Shanna Driussi, Kakadu Magic (LANDSCAPE 2023)

I took this image in June 2022 while visiting Kakadu. We left our campsite early to arrive at Yellow Water Billabong for sunrise. Having only the boardwalk to walk along the billabong meant limited freedom/options for setting up photo opportunities with the sunrise in a good position. The river cruises/tours were also leaving at this time, which meant getting a shot without them was tricky. I used the bush on the left to hide the tour boats and the tree on the right to add some depth to my composition. The final image is an edited HDR using 3 images. Images were taken by Canon 5D Mark IV with a Tameron 24-70mm lens. Due to the tour boats moving out onto the water and not wanting to capture them in my image, I couldn't take extremely long exposures. This meant needing to crank up the ISO on a couple of images to let in the light to and to use shorter exposure times. Images were taken at 24mm focal length at f/11. Image one was an exposure time of .5 sec @ ISO 250, Image 2 was an exposure time of .5 sec at ISO 2000, and image 3 was an exposure time of 4 seconds at ISO 2000.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.