water ranger's hut

This week's pic was taken two years ago and it very almost went to whatever afterlife ex-digital photos go to! Another HDR image from 5 exposures, I had an idea for processing the image, but didn't have a spare moment to work on it at the time, and then I forgot about it as more and more photos piled into my library. Now that I'm finally getting stuck into the task of organising my digital library (whittling it down from over 20,000 odd photos to around 2,000 usable images) I noticed that these images were missing from all my hard drive backups! Fortunatly I'm paranoid enough to burn a DVD as soon as I download the images from my camera, and there they were, although for some reason unknown to the Me Now, the Me Then had deleted the RAW files but kept JPEG versions... However, since I'm combining the exposures into a single high definition image, ending up with same quality image as I would with the original raw images, I'm not too devastated!

I think this is one of those images that look better large, so click on the image to view the large version...


Just before taking off at the end of a search & rescue training exercise on Table Mountain with the SA Airforce, (and shortly after the Oryx had a hoist failure with me on the end!) a ray of sunlight pushed past the mist that was starting to race up and over the mountain, illuminating the water ranger's hut perfectly. I have no idea how I managed to handhold the camera still enough for 1 second while I shot a burst of 5 exposures - perhaps the vibrations of the aircraft cancelled out my shake - but the images line up perfectly and the only movement evident is in the mist as it sweeps up towards the hut (hence the odd ripple line effect).