Great Walks spends a week on Lord Howe Island learning to take better photos.
As a travel writer and editor of Great Walks I always take photos on my trips. Part of it is for work and part of it is for fun. I've always loved photography but I always knew my photos had plenty of room for improvement. So when I was invited by Pinetrees Lodge on the magnificent Lord Howe Island to attend their week-long walking and photography week I immediately said yes.
In each group of 12 photographers, there are two professional photographers and a local guide. Each morning after breakfast, there's a 30-minute workshop on the technical theme of the day and then guests are given a brief for daily photo competition, although Luke says it's not really competitive. "It’s just a way to get guests to concentrate on a technical theme, and have a bit of fun.”
Getting behind the lens
The daily theme could be tonal contrasts, scale and perspective or, in the case of today's assignment, drama, which we're not short of as we climb along the granite face of Mt Lidgbird, one of the island's two mountains. To get there requires an hour-long hike up a series of steps through palm forest under a thick canopy, so there's a certain physicality to the photography week which I like. The walk has its challenges but there are ropes in place for some of the steeper sections.
All this provides plenty of photo opportunities to showcase today's drama theme. Our destination is Goat House Cave half way up Lidgbird. From where we stand Lord Howe looks like some wild, exotic island straight out of an adventure novel.
Looking through my lens, I photograph the island under the watchful eye of my three photography mentors Luke, Kenny Lees and Alex De Kiefte. As taught on day one of tour I'm constantly checking my histogram to help me improve each shot.
Histo-what?
A histogram is a graph that displays where all of the brightness levels contained in the scene are found, from the darkest to the brightest. “Imagine that each pixel within your camera is like a cup that holds water,” explains Alex. “Every pixel or cup, can hold a certain quantity of light or water."
"The cup will only hold so much water before it overflows, and the pixel can only record a certain amount of light before it is also full. So quite simply, the histogram is a bar chart that has each pixel's quantity of light presented in graphical form.” So in theory a scene with a 'normal' distribution of brightness values will produce a histogram that looks like a hill. The edges slope down either side towards black and white, with the majority of tones in the middle.
Show & tell
Every night we have a debrief and everyone shows their top two shots of the day. “It’s always a revelation for each guest to see how many different perspectives there are from the same location," says Luke.
And it's not just the photography instructors who are impressed by the quality of photos. Everyone sometime during the photography course produces a stunning shot that we all get to admire and congrats that person for their efforts. We all have a sense of pride as our photos are revealed to everyone at the end of each day – including other guests at the resort who are curious to see what we're looking at.
There's a bottle of wine for the best photo of the day and guess who won the pinot for best dramatic photo? Thank you very much!
Words_Brent McKean