12th October 2015. Reunion.
Early in the morning I drove north and then went for a walk of a kilometre or two in Sentier Botanique de Bras Cabot, a nature reserve in the Forêt de Bébour. Other, more extensive walks were available for someone with more time.
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This was my journey for the day. I started at Bras de Calumets and drove to La Fenêtre via Sentier Botanique de Bras Cabot, ending up at my accommodation for the night above the west coast. There is another La Fenêtre overlooking Cirque de Cilaos rather than Cirque de Salazie but I ran out of time to visit the second one.
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Most of the images in this post are from my walk through the wild nature reserve at Sentier Botanique de Bras Cabot.
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Many of these images involve multiple exposures through a macro lens combined through photo stacking.
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Without a path or a compass and map, it might be easy to get lost here.
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Moving on from Sentier Botanique de Bras Cabot, we are now at La Fenêtre, overlooking the Cirque de Salazie.
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The town is Hellbourg that I visited the next day and that you will see in the next post.
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Back near the route to the West Coast, this is Belvedere de Bois Court. That waterfall wouldn’t look so small if you were beside it.
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A similar but wider view. The village on the other side is accessible only on foor; there are no roads over there. It is also the starting point for some longer walks.
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There were also a couple of azaleas on the path to the lookout.
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This was my room for the night at Caz Oceane. I don’t often mention the places I stay at but this was special in more ways than one.
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A spectacular view of the sunset unfolded from the balcony at the front of the house.
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We had a wonderful dinner with eight or ten people around a long people. A very varied conversation and surprisingly for very French Reunion, the common language was English. There was a couple there that I had briefly met four days earlier in Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam Botanic Gardens in Mauritius.
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Murray Foote 
Absolutely beautiful shots in the gardens, just wonder if the last flowers are azaleas not hibiscus. I’ll have to look into focus stacking because the DOF you’ve got with the macro shots is fantastic!
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Quite right, they are azaleas. Jools told me when I got up this morning.
I use either Helicon Focus or Photoshop for photo stacking. Sometimes one works better than the other. For the stacked shots I was using a Sigma 180mm f2.8 Macro lens which is fairly big and heavy but you can get macro from a few feet away because it’s a longish telephoto and it continuously focuses from macro to infinity.
Most people do it on a tripod with discrete exposures but I was mainly doing it hand-held (or probably on a monopod), rolling my wrist around to focus and determine the desired focus range, then taking the shot by doing that by doing that slowly while the camera was on slowish continuous exposures.
Hope that seems to make sense.
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Thanks for the details Murray, somehow I had thought you needed focus stacking rail, which put me off. I like your way much better, though I guess it takes a bit of trial and error to get it right. Will be trying it soon, thanks again.
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The danger is missing a focus point so that when you assemble the images there’s an out of focus band in the middle. So it may be a good idea to do it a couple of times and then throw away all the images you don’t use.
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That bedroom is spectacular!
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A wonderful place to stay in general!
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