MORE OF GERHARD LAUBSCHER'S WONDERFUL IMAGES

READER’S PICTURES PART 7

I am indebted to Robin Fick and Kevin Cooke for this series of images. There’s little wrong with them, but I will tweak them a bit in a software programme called Photoshop to show you how you can enhance an image using one or two simple tools.

ROBIN FICK’S IMAGES OF THE WILLOW STREAM AT BALLOCH

What I like about this first image is that it really does capture the grandeur of this landscape. Notice how the angler is well placed and lends a sense of proportion to the monumental scale of the topography in this area.

The first thing I did was use the Curves tool, chose the blackest, or darkest spot, and clicked on it with the Curves eye dropper tool.

Then I chose the brightest spot – the white water alongside the angler – and clicked on that with the brightest spot eye dropper tool.

In the next image from Robin I again use Curves, but this time click on the darkest, then the brightest and finally the mid-tone (or neutral grey) area in the picture. For this step I chose the angler’s pants. They are a perfect neutral grey.

Here’s the original image

After clicking on the darkest spot in the image it is left a little dull and has a bluish (cold) tint to it.

Clicking on the brightest area in the image lightens the whole picture a bit.

Finally I click on a mid-tone or neutral grey area and see how the picture warms up.

Finally, Robin takes an excellent shot of typical holding water on the beautiful Willow Stream

THE NEXT SET OF IMAGES IS FROM KEVIN COOKE.

This is a marvellous fly fishing landscape that needs little work, except maybe to remove the date stamp. I do this by dragging a tool called the Spot Healing Brush over the date. In a stroke it has gone and the tool replaces the lost pixels with suitable pixels it matches from nearby the scene.

Below is a lovely image from Kevin of his youngster on the Bell River in the Eastern Cape. Notice how with all the bright light around the camera has been fooled into slightly over-exposing the shot. To prevent this Kevin could have stopped his camera up (in other words set to expose lighter) and not down, to make the camera read the scene as darker, as you would intuitively think things should work! But Photoshop will help. I just clicked on the darkest part of the image using the Curves eye dropper tool.

And I did exactly the same with this image taken at Highland Lodge in the Stormberg area of the Eastern Cape near the town of Dordrecht.

And finally if you had any doubts about the size of the trout in these great lakes, have a look at these Highland Lodge beauties!

GERHARD LAUBSCHER

I have watched the evolution of Gerhard's fly fishing and parallel with that his almost complete mastery of fly fishing photography. Looking back at the times we fished together in earlier years I remember him carrying a Minolta film camera and always squeezing the most out of it. Even then he was taking pretty good shots, but as his career unfolded into the business of guiding and saltwater fly fishing, he became more serious about cameras. On one of their trips to the Seychelles I suspect Henry Gilbey (http://www.henry-gilbey.com/ ) influenced Gerhard a lot, but it’s a guess because Gerhard has always had a keen eye for composition and a deep appreciation for the value cameras have to compliment fly fishing. And as his guiding business, FlyCastaway, expanded and reached some really exotic destinations ( http://www.flycastaway.com/) Gerhard got into more and more fish species and more and more camera gear. Now he uses a Canon 7D along with a 5D Mk II, 16-35 mm and 24-300 mm Canon lenses (among others) and is undoubtedly now one of the best fly fishing photographers in South Africa. I am tempted to say he is the best and leave it that, but subjectivity is always open to debate, I know.

In the following series of images (and I will post more in the weeks to come) keep an eye on Gerhard’s sense of composition and colour.

Then along with the images Gerhard sent this note, which will interest those of you who do some photography, but you can skip it if you don’t...

Here is some of my work shot over the last 3 months at various destinations in the Indian Ocean, Rhodes and Sterkfontein. Please feel free to crit, you know I value your opinion and would like to have your input. Very little if anything has been done to the images, the RAW’s went into Lightroom where the Vibrance is adjusted by about 15points and the blacks by about 5, they are processed out of Lightroom as 1500 pixel wide jpegs of no bigger than 600k.

(Lightroom is a leading brand of image adjusting software much favoured by many professional photographers - http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/)

GERRIT REDPATH - ACE FLY FISHING PHOTOGRAPHER

Gerrit  is a keen and now widely experienced fly fisher living in Bloemfontein about whom I feel a little guilty. Our paths first crossed when I’d just published Hunting Trout. I was on my countrywide, six week sales pitch trip with my truck loaded up with 700 copies of the book. I left Cape Town at sparrows and stopped over at his place for the night to deliver the copy he’d ordered by email. I’d never met the man before that but he insisted I stay over and we talked deep into the night. Since then we have become great friends, fished together a bit, communicated a lot and in some ways I was, I guess, at least partly responsible for encouraging him into fly fishing photography.  And with that, into ever increasingly expensive camera gear and lenses! I’d be guessing, but I’d say that he started his photography less than three years ago. Have a look at where he is now! He has an incredible eye for the absurd, a perfect vision on composition and he has become a really great amateur photographer. I asked him for a DVD of his work and will post some of his images piecemeal over the next few weeks. He does a lot of fishing around Clarens and the Golden Gate area as well as Rhodes in the Eastern Cape. Check out this small taste of his work and see if you get the same feeling about his images and his talents that I have.

Gerrit (far right) with friends

More to follow

THE LITTLE POTT RIVER – GEORGE BRITS

This is a charming stream 15 kilometres to the north of the village of Maclear. It runs in wonderfully rugged sandstone topography and carries a good head of brown trout. It’s superb nymphing water – Zaks, Flashbacks or Gold-ribbed Hare’s Ears and PTNs – and typical of brown trout streams there is often an evening hatch when the fish move out of deep, hidden primary lies to feed in shallow runs and tail outs.

I have always fished the lower sections but a place with a great reputation for beauty and supreme fly fishing is Woodcliffe, owned by Phyll Sephton. This is the last farm on the road before the vast hinterland of the southern Drakensberg starts. See more on this link

http://www.woodcliffecavetrails.co.za/woodclife_accomodation_frameset.htm

The custodian of most of the other fly waters in this area – there are 1000 kilometres available - is the Maclear Fly Fishing Club. For more details, contact Theuns Botha (073 674 3326) or Noel Wagenaar (045 932 1038). Day permits for the rivers in the area are available at Maclear Agencies or Maclear Nissan at R150-00 per day.

http://www.maclear.co.za/FlyFishing.htm

Fishing guides available: Contact Colin Moolman (045-9321139 H 045-9321046 W) or Richard Viedge (082 6571728)

Now enjoy the upper Little Pott with George Brits

Close enough to Heaven that it makes little difference I'd say!!

George Brits

George is an accoplished man in many areas - business, photography and fly fishing. He has travelled the world widely. Here is a series of his images from the USA. In the next issue I will feature his photo essay of the Little Pott River in the Eastern Cape.

Bitch Creek Idaho

Bitch Creek Cutthroat

Snake River Idaho

Snake River brown

Snake River

Snake River

Soda Butte Yellowstone Park