Justin Oh Wedding Photography

As promised, here are more photos taken in 2008 which I haven’t posted before. I’ll be posting some of my favourite wedding photos from last year too but here are some landscape ones to begin with

These were taken in November 2008. We decided to revisit Narrabeen as the placed offered plenty of great opportunities for great landscape photos. We got there way before sunrise but decided to explore the area for other landscape opportunities and as a result, we didn’t quite get to catch the sun rising. Most of the photos here were taken after sunrise and resulted in some pretty harsh direct sunlight. Luckily, we did manage to get some good photos though

The photography started form this location, just at the corner of the beach with plenty of rocks. Here’s a silhouette of me taken by Aaron

From that location I got this, shot taken handheld

Here’s the view to the left, beyond the rocks

And a view from the right, as we were about to leave that spot for another location

Then we started heading to the other side of the beach, in hopes of finding another spot. It was a fair drive to get here from North Sydney so we wanted to make the most of it, and of course the early rise in the morning sacrificing sleep

We got lucky and found some really cool rocks with heaps of moss on it. Pity about the light though as it was pretty harsh by then

This was the shot I believe I was taking in the pic above. Due to the harsh light, I decided to take a different approach with post processing the image to make the best out of it. The sun was pretty high up already so I went for a very high contrast shot – the movie 300 style.

This shot was a slightly toned down ’300′ version of a slightly different scene but around the same area

Tide was pretty high that day!

And one last ‘behind the scenes’ shot. Strapped around me is my Xpan

I didn’t bring the dinosaur with me this time around as I wanted to travel light while exploring for new locations. I will most certainly revisit this spot again fully armed

Some of you may wonder if I use HDR to process my shots. The answer is No because I like to have total control over the whole process. While HDR helps a lot with increasing dynamic range I sometimes feel that it makes the shot look somewhat unnatural. That or i’m just plain lousy with HDR processing

What I prefer to use and also have more control over is the Graduated Tool in the Develop module in Lightroom

This tool replicates an actual Graduated Neutral Density filter and can really help recover blown skies and also apply color tints should you choose to do so. I highly recommend this tool for landscape shots so have a go with it! This tool may very well save you a couple of hundred from investing in GND filters which can be quite costly.

Feel free to ask questions if you need clarification on how to use this very powerful tool

P/s: Behind the scene shots were taken by my buddy Aaron, another great photographer in the making