Get the RSS feedThis is just a quick follow up post from my Scouting Landscape Locations post from the other day. As I mentioned in that post I had found a few locations that I wanted to try different shots from.
The cold weather we've been having and a few late nights have meant I haven't had the will power to get out of bed before the sun but I have instead been shooting around dusk.
As a result so far I've posted two new images:
And.....
I will be forcing myself to get up early one day before I return home so there will be more images to come over the next week.
It's been far too long so I've created a new post due to the usual work commitments and various other things getting in the way. So, now while I have a few moments I thought I'd quickly put together a new post.
I'm currently in Armidale and have decided to take the opportunity to squeeze in a bit of photography while I'm here. Autumn in Armidale sees a majority of the trees changing colour and dropping their leaves due to the cold. This is something we don't get so much on the Central Coast (due to higher temperatures) and it offers some wonderful colours and photo opportunities.
I have decided on a particular "country" style of shot that I am looking for and will need to get up before the sun to get the best light for the shot. As I don't know the area very well I have just gone out scouting for some good locations. Scouting out a location or two before you go out shooting can often be very helpful and save you from wasting an entire shoot.
The benefits of scouting a location before a shoot include:
- Less "shoot" time is spent looking for your subject when the light is right
- It is much easier to find good locations during the day time as opposed to when it's dark
- You can plan the equipment (filters, lenses etc) you will need better
- You won't have to get up as early if you know where you're going
Some things to look are for and keep in mind when scouting a location are:
- Keep in mind the style of photos you want to create
- Don't get too fixed on that particular style or you may miss other opportunities
- The light will be different when scouting. Think of where the sun will be
- Get permission to shoot from the location if required. E.g. don't just enter someone's private property.
- Is there anything in the way of getting the shot you're after?
Once you've found your location it's all down to how you approach the shoot. If it is a popular location you could also look for other photographs that have been taken in the area. Then, try to shoot something different.
That's all for now. Hopefully the weather and light will be in my favor tomorrow morning and I will come back with some wonderful shots.
I had a crazy idea the other day and I ran with it. As a result last night I've added the first in a range of "twerrific" twitter t-shirts to my redbubble profile.
This shirt, titled "8.7 times a day" is the first and there's will be several others to come. The design of this one is quite simple and is ideally created for a black shirt print. The shirts are available in various sizes and styles including short sleeves, long sleeves, v-neck and fitted (for the ladies).
I would love to hear feedback on this particular design by anybody that's interested or if you have suggestions/requests for a particular design. Alternatively, if you want to purchase a shirt from $29.95 AU head over to this page at redbubble.
That's all for now.
I recently bought and read Scott Kelby's "The Digital Photography Book" volumes 1 and 2 on the recommendation of a friend. This post is intended to be a bit of a review of the books and some of my thoughts on them.
Scott Kelby takes a unique approach with the writing style used in these books which seems to make them fairly popular and easy to read. His approach aims to give you the low down on how to achieve certain things in photography without going into all of the technical detail and reasons why. This approach makes the book good for beginners and is fairly engaging for the reader. With one of the books I found myself being unable to put it down. Wanting to continue reading to see what happens next. Rather unusual for a non-fiction book.
The down side of the book's style is that there are numerous sections that are clogged up with nonsensical "humor" which really doesn't add much to the content of the book. I'd suggest skipping the introduction to each chapter unless you have time to waste. Otherwise you will get to the end of the introductions and wonder ":WHY>".
My gripe about the needless padding in the books aside, both books cover some excellent topics for various areas of photography and even if you aren't interested in those particular areas (for example wedding photography) I still feel that anyone can read them and take something away that will help in other aspects of photography. For example the wedding chapters (there's one in each book) both have some great suggestions for lighting and group photos.
I picked up volume 2 at the shops before volume 1 so I read them in reverse order. This didn't matter immensely although the second book is intended to follow on from the first. Ultimately I don't think a second book was really needed as a lot of the content seems to be repeated in both books. Perhaps instead of padding the books with humor, Scott could've condensed them into a single book.
All in all I did enjoy reading both books and would recommend picking at least one of them up if you are beginner to moderately experienced as a photographer and want to learn a few nifty tricks.
Also, if you've read either of these books I'd love to hear what you think about them.
I know I have been a bit quiet lately on this site and redbubble so I thought a quick post would help clear things up. I've taken on a few new web development projects (including www.martialartslife.net among others) over the last week which will be consuming most of my time for a while.
Unfortunately this means that my personal photography and blogging has taken a lower priority so updates on this site will be happening less frequently. I will still be trying to get creative on weekends or whenever I have a chance. The opportunities just may not be as frequent as they were in recent times.
In the meantime please continue to send any photographic requests through. I will make time for any specific requests. Additionally, all of your comments, thoughts and feedback are most welcomed and appreciated.
I received my magnifying eyepiece during the week which I ordered to help me with using manual focus in certain situations. Wearing glasses with a dSLR is not the easiest or most practical thing so I sometimes struggled (particularly in low light) with getting tack sharp images. I purchased the magnifying to hopefully make this issue go away.
The product I bought actually came with a number of adapter pieces included making it suitable for virtually all Nikon dSLR models. I believe the regular product from Nikon does not come with the adapters and a separate adapter may need to be purchased depending on your camera. I am currently using the eyepiece with my Nikon D60.
Attaching the eyepiece was easy enough once I figured out the correct adapter to use. It is simply a matter of sliding up the standard rubber eyepiece and then sliding the magnifying eyepiece down. According to the specifications the eyepiece provides 1.3x magnification. It is definitely a noticeable increase in size.
Once attached I played around with a few test images in different situations comparing auto focus against my best attempts at manual focus using the new eyepiece for the same photo. I was quite pleased with the results and could see virtually no difference between the auto focus and my manual focus (when the auto focus actually got it right).
The only down side of the DK-21M that I could find is that it is round while the standard eyepiece is rectangular for the D60. This obviously isn't a problem for all Nikon models but for the D60 in particular it makes composing the shot just a little it harder as there could be elements in the corners you can't see until you've taken the photo.
All in all I'd have to say I'm pretty pleased with it.
I've been busy taking lots of photos and experimenting with new things since my last post. Here's a brief run down on what I've been up to.
Firstly, I did a bit of flower photography with some of the flowers around the garden. From that I've produced two photos; Red Hibiscus and Yellow Hibiscus. The red one was shot outside as it was on a Nikkor 55-200mm lense and tripod. This proved slightly difficult on the day as there was a slight breeze causing minor movement in the flower. The yellow one was shot inside using a single daylight globe and an A4 sheet of paper to diffuse the light.
Second, I set up a makeshift studio at home on Sunday night using the same daylight globe, a sun deflector from my car to reflect the light, a piece of paper to diffuse and a couple of black sheets. Unfortunately my lighting was not quite adequate for this type of shoot and I would've preferred to have at least one more lamp. The theme that I was shooting with was "Vampire" as you will see.
From this so far I've produced 3 images; Red Dress, Vampire Fangs and Vampire Eyes. My favorite of these is Vampire Eyes. These images are obviously not for sale but are more an example of what can be done.
Also, I've been discovering lately the difficult in making images tack sharp while focusing in low light situations. To help remedy this on Sunday night I purchased a magnifying eyepiece (DK-21M) and the associated adapter for my camera body. I have not received it yet so I will post an update reviewing how effective it is once I use it.
Last night I decided to have another attempt at the Avoca beach sunrise photos I tried for just after Christmas. Again the forecast was mostly fine so I got everything organised and woke up at 4:45am.
It turned out that there was extensive cloud cover and the sunrise was nowhere to be seen. I decided to go ahead anyway and capture a few images. Due to the cloud cover I focussed on shooting some long exposure shots of the waves and rocks and decided to produce my first published HDR (High Dynamic Range) images.
I have experimented with HDR a very limited amount before so producing this kind of image is fairly new to me. I initially used the Photoshop CS3 Merge to HDR tool with the photomatix plugin for photoshop. I was unimpressed with the results of this approach so instead I moved to using the stand-alone photomatix software which yielded much more pleasing results.
Using the photomatix software is reasonably simple and only involved a few steps. Firstly, you select the images to generate the HDR image. Next, the tone mapping must be performed. In this step you can determine the final look of your image by using the Details Enhancer method or the Tone Compressor method. I'd recommend saving the HDR image before performing any tone mapping as this means you can try multiple variations to find which suits you best.
Today I've released 2 new images: "Ocean Mist" and "North Avoca Beach". As usual these images are available to members first so head to the gallery and login or create an account if you don't yet have one.
Finally, I'd love to hear your thoughts on these 2 new images so please leave comments on this site or on redbubble.
I've just added a new slithery, creepy image to the gallery. As promised, this image is available to members only at first so if you haven't already got an account sign up now.
Otherwise, log in and head to the gallery to check it out.In other news, last night I uploaded several changes to the website including a new favicon, home page changes, tag cloud changes and much much more.
After a couple of days hard work last night I uploaded the very first release of my new gallery to this site. The gallery now includes many more images than before, titles, descriptions and redbubble integration for purchasing.
As part of this change, from now I will be releasing any new images to members of this site before they are released to the public. So sign up to see my new work before anyone else.
There's still many more smaller tweaks I have planned for the gallery and the site in general so keep an eye out for new things to come.
I can home last night and checked my email to find that I had made my first sale on RedBubble. I've been a member on RB for almost a month now and haven't really been pushing my work outside this site and RB so it's great to know that somebody out there likes my work. I was a bit disappointed to find out that I'm not told who actually made the purchase. It would've been nice if I could send them a bit of a thank you email but not to worry.
The sale was for my Taste of Malaysia Calendar which show cases a collection of images taken in Malaysia, predominantly Sabah. There's 13 images in total (1 for each month and a cover image) and they range from close up shots of wildlife to landscape shots taken at the top of Mt. Kinabalu. I must admit I have been meaning to purchase one of these calendars for myself.
Hopefully this sale is the beginning of many to come.
Tonight I've uploaded 4 new photos to my RedBubble account including shots from South Korea, Japan and one I took last night after swimming through the mud.
Head to my account at RedBubble to check them out.
I really should get stuck in to finishing my photo gallery software!
Some exciting news today. The new Central Coast & Hunter group I requested on RedBubble has been approved and created. I will be co-hosting the group with Mike Salway and it should open up some good opportunities for photographers and artists who live on or have been to the Central Coast.
This group show cases art (particularly photography) that is related to the central coast and hunter regions of NSW, Australia. The group includes all kinds of photography, art, writing and journals as long as they are related to the central coast/hunter.
Last night I took the camera along to watch the 2008 new years eve fireworks at the Gosford waterfront with the intention of taking a few colourful shots. We had watched the Central Coast Mariners play before hand and there was a bit of traffic on the roads so getting to the location I selected took longer than expected. As a result all of the "good" positions were taken by the many onlookers and we arrived without much time at all to spare.
It was low tide so to get a better view I took off my thongs and walked out into the muddy water while being vary careful not to end up on my rear in the water. I decided not to use the tripod as I wasn't comfortable setting it up in water so all of my shots were hand held (possibly my biggest mistake). This meant that I wasn't able to use my cameras bulb mode (allowing the shutter to stay open as long as I desire) and needed to have my shutter speed fairly quick to avoid camera shake. I managed to avoid camera shake from most of the shots but the down side of this was that the shots were more underexposed than I would've liked.
I had a bit of a search on the web today to see if there was any profound knowledge out there that could've helped me last night. Most of the articles I found generally say the same thing and I agree: I should've used a tripod or monopod. There was one quite well written article I found on Digital Photography School, you can read it here.
The moral of the story is: When it comes to photography you need to be prepared. Don't rush things, arrive before the event begins and plan how you want to shoot. Then, you will have a greater chance of capturing the photos you want.
I will be looking over my NYE images in the next few days and will upload any that are of sufficient quality.
Now that Christmas is over and things have quietened down again I've had a chance to sit down and perform a few more updates. So this evening I have uploaded the following changes to this site:
- A list of tags has been added to the home and blog pages. When I create a new post I will now tag it with certain keywords so users can find old articles quickly by using the tags
- The user account sign up page is now complete and working
There has also been numerous other very minor tweaks that aren't worth mentioning in great detail.
Yesterday morning I dragged up fience up out of bed at 4:30 so we could catch the sunrise and take from photos at Terrigal beach. It was supposed to be good weather but unfortunately it ended up being very very misty. We could only just make out the skillion (large rock/cliff formation) from about 100m away at North Avoca beach.
Rather than throw the whole morning away we decided to salvage it by heading to a wharf in Kincumber that has access to brisbane water. I've never really taken mist/fog shots before so it was an interesting challenge and about 15 minutes after we arrived the mist had moved in even more so we could hardly see any detail.
Before the mist rolled in I managed to get this mist/reflection shot so in the end it wasn't all bad.
As a side not I got my second feature photo in the Fine Art of Landscape Photography group on RedBubble.which I am really pleased about.
I got my first blog comment spam last night so this morning I have implemented captcha to help prevent this sort of thing. I decided to go with an existing implementation rather than writing my own like I have with everything else on this site. My main reason behind that decision is that I find image creating and manipulation very painful.
I ended up using Securimage PHP CAPTCHA as I'm using PHP and it seemed like a fairly straight forward implementation. Integrating it was incredibly simple and took me all of 15 minutes. How effective it is, only time will tell but from what I have seen so far I am quite impressed at the ease and simplicity of this PHP offering.
As a side note one other thing I'm currently working on and will be uploading very soon is support for tags/categories. I've completed the back-end work and now just need to integrate it with the public facing areas of the site.
That's all for now
I'm quite excited about this so I really need to share it with everyone. I woke up this morning to find that one of my photos in my redbubble profile, Mt. Kinabalu South Peak had been chosen as a feature to be displayed on the South East Asia group.
For me it's a bit of an honor and will hopefully give WRT Design some much needed exposure amongst photography lovers. Maybe, just maybe it might even lead to a sale or two???
I am a big lover of Japanese food and anything Japanese for that matter. Last night I discovered something that I think is really worth sharing with everybody.
I particularly love ramen and have tried several times to cook my own in the past without great success. It seemed that no matter what we tried it never ended up tasting the same.
Anyways, last night we found this great ramen recipe. We had all of the non-standard ingredients already so it was a very cheap meal and only took us about 30 minutes to prepare. We topped our ramen with boiled egg, pork, shallots and choy sum. We also intended on adding bean sprouts but ran out of room in the bowls.
The result? It was simply delicious. I would go so far as to say it was almost on par with some of the ramen I have tried in Japan. Although, it did still lack the authenticity of sitting in a tiny noodle bar in a busy Japanese city. My advice is that you should try this recipe even if you are one of these people that thinks all Japanese food is raw fish. You won't be disappointed.
When we left home it was mostly sunny with only a few clouds dotting the sky. Beautiful weather for a few afternoon shots. Unfortunately when we arrived it was very hazy, overcast and extremely windy. The falls had very limited water even though we had a bit of rain recently and because of the clouds all of the colours were quite flat and lifeless.
I did end up taking a few shots, of course. However I haven't been game to look at them yet and I am not holding high hopes.
On the bright side we did have a lovely picnic and bought a rather pricey black forest cake from the local bakery. Moral of the story is check the weather before you go anywhere hoping to take some photographs.
Last night I stayed up late resizing and uploading a few of the videos from the grading on the weekend. There's a few good examples and also some bad examples of hapkido in there. Head on over to youtube to check them out.
The whole exercise of sharing the video clips has reminded me of a few things I had pushed to the back of my mind:
- I have severe disk space issues and it is well past my due date to upgrade
- I remembered again why I don't like working with video files. Takes such a long time to do anything and as yet I haven't found a decent editing program to work with.
- The end result is always very enjoyable
As a side note, I did pass the grading. I am now officially a black tip.
I've uploaded the initial version of the gallery this morning in order to quickly get some content up on that page. I'm using the Fliquid Javascript gallery library I am writing that will be freely available once the Fliquid site is launched. Like most other areas of this site it is in it's very early stages so it's quite experimental. Hopefully nothing major goes wrong.
The gallery is currently only displaying a limited selection of my images, most of which are also available in my redbubble profile. Once I get the database integration happening for the gallery I will be adding a lot more images including some that are only viewable if you sign up for a WRT Design account.
Now, back on to the Fliquid Studios Javascript Gallery library... The idea for this library is that it should be as configurable and flexible as possible while still being small enough to be practical. It currently has support multiple image pre-loading methods including: loading all images before displaying, loading images one at a time displaying them as loaded etc. Additionally, the look and feel of the gallery is completely handled by CSS. A number of classes are assigned to the different elements as they are created. These classes should be used by the develop to create the exact gallery style they are after. Anyway, there will be lots more on this topic once the library is released to the public.
That's all for now.
Today I had my black tip grading for hapkido, the belt before I get my first dan black belt.
I was unfortunately a bit disappointed with how I did. I remembered everything I needed to do without a problem but I felt like I didn't get much of an opportunity to show the various techniques. Also, when it came to the board breaking I needed 3 attempts before I correctly broke each of the boards. This mainly annoys me because I know I am capable of breaking them first go without breaking a sweat (I have broken all other boards on my first attempt). I think I was not focussed enough and was feeling a bit sapped from the 38 degree heat inside the dojang.
I guess I need to take it as a learning experience and make sure I do better next time. I'm sure I will still pass the grading so it's time to move forward. Kelly, my partner, was unable to grad due to a broken arm (that's another story - she will be grading once the cast comes off) so she captured most of the grading on video. I'll be uploading some small snippets once I get the gallery up and running.
So I should get my black tip at training on Monday and from there Kelly and I will begin the next step towards getting our black belt. We will be aiming from grade either around November 2009 or March 2010.
After being made redundant from REA Group recently I suddenly found myself with an unusual amount of free time. So after many years of having this domain name sitting idle and unused I decided that one of my first projects should be to get my website up and running.
In the interest of getting something up and running quickly I have uploaded my progress so far relatively untested (I have only viewed this on Firefox 3 in Linux) and with some areas still under development (Gallery and other features still to come). I'm reasonably impressed with what I have managed to do in less than 2 days work.
While I am a developer and like to think I have a bit of an artistic side I am definitely no graphic designer so all thanks goes to Lauren Bird for helping me put together this great design.
Anyway, that's all for now. I will be updating the site with new features and content very shortly but for now I would love to hear what you think.