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.

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.

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!

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.