Stewart Island Revisited

This month Robin and I spent a week visiting Stewart Island located off the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island. We spent a month there several years ago on our boat; this time it was a land-based visit.

With less time and a holiday home rental it was a different experience including my attempts at landscape photography. Regardless, we saw some lovely scenes worthy of a brief post that includes a gallery of new photos.

For past Stewart Island photos and more on the island itself, see the July 19, 2019 blog post.

This visit was a reminder about the challenge of shooting landscapes under normal circumstances. Good landscape photography involves a lot of planning to be at the right spot under optimum conditions. The pictures from this Stewart Island visit were taken under less than ideal conditions with normal daytime lighting and nothing terribly exciting happening with atmospherics.

Despite this, careful exposure and digital editing can produce good results. None of these images are straight unedited files. They all have been carefully processed to maximize tones and color in individual zones like sky, land and water. At minimum basic adjustment tools like Adobe Lightroom’s Graduated Filter and Adjustment Brush have been used. In many of the shots more precise controls available in Photoshop have been used to control tone and color in very specific areas of the photos.

Several existing blogs talk about Lightroom tools and I will be doing a future post on Photoshop selection and pixel-based adjustment tools that can give even more control over an image.