Photos

Robe, on Guichen Bay, is a popular holiday resort on South Australia’s Limestone Coast. It was established as one of the earliest ports in the state. Much of this early success can be attributed to South Australia’s sister state Victoria. In the 1850’s thousands (20,000 in 1857 alone) of Chinese prospectors landed in this port for the rush to the Ballarat goldfields in Victoria. It seems Victoria, to capitalize on the gold rush, imposed a 10 pound landing fee to all comers into Melbourne. This was more money even than the passage over, so it was easier for these people to land in Robe and walk the 150 km. to their destination. Having ships coming in with passengers, it wasn’t long before the trade was expanded to ship other cargo out.

The Doorway Rock (seen here) can be seen just off Cape Dombey, on the north-east side of Robe, (out by the Obelisk). It is an unusual limestone feature that would have been seen by all ships coming into Robe. Something I noticed as I took this shot, and others, was the presence of a lot of flat table rock, just at the waterline. It can be seen around Doorway Rock, and as the darker area closer to shore. This was seen at other areas around the cape as well.

Given the position of this rock, I expect one could get some great sunset shots of it. I was there in the early (overcast) morning so couldn’t try this out. It’s something for others to watch out for if they’re in the area.

Much of this from:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/South-Australia/Robe/2005/02/17/1108500204663.html and http://www.wilmap.com.au/samaps/robe.html

Workflow was as follow:
Shot in Raw - NEF files adjusted for exposure and shadow
Filtered for lens correction – Distortion and Horizontal Perspective (on horizon)
Adjusted levels
Adjusted curves separate for sky vs sea and land
Filtered for noise on sky
Added saturation +14 to master
Dodged and burned with overlay layer (5% opacity brush)
Added a layer for sharpening (excluding sky) and “over-sharpened” with USM
Modified sharpening with a layer mask (15% opacity black brush)
Saved as a tiff
For this post, created a new sharpening layer for the reduced size and redid the technique from above, framed, and saved as a jpeg

As a separate note: I’ve been looking for ways to keep the quality level as high as possible during the save to the jpeg. Using Photoshop I had to save this file at a quality level of 8 out of 12, which gave me a file size of 179 kb. To get higher results I decided to do some experimentation and opened the Tiff in both Photofiltre and Irfanview. I then saved the jpeg as separate files and compared. In Photofiltre I was able to save at a 94% level for a file size of 198 kb. In Irfanview I was able to save at a 95% level for a file size of 191 kb. Then I did a compare of the 4 shots by tiling them in photoshop and doing a visual compare. The photoshop jpeg was definitely closer to the original TIFF, though it did seem to loose just a touch of saturation and sharpness. The Irfanview was next best, followed by Photofiltre. All of this comparison was done visually. I invite others to do the same. For now I will stick with the save on photoshop, even though for shots such as this, with a lot of detail, I may have to settle for an 8 / 12 on the save.