Postcard From The Adelaide Hills (FujiFilm x100s)

It’s winter in Adelaide and remarkably cold for this part of the world, with several days since I’ve been here struggling to get into double figures.

On Monday I took a drive into the Adelaide Hills with my FujiFilm x100s in tow. My fondness for this camera has not waned and these two images reflect the kind of photos I created on the day.

The Adelaide Hills mark the western edge of Adelaide, where suburbia meets farm country and are home to some very quaint villages and excellent food and wine companies. I got my days wrong, so the shop at Skara Smallgoods was closed, but I did have a great time visiting Beerenburg, who make some awesome jams and sauces known all across Asia.

It was also great to visit Hahndorf Farm Barn, who run some great programmes to give kids a taste of life on a working farm (complete with milking cows, grooming and feeding animals).

The first photo was taken on an abandoned road and reflects the approach to HDR I’ve been working on for a few years now (and featured in Piet van Den Eydne’s book Pushing Light). It’s a multilayer process in Photoshop (using Nik plugins), where I’m trying to draw out the complex details you find in these sort of scenes, without (hopefully) making the image look too over-processed.

The second image below, is the kind of Black & White style regular readers of this blog will be familiar with. I first started using this kind of process in Oaxaca in 2011 and I really find the x100s is incredibly well suited to creating these kinds of images.

I grew up with the Australian countryside on my doorstep and still adore the way this kind of scenery looks deceptively simple, almost plain at first, yet reveals so much detail and subtlety as you look more closely. It’s a wonderful challenge as a photographer to try and capture this within the limited frame of a photograph.