Thredbo - Start of the snow season

Just a few landscapes. Lugged around a lot of gear, but spent more time eating fresh snow (carefully avoiding the yellow stuff) than taking photos. Also bought a cheap ($50) 12" usb tablet from Aldi... seems okay for photo stuff, not really sure if you'd want to be doing fine art drawing on it. My 21" Wacom Cintiq will just have to wait a little longer.









Laksa on top of Australia? Especially in a german styled bierkeller? All I can say is it's no Laksa Hut (sob..)



Cheizie wasn't really looking impressed about going through the snow maker sprayer that someone thought would be awesome to put right next to the ski lift. Let's say it was more water than snow as it was right next to us.

Melbourne Weekend

Should have brought my tripod in hindsight... siigh..

Ground to Cloud lightning strike?

UPDATE: Looks like I made the front page of the Canberra Times too! HERE



I decided to do a chance time lapse as the clouds rolled in across Canberra. Managed to grab this. Looks strange to me, possibly a ground to cloud lightning strike.

EDIT: Some more information on ground to cloud lightning (here)

EDIT: Time lapse youtube

Friendly competition - Old School Rules

I've been trying to go back to basics after a recent series of mediocre photos. I was blown away by what a friend has been doing with his Kodak bakelite Brownie Hawkeye. When he showed me what you could do with a simple light meter and a fixed focus/fixed f-stop camera I just had to try.

The Hawkeye has a fixed focus lens with a close up attachment, and a fixed f-stop. I tried to emulate it's operation by only allowing my bodgy plastic lensed Vivitar 28mm f2.8 to operate at f8 only at two focusing distances of 23cm and 2metres.

I tried to do the exposure manually like you had to with the Brownie Hawkeye using a separate light meter. Since the only light meter I have is in my camera, I used it in centre weighted mode and tried to meter different parts of the scene for best overall exposure. I came up with a shutter speed of 1/250th (which seems a bit too fast to replicate the older camera).

Processing was done as simple as possible, for the next lot of Browniesque photos here are my steps

1) Match the framing of the Brownie prints - center crop to a 1x1 aspect ratio.
2) Give it that film feel - Process using some sort of preset lightroom film type in this case Fake Fuji Superia 100.
3) Simulate the light fall off on a brownie lens - Use a preset vignetting.

Now the real challenge is that my friend pays $3-$4 per print from his camera, so I couldn't exactly be unjust and chimp away with my digital. I have to focus on composition and exposure and I'm only allowed one click to get my photo right.

So here is my attempt this month, a Cosmo Flower grown by Therese on our balcony. The photo is still too clear and sharp, and doesn't have that dreamy look that my friend's photos have. I think I need to look up the Brownie Hawkeye's specifics and constrain myself even further.



EDIT: Yup, next time I need to fix the 28mm to f16 and only use a shutter speed of 1/45th. I might also introduce some negative clarity into my processing as the crappy Vivitar 28mm is still sharper than the meniscus lens on the brownie. I could just buy a hawkeye to play with but I can't afford the film processing costs!

Wedding - Mikey and Jo

I think this pretty much sums up the fantastic evening we all had at good friends Mikey and Jo's Wedding.

Didn't take as many photos as I had hoped since I was part of the bridal party. The photog. was very good and was quite calm even though we missed the golden sunset moment.

More Landscapes - The Rock - Wagga

The last landscape I'm going to bother doing for a while. Plus, I worked out how unfit I am that it was heavy work to haul 5kg of camera gear up a hill. Stitched HDR and converted to B&W with PP to bring out the cloud texture. 24mm @ f8, handheld. PS does a good job of stitching these days.

Need to get back to my portraiture. Went to the National Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition. Maybe it's just me, but only a few (including the winner) stood out as exceptional photos. Without wanting to sound self involved, many amounted to mere snapshots.

Have you ever seen an very ordinary, blurry photo of a surly looking teenager taken by his mother blown up to a huge size and hung in a national gallery? Well here is your chance.

I'm not saying that my photos are works of art or contain vast quantities of emotive content, but heck, I can at least take a photo that doesn't have back focus or slow shutter blur (most of the time anyways).

Kosioszko Landscapes

We had our first camping outing since way back in 2007 at Girrawheen. We hiked and stayed in the Kosioszko National Park and covered 22 km in one day doing the Main Range track to Mt Kosioszko. I sure wished the camera wasn't quite so heavy, I wonder how I will go trekking with it.

Lessons I learned:
VR is no substitute for a tripod in doing panos...
trying to guess hyperfocal distances sucks - use the iphone app... or a prime with f-stop markings
50mm f1.8 rocks in portrait orientation - that's what the L-bracket is for...
be consistent with using an index frame at the start of each pano/HDR cycle - it costs nothing...
Don't go beyond diffraction limit of a lens just to get a shorter close hyperfocal distance...
Watch for the change in polarisation angle whilst panning across the scene - a bitch to fix in PP...
HDR looks fake - use a ND grad. filter where possible

On to the photos...


The start of our walk. The ascent on the other side is much steeper than it looks


Blue Lake Pano - pushed more blue into the lake as it was looking greeny-brown, maybe too much


Head waters of the Snowy River - towards the end of the day


HDR Pano - Lookout from the Alpine Way back towards the Main Range


HDR Pano - Tom Groggins Camp site - late afternoon

Now for a MANscape... Awwww Yeahhhh.