Escapism

My most expensive shot...

03 Mar, 2010

Today I took a Landscape Photography course that I had booked with my mentor, David Nightingale through GPP. He decided that we would take some off-road vehicles and head to the desert to shoot some dunes for the afternoon. Sounded like a great plan I thought. He had discussed getting down low for shots and using props etc and all of this was in my mind as we headed out. So when I happened to find this can lying in the desert on top of a huge dune I decided it would be a fantastic idea to put my trusty Nikon D300 and 24-70mm lens on the sand and shoot the can with a landscape background. As soon as I got down I realised that it was probably not the best idea as the wind had picked up and having my face on the sand whilst the wind was so ferocious meant that I couldn't open my eyes. I decided that as I was down there anyway I would shoot a bracketed sequence of 9 images with my eyes and mouth firmly closed and hoped for the best. Unfortunately, they were the first and last shots of the day that my camera captured properly. Sand had gotten into the lens and the buttons of my camera so that some of the buttons were stuck depressed and as a result the screen stopped working and so I had no idea if it was capturing anything at all, whilst the lens would no longer focus.

As soon as we got back to Dubai this evening I took the camera to Nikon who had a real laugh at my expense. They kept my lens and D300 indefinitely whist they try to fix them and as I was now without a camera they sold me a Nikon D3s which was a rather expensive unplanned purchase.

When I finally got home, I checked the metered exposure of the shot on my computer and was very disappointed to find it did not capture the scene at all which you can see here if you're interested. I couldn't accept that I had ruined my camera for nothing so I decided to use 8 of the exposures I took and created an HDR in Photomatix Pro to see if I could extract more details. I then took the image into Photoshop and used the Topaz Details 2 filter and also made some curves adjustments. The end result is now very close to what I recall seeing before my eyes filled with sand.

Tomorrow is day 2 of the course and we are off to shoot urban landscapes with my fancy new D3s in the rather safer and more civilized surroundings of Dubai International Financial Centre. This time I will try to pay more attention to Davids advice as he just rightly pointed out that he did strongly warn us several times about the dangers of getting sand in our equipment...

Update (23/03/10): I received my gear back from Nikon. They managed to fix the D300 so I am happy. The lens is another story as they refused to open it so just cleaned it externally. They did manage to unstick the focus ring so it now functions most of the time, however it requires some serious effort to adjust the zoom as all you can hear is sand grinding in there! I am trying to sell this too now. I purchased a water/sand proof cover for my D3s which I just tried out at the beach and it is excellent! If you are interested you can find them here .

(EXIF: Nikon D300 • 24-70mm f/2.8 • 24mm • f/10 • HDR • AP • ISO 200)