Danger Zone - Jets - Temora, NSW

Mikey and I decided to wake up well before dawn and travel over 400km just to smell burnt aviation fuel... vintage aviation fuel!

Temora hosts an air museum which has bi-monthly flying days of its vintage aircraft. We went this particular weekend to catch three of their turbine powered flying machines.

It was a good opportunity to practice my panning skills again. To freezes these planes going low and slow I needed at least 1/800th, but was using 1/400th to see if I could induce some panning blur.

Unfortunately, 1) it's hard to see relative motion against a pure blue sky with no clouds, and 2) where there were clouds I just plain sucked at panning.

The longest lens I have a the moment is my 80-200mm with 200mm being insufficient to really fill the frame with a jet (OH&S meant they weren't allowed to go balls out right above us).

I had better luck with the static displays and busted out some subtle HDR.

Tulips - something from nothing

Tried some 3 flash lighting, 2x shoot-thru defuse front lights - 1 key, 1 fill and a gridded hairline off to the right from behind.



I don't know too many people who'd model for me so tulips from the markets just had to do. They weren't in the greatest shape, but hey when you have lemons...

Used a variety of lenses, 90mm to 80-200mm for kicks. Used aperture to control amount of light. Toyed with ND4 filter rather than fiddling with 3x flash power controls to open up the aperture a little (3x strobes in small white room = lots of light bounced around)

A little underwhelmed by my post processing. The vingetting is too cheesy in the preset I was using. I toned it back but still looks pretty dire.

Lesson learnt: Takes a lot of effort to make a photo from nothing.

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.