In this month's Gourmet Traveller...

I got published :D



It wasn't an article, it wasn't even a photo in an article. It was a small part of a one page advert about an Australian Tourism photocompetition. I didn't win, I wasn't even a finalist, but I did get my name and a picture on p67 of the July 2010 issue of Gourmet Traveller. Cue flag waving!



http://www.nothinglikeaustralia.com/flash.htm#/entries/17244/title

I was doing a job for a sports photography company (who may or may not want to be associated with this blog and thus will remain anonymous - however, if you have a sporting event, these guys know how to roll out good coverage - I can pass on a name) and the long and short of it is one of my frames caught the eye of someone who knew about the competition and I submitted on that basis.

To be honest, I thought I had accidentally taken something fantastic, beyond my known abilities, tapping into some innate artistic creature I hadn't found before. So I was quite underwhelmed when the photo in question was revealed to me. It was a test frame to check ambient backlight to dial in my exposure and flash fill for the event competitors. Hell there was even a building crane smack bang where the sunrise is!

So with some garish colour manipulation and quick and dirty heal brushing of the crane we end up with this...



Slap on a cheesy title (I had no coffee or pastry though I did pity the event competitors it was so cold) and email... it is that easy to get published people!

Revisiting Italy - Damn Jpeg

I was looking back over some photos from my 2006 trip to Italy, and thought I'd try my hand at sprucing some of them up with an extra three and a bit years of playing around with photos.



I shot everything in jpg (I didn't know any better early on) and hence am pretty limited in manipulation leeway, I only had my three primes a 90mm, 50mm and (bodgy) 28mm.



Everything was shot off hand without any real thought to composition (as far as I can remember) and I hadn't yet learned to use the in camera histogram to evaluate exposure.



In reflection, three years on, I've gotten far better at my camera handling and knowing what my D200 can and can't do. However, I think my composition is still fairly rigid and needs to be loosened up and made more adaptable. Despite fancy zooms and fast lenses, I'm still sticking to fairly mundane perspectives. That's not to say I don't deserve new gear though ;-)

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