Nature images like this were a complete surprise. I went to Australia on a family trip totally expecting to make few if any scenic images. My expectations were devoted to supporting my wife and a couple of travel articles she was writing by accenting them with a few local images. Scenes were not part of the plan. We hoped to travel with a couple of close friends with the goal of just exploring southern Australia. The idea was to start in Melbourne, travel our way to the great Australian wine country near Adelaide, then make our way back. As expected, the trip was phenomenal with lots of great memories. The company was awesome, the wine terrific, the food incredible... I got everything we possibly could want out of a trip. Okay, even though I knew I wasn't going to shoot much in the way of landscape or wildlife photography, I still brought what I would term my "minimal nature photography" kit. This was for the off chance I could actually be able to break away from everyone else and get some shooting done.

As luck would have it, I got to break away a lot. Not only that, our less planned return from Adelaide to Melbourne developed into one of the best nature photography outings I'd ever had. Surprise, surprise...

What's the story with this image? It's taken just beyond Reid's Lookout in the Grampians National Park in western Victoria. While most of the world won't know this, this entire national park suffered a severe brush fire consuming a significant portion of the park including this area. The amazing this is the fire only happened 2.5 months previous to this image capture with many, many green spots growing like crazy. The tree's in the mid-ground were all charred by the fire sweeping through the area. Amazingly, while some of the charring is significant, you can still see a green forest. It is definitely not dead as some would believe after such a major environmental event. I expect the next spring will be amazingly colorful with lots of wildflowers and other plants normally dormant until a wildfire like this passes through the area. As it is, the current state of the park is still quite beautiful.

I took this image as I do many times with the idea to compose three major layers--fore-ground rocks, mid-ground charred trees, background mountains. It has four images shot with three exposure settings a piece for a total of 12 captures. The pano's were made with Realviz Stitcher and the different exposure value layers were blended with Photoshop. Overall, there's about seven stops of data in the image with lots of shadow detail without blowing out the highlights.

Anyone that's wondering if the Grampians were worth seeing after such a fire can be rest assured, it's still awesome. Some may be disappointed by restrictions to trails and some of the icons of the park. But, if you're new to the area like I was, there's still plenty of awesome images to be made. This is especially true if you have a desire to document the results of nature's amazing wildfires.

Cheers

Tom Hill