Mindil Beach at Dusk Panorama

Even if you haven’t been to Darwin, you may have heard of the beach in Darwin called Mindil Beach and the market where everyone goes Thursdays and Sundays – Mindil Beach Market.

I’ve blogged about Mindil Beach before when I was there in August 2007, it is a great and fun melting pot of so many cultures, market stalls and buskers and thousands of people. Then there’s the sunset. It is not just watched it is almost worshipped by the Territorians and the tourists. It is out of this world, only in the tropics will you get these colours. Dusk is even better, the colours are so intense and saturated that Scandinavian eyes used to our somewhat paler version of the world find it hard to believe these colours exist!

I recently finished stitching a panorama of Mindil Beach at Dusk that I feel succeeds fairly well in showing the magical dusk light at Mindil Beach. Click this to see the large size version on my website:

Click to see large size on my gallery! Copyright Flemming Bo Jensen Photography

Mindil Beach at Dusk Panorama
Copyright Flemming Bo Jensen Photography

About the photo

I love this shot, looking at the full size version it totally brings me back to Mindil Beach – all that’s missing is the many sounds and smells of the market and the tropical heat! The colours are spot on as I remember them from Mindil in dusk light and this particular night (I was at the market 3 different nights) had the best light and one other important thing – the tide is out and went out timed perfectly with the sunset! There’s a 9 meter tide at Darwin so it’s a huge difference, either there’s no beach or a huuuuge beach! Having the tide go out timed with the sunsets leaves these tiny rivers of reflected light in the wet sand picking up all the colours of dusk! Only happened on this night! I underexposed by more than a stop to keep the red channel from blowing out.

It’s not a perfect panorama shot technically though, I did quite a few things wrong and I have spent hours and hours in PTgui and Photoshop trying to correct my mistakes, “salvaging” this pano. I didn’t have a tripod for this so I shot it handheld, but that can still work fine. It won’t work when you’re not paying attention though, I must have still been jetlagged because the horizon is all over the place from shot to shot. You would think I bloody shot it one handed looking at the files! This + the fact that it’s a very wide ‘n wide angle pano shot vertically is why the horizon is not totally straight in this shot and I had to do a lot of cleaning up in Photoshop of the stitches. It was worth all the work though, I love the shot but wish it was a bit better technically, certainly would have saved me many hours of work at the computer if I’d done my work properly in the field to begin with. I guarantee it’ll still look great on your wall though 🙂

The Market

Gotta love Mindil Beach Market, half of Darwin is there not just the tourists and it’s great fun. I’ll end this with one of my shots from the market itself, click to see large:

Click to see large size on my gallery! Copyright Flemming Bo Jensen Photography

Busy night at Mindil Beach Market
Copyright Flemming Bo Jensen Photography

…and finally, a video of the market courtesy of Northern Territory Tourism at Youtube:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EceRhV_PQc4]

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