Light, camera location, action

In focus ... Wentworth Falls lookout is the perfect spot for a filtration lesson.Credit: Matt Lauder

With majestic mountains and an expert tutor, Michael Gebicki works at the fine detail of landscape photography.

Why would a mature, consenting and otherwise rational adult leave a warm bed on his holidays before dawn to spend an hour waiting patiently for the rising sun to burnish a seascape - which might or might not happen? Answer: landscape photography.

After front-line war photography, landscape photography inflicts the most pain. It requires heavy tripods, spirit levels, several expensive lenses and filters, and involves unsociable hours and fiddling about with torches in darkness. And, most of all, it demands patience.

Dedicated landscape photographers will sit for hours beside a tripod-mounted camera to capture the spiralling streaks inscribed on an ink sky by star trails. Show them moss-covered boulders in a gushing stream with bolts of sunshine dappling the water and they'll turn away muttering about contrast. Give them the same scene under heavy cloud, and hallelujah! Mist makes them pant.

I must admit, though, when you're in the sweet spot at the right time and the weather gods smile and it all comes together, the result is sublime. If you lug your camera gear away with you on your travels and you happen to be there when a sailing dhow is silhouetted against a molten sea, or when the Taj Mahal glows in the early-morning sunlight, that single image can make the whole journey worthwhile.

It's 9am and well past the landscape photographer's holy hour of sunrise when I pull into the parking lot at Leura Cascades in the Blue Mountains, but the motivation is the same. I'm signed up for a hands-on location course run by Matt Lauder, a passionate, professional landscape photographer.

There are nine of us in the group, men and women varying in age from early 30s to 50s. Most of us are armed with digital SLR cameras but, as Lauder advises on his website, the course works just as well for anyone with a non-SLR camera with manual overrides or anyone using a film camera.

Each participant gets a comprehensive online workbook when they sign up, which outlines camera set-up, exposure, focus, white balance and all the other factors that contribute to a high-quality image.

Before the course starts, we're encouraged to do a series of tests to determine depth of field and the effects of different ISO settings, which is the sort of detail that enthrals photographers while everyone else falls into a coma.

It's a Saturday, a bright and warm winter's day. Groups of walkers are pulling into the parking lot, lacing up boots and setting off with day packs while we're clustered in a knot around Lauder, camera bags and tripods scattered across the grass. The first part of the course is all theory and it rapidly drills into technical matters.

Lauder's aim is to teach us how to produce the best possible image at the moment of capture. It's a simple proposition but getting to that point requires much knowledge. He is steadily working his way through "raw" versus JPEG quality, through F-stops, histograms, focus points and shutter speeds. I've been shooting since the days when you flicked a lever to wind your film to the next frame and there aren't too many surprises for me in what Lauder has to say. Then we get on to the topic of colour space and Lauder says something that makes me stop.

"If you want to utilise the maximum colour space, use ProPhoto RGB as your default," he says. This is rolled-gold knowledge. Like most photographers, I use Adobe RGB as my default colour space but ProPhoto, Lauder says, has a bigger gamut and he pulls out a colour graph on his iPad to show the difference.

ProPhoto has a wider range of colours within its reach; it squeezes more information from each pixel, which makes it capable of producing an image with more levels of subtlety and complexity. It's a little like the difference between a dish made with truffle oil and one made with real truffles. For me, with this nugget of information and a few more, the $330 price of the course is justified.

There are plenty of questions, which Lauder encourages. "What do you use to clean your lenses?" someone asks. "A lens cloth," Lauder replies. But another landscape photographer he knows swears by the tail of a flannelette shirt.

It's almost two hours before Lauder stops talking. We grab our gear and march down to the waterfall at the bottom of Leura Cascades. The water gushes through a ferny glade over a series of small cataracts before it reaches the pool at our feet. We set up our tripods on the edge of the walkway and try to work out an exposure that might do justice to the lovely scene before us.

It's gorgeous but problematic, a high-contrast scene far beyond the range of light that can be captured in a single exposure. On an average exposure, the shadows will go to black while the sunlit water burns to white without visible detail.

Normally, I'd shoot several images of this scene at widely different exposures and blend them together, a technique known as high-dynamic range processing. Lauder explains another method that he calls low-dynamic range, using luminosity blending to paint detail back into layers of extreme shadow and brightness.

There's an online tutorial on his website, Rubbing Pixels, with free access for those who attend his courses. Lauder's courses are the only ones in Australia that come with a website with dozens of step-by-step video tutorials on post-production techniques.

After an hour at the cascades, we return to the parking lot, jump in our cars and head for the lookout at Wentworth Falls. It's now the middle of the day and time for a lesson in filtration. Lauder uses a graduated neutral density filter to hold detail in the bright clouds, then a 10-stop neutral density filter to show the effect on shutter speed. It's a technique he uses regularly to create a misty effect on the sea, or to blur a waterfall. We're invited to play around with his filter set before more instruction, this time on shooting and stitching images to make a panorama.

We break for coffee and I head to the shops at Leura before our final rendezvous at the lookout at the Three Sisters. The sun is sinking and the great sump of the Jamison Valley at our feet is filled with black shadows cast by slow-moving clouds. When the sun emerges, it spotlights the red walls of the Three Sisters and Mount Solitary.

It's prime time for shooting and while we click away, capturing the RAW files that will form the basis of panoramic images, Lauder shows us an iPhone app that integrates with Google Maps to indicate the time and direction of sunrise and sunset at any point on any day. For a photographer, pinpointing the optimal time and location of these events is a priceless bit of information.

The sunset is a blaze of glory, although it doesn't quite gild the clouds above the valley with the super chromatic tints that J.M.W. Turner managed in his paintings. "What we need is pollution, or a bushfire," someone says.

Lauder wraps up the day as the sun touches the horizon. "But hang around," he says. "Half an hour after sunset is when objects glow in the final remnants of daylight and the sky can do magic things." I linger for a while but it's getting cold and it's a two-hour drive home. One of us stays on, bent over his tripod, eye barely moving from the viewfinder when I say goodbye. I recognise a man with a fire freshly kindled in his soul.

Michael Gebicki travelled courtesy of Destination NSW. The Blue Mountains day course costs $330 and is one of several run by photographer Matt Lauder. Phone [phone], see mattlauder.com.au.

Shooting around NSW

Focus 10 Photography offers various courses in and around Sydney. Topics covered include black-and-white photography, photo traveller, fashion photography and various location workshops. Phone [phone], see focus10.com.au.

Ken Duncan, one of Australia's most accomplished landscape photographers, runs multi-day location workshops as well as Photoshop workshops. Phone [phone], see kenduncan.com.

Mark Gray, a fine-art landscape photographer, conducts one- to three-day photography tours from his home base in Merimbula and other locations. Phone [phone], see markgray.com.au.

Australian Photographic Safaris runs regular one- and two-day photographic workshops in the Blue Mountains and longer photo safaris in remote parts of outback Australia. Phone [phone], see banana.straliaweb.com.au.

Alfonso Calero is a professional photographer who takes groups on escorted day and night tours through The Rocks area, where the emphasis is on candid, street-level photojournalism. Phone [phone], see sydneyphotographytours.com.

Signature Photo has short courses focusing on portrait, landscape and travel photography that take participants to various locations around inner-city Sydney. Phone [phone], see signaturephoto.com.au.

Discovery Photographers operates three-day Kosciuszko summer workshops in Kosciuszko National Park, starting in October. Phone [phone], see discoveryphoto.org.