drove for a couple of hours before I found this place. Not so onerous as it may sound: the Dandenong Ranges are beautiful.

 

But everywhere I looked before his had some flaw, something not quite right about it. In fact this area was much more beautiful than it looks.

 

Your instructor's right about landscapes, Geoff. When you half-close your eyes you see only gross compositional elements, literally you see the "forest" and not just the "trees". I don't claim to be an expert on this type of stuff. In fact I'm a rank amateur. I don't have the ability to extract a beautiful composition out of (what seems to be) thin air (as, say, Leping Zha does). I tend to see objects topologically as opposed to photographically (I continually fail to associate ostensibly non-associated elements that work photographically but aren't connected by geology). Zha's "Chinese mountains" series is a case in point: he can take a tree and a mountain separated by miles and make them look like they were created to be together. That takes a special skill.

 

Someone above mentioned the overexposed sky. That's a correct observation too. The forest was darkish and the film (Velvia) didn't have ther range to reproduce both sky and darker forest accurately, so I opted for the forest (I didn't want the shadows under those ferns to come out too dark). From memory, I used the bark of the tree to establish my "18% gray" point. In my defence, all I can say is that at the end of a long afternoon, I just wanted to capture something on film for all the time I had spent looking and driving around. But you're perfectly correct in saying it is a flaw. To get a really great picture of this scene I would have had to have hung around for more than just a couple of hours on just one day.

 

However, I continue to plod along, trying to "see". Thanks anyway for the positive criticism.

I've spent quite a few days round Sherbrooke Forst. This captures the best of the region.