Farmlands Near Esperance, WA
Phase One IQ150, 80mm Schneider, f4 @ 1/3200 second ISO 160

I've just finished the Esperance/Albany photo tour with Tony Hewitt, accompanied by half a dozen enthusiastic photographers. We had a wonderful mixture of light, flights and bad humour (the latter attributed to this writer).

If you've travelled with Tony on a workshop, you'll know that he regularly asks, "What have you learnt today"? Usually I make a smart comment when it's my turn to answer, but as I was processing some of the aerials I'd taken, I realised I had learnt to crop. Okay, so I had re-learnt the lesson, one I also teach regularly, but the 'new' direction came from watching my 'students' who were cropping in very tightly to produce their final compositions. Why wasn't I being more aggressive as well? I certainly had plenty of pixels to spare - as do most of us these days with our 20+ megapixel sensors.

The image above is one example. North of Esperance are hundreds of small ponds, some dry, some full, some coloured. Of course, these ponds are found in many places all around Australia, but I had noticed a congestion of them on a commercial flight some 10 years ago, looking out my window. Keeping notes of future locations is an occupational habit. I'm still working out if I prefer the ponds in the 'wilderness', or surrounded by farmland. Both have their appeal.

And the original framing. Click through to the Better Photography website to see the original raw file, before processing and uncropped!

The full frame image before the tighter crop.