A book filled with HDRI, focus stacking and macro panoramas:

Wildflower Country—Discovering Biodiversity in Australia’s South West

In August of 2010, Wildflower Country was published by Fremantle Press, to great acclaim. The first of its kind, this book combines extensive focus stacking macro photography out in the field in natural light.

This large format book is a personal journey about the experience of following the magical “wave” of flowering that occurs during spring thoughout the southwest of Western Australia.

A luscious book dripping with detailed pictures, it showcases our pioneering techniques incorporating focus stacking (or expanded depth-of-field), HDRI (high dynamic range imaging) and macro panoramas. Truly something special.

We are very proud of the photographs. We strive to produce pictures that are so rich and detailed that you feel you could almost reach into them… that there are no barriers between yourself and the page. We feel this is fine art wildflower photography with a real difference.

Almost all of the pictures involve an average of five, and some incorporated up to 20 exposures to achieve the depth of field we needed. Some involve a special technique we have developed, which uses multiple pictures combined with HDR! We call it hdr-dof. For example, a Royal Hakea is made of a stack of 25 exposures (5 sets of hdr exposures) combined to achieve the tone and depth of field we wanted.

To our knowledge, nothing like this has been done before in macro nature photography.

It has been a mammoth task, but very exciting and the results are wondrous.

An interview with us about Wildflower Country.

Ewen Bell of Photography for Travellers has written a review of Wildflower Country.

RRP $75 AUD. Published by Fremantle Press, you can buy it here. Remember, support your friendly local starving artists so we can continue to struggle on. If you buy from a big free-postage discount book seller, you get a bargain but we get practically nothing. And if you are buying from a bookstore in our local area, please tell them to order more—they may have only one book on the shelf, and sometimes don’t think to re-order when it sells. Yes, I know.