Silhouette Photography
| Last Updated: February 6, 2014
In this showcase series we feature the Mount Bromo photography of Helminadia Ranford. Helminadia is a photographer from Indonesia, she spoke to us about this spectacular landscape photography series.
Helminadia, please tell as a little about your background?
I was born in the small Village called Ruteng on the small island of Flores in Eastern Indonesia, I was a nurse once but since moved to the Middle East (Bahrain and now based in Doha-Qatar) with my family on July 2006.
In March 2008 I got my first DSLR, a Canon 400D, I get serious in travel and taking a lot of photographs when my husband bought me a birthday gift Canon EOS 5D Mark II
in August 2010.
The first adventure was to Lombok island Indonesia with my good friend Jesse Estes, this wasn’t an easy trip, it was my first experience visiting a volcano area (Mount Rinjani) before I went to Ijen Crater and Mount Bromo.
Since then I’ve been very fortunate to visit breathtaking landscapes around the world and able to capture the beauty of nature in photos.
Can you tell us more about this Mount Bromo series?
Ever since I saw some images of the volcano, I just could not help myself to visit the area and capture it my self. The volcano is located in Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park, which is a popular tourist destination for photographers.
Mount Bromo is an active volcano, it forms part of the enormous Tengger Massif, which also contains Mount Sumeru, an even more highly active volcano. Indonesia itself is in the volatile Pacific “Ring of Fire,” which means that it experiences both volcanic and tectonic activity.
The first time I took a trip to Mount Bromo was on November 2010 with a private tour, we drove from Bali across to Java, it was to take 7 hours on the road. I did not witness good light at the first trip, the last activity was in late January 2011, there were an eruption in Mount Bromo.
Since I heard/watching the news about the eruption I decided to visit again in July 2011, as some things might have changed and I might able to capture some beautiful landscape after the eruption. The result the second trip was a big success for me, capturing images in amazing and beautiful light for two days in a row, with smoke and ash, this including some of the the sunset images, as you can see on some of the Bromo Dunes.
What equipment did you use for this series?
I took all the images with Canon EOS 5D Mark II, with two Canon lenses, the Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L
and Canon 70-200mm f/4L
. There was not much processing other than basic Photoshop; such as contrast, sharpened details and dust removal. To be honest I only know basic Photoshop.
Do you have any new photography series planned for the near future?
I’m planning to take a trip to Nepal and China again, for some landscape and street photography series.
You can see more of Helminadia’s work via helminadia.com or her Flickr account.
Photophique has express permission to publish these images and Helminadia Ranford retains full copyright to all photographs featured in this showcase series.
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the cover picture is just awesome ! superb series !