The Curse of the Devil's Cauldron

[PeterB666]

Well a bit of a SNAFU for me at a place called the Devil's Cauldron today.

The Devil's Cauldron is a fissure in the rock ledge just South of Whale Beach on Sydney's far North Shore. There is around a 1 km trek over boulders and stuff in the dark to do this as a dawn shoot. It is not for the faint hearted. Not only did I slip of the same rock in the dark a mere 3 times and have a pair of scraped, bruised and bloody legs to show for it, but other than the first few shots when I had to wipe off the rain from my lens, the rest of the shots have a lovely smear mark in the middle of them as I couldn't see what I was doing in the dark. Argh!!!!

Anyway, I post these for your amusement. I will ignore any comments about the fuzzy bits - I only score a 3 out of 10 for Photoshop skills. As usual, all shots taken with my Olympus E-P1 and Olympus M.Zuiko 9-18mm zoom ...

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Devils Cauldron _1 by peterb666, on Flickr - OK, that's the only shot that doesn't have a fuzzy bit but then the spray makes it look fuzzy anyway. Now for a patch of heavy rain ...

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Devils Cauldron _2 by peterb666, on Flickr

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Devils Cauldron _3 by peterb666, on Flickr

This one is my favourite shot and it has cleaned up well enough ...

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Devils Cauldron _4 by peterb666, on Flickr

To give you an idea what the weather was like, it was only very light rain during this shot ...

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Raindrops keep falling on my camera by peterb666, on Flickr

Note the amount of fuzzy crap. One of the disadvantages of shooting using live-view is that you rarely notice this stuff even when reviewing recently taken image and zooming in to check the detail.

Anyway, stuffed legs and stuffed photos, it is still good to get out and I was with a bunch of insane photographer friends at 5 am on a wet and miserable morning - what more could I ask for?

Enjoy - comments and feeback welcome.

 

[grebeman]

Hi Peter, you seem to be getting some good old British weather down under. The rain here this morning might have washed you off the rocks, so not having any local mad photography friends to encourage me out I stayed under the duvet and listened to it beating against the windows. A great shame about the wet on the lens spoiling some very atmospheric shots, agree with you that no. 4 is the best of those you have posted and as you say you've done well post process to clean it up.

Barrie

 

[hmpws]

I like your 4th shot also. I was down near the rocks today, and only now do I appreciate how hard it is to take the shots that you have taken .

 

[PeterB666]

I vow never, ever to go there again at 5:00 am in the morning.

 

[ddb]

Nice shots but I really like the last one showing what photographers put up with to get their image.