Wet Feet
There comes a time when you stop dancing over the puddles and minimizing how wet your feet are and simply accept the fact that you are gonna have wet feet, wet shoes and wet socks.
Deep in the jungle of frenchs creek..
Buried
I am getting quite the collection of Stormwater outflow pipes in Sydney, luckily for me there are barely 2 alike , although I would have thought a standardised design would have been much more cost effective..
Tvindefossen
(Frenchies version)
get a load of this one full screen and find those leeches
Well, its the aussie version aways, Tvindefossen, which i am pretty sure means twin falls is midly epic waterfall in Voss, Norway – yep where the sparkling mineral water comes from – not 🙂 its actually comes from much further south in Norway, but clearly "Voss" said with the appropriate deep Norwegian accent sound a crapload better than the boring spot where the extraction and bottling plant is 🙂
Anyways, this set of falls in Sydney, with its distinct set of two falls reminded me…a tiny bit.. of Voss, also the home of extreme sports, thats another story for another day.
This is the second cascade in the water falls in Belrose on Frenchs creek, where the water quality is.. well a small step above first stage sewerage treatment level, it smelt bad, it mostly looked bad and somehow still, the leeches survive 🙁 I am gonna name these leeches the crotch searching leeches from hell. I am not overly perturbed by leeches, however these ones seemed to get on your legs and with their gaily little wobble make beeline for higher ground 🙁 much rather they just hang about the ankle and suck some blood …
This image is a bunch of vertical shots stitched into a panorama, the conditions where good, overcast, plenty of water and the company (Rodney Campbell) was bearable 😉 plus its better if someone can be there to at least listen to the continued stream of profanities about finding yet another leech.
Vertical
Vertical Panorama
Two Worlds
Sometimes you can become blinded by what is reflected on the surface and cannot appreciate, nor see the beauty underneath.
The Endless run
… a dog's Dream
Probably safe to say that dogs only dream of a few things, one of which would definitely be chasing.. something, anything…..and for as long as possible.. I have been regularly reminded of this by a thing that kinda resembles a dog (at that size I think rat would be a more appropriate name 😉 ) which seems to take great enjoyment in chasing me up the road on my run to train station, not at all deterred by the threat of my size 14 boot 🙂 I have given up and now just expect to see him come flying out the driveway (of his house i assume) and and lose his vita-dogs or whateva dog snacks are equivalent to a sugary lollies at the indignation that someone dare use the footpath 🙂
heres to to you little rat-dog 🙂 see ya next week.
3 shot panorama
D750 coupled with Nikkor 85mm f1.4 @ 85mm
Aperture: f5.6 and Shutter Speed: 1/1250s
ISO: 100
Out front: endless doggy dream
Chaos and Tickles love playing with video games and watching telly – but neither gets them to smile like this :)
Everyone deserves a good kite flying session
But if you close your eyes does it almost feel like nothing changed at all?
Broken Reflection
This one is for all the bone heads, including the trucks on the M5 who can't seem to understand the concept of merging or keeping left if not overtaking, hey you even have a lane all to ya selves on the way out the tunnel and the only time you use it is to cut up in front of the queued traffic.. boneheads – note on the flipside there are some good ones, but I feel the are getting fewer and fewer.
…. and the boneheads in the pool who don't quite get it when people in the slow lane are swimming faster then them in the medium lane and don't let people past 🙁
nothing like a good rant and there was not even any politics in there 🙂 FB is great for that gives every man and his dog a soapbox to stand on 🙂 even if its a little one..
Happy Hartzell
Engineering is soo cool – whilst most would find this kinda boring and yeah, its just a bit on a plane, Sarah Joy made a great point that many people do not realise the amount of development work and effort that goes into the hundreds of assemblies and parts that make up a plane. Here is one such bit, one of the simplest constant speed propellers/hub you will see on small 2 or 4 seater aircraft.
I get to see lots of plane bits, but not that often a full propeller hub, in bits 🙂 this one was a unserviceable and had all the bits from the last overhaul. So whaddya do with a Hartzell Propeller which you have in bits, a pair of verniers and a few spare hours? you model it of course and turn it into a animated mechanism. 🙂
well the spare hours is a bit of a lie, I really don’t have those, but did spend a couple of late nights on it 🙂
Ålesund
The home of Rollo (some viking dude) whilst appearing to be hundreds of years old is mostly less than hundred years old, back in the early 1900's there was a fire which destroyed pretty much the entire built area on this island. The island which forms the old town and the touristy area of Alesund is fairly large and back then covered with predominantly wooden structures, much like most of Norway, makes sense when you see how much wood they have 🙂 durign that fire there was also a gale force wind, described as strong enough to blow a man over, thus you can only imagine how fast a fire would propagate through nice dry Norwegian timber and it did.
We stayed at the big white one off to the left, not a bad view from it, especially in the dining area, this one of the few we stayed in during our visit to Norway and whilst expensive, it is comparable to Sydney so not that bad I suppose.
This was shot well after sunset, from memory about 11pm and the glow from the sunset, which seems to last for hours , glowed off the hotel strip and created some very nice reflections off the water.
Swim?
The word 'moody' is way over used now, it seems everything from something with a cloud to a BW image is classified moody, hence, for the greater good I shall not use the term, but rather Dreamy :) equally cliche
I quite like art and images where they take on those qualities which are often associated with the notion of 'dreamy', like the softness, the out focus and the pastel colours, for me its that view which is blurry, like your looking permanently through your peripheral vision or thru a set of contacts which have been in way too long after a long bender of a night, this coupled with a tiny aspect of the scene vivid and full of clarity which sticks in your mind irrespective of the haze that surrounds it. Getting old is so boring 🙁 I never have these 'dreamy', dreams anymore, hence, heres a image to make up for it 🙂
This image (of the stormwater overflows) is quite timely given the recent media reports on the great water quality of the sydney beaches at the moment as a result of the crazy flash storm we had the other day. Seems there are plenty of signs stating there is dangerous bacteria about, I reckon thats prolly code for floaties and chokito bars about 😉 google chokito bars and it'll all become clear.
Here you go, Manly overflow pipes at 182.1 seconds of exposure.
Image Manipulation
Just a few thoughts one processing and manipulation.. 🙂
Onto the image, and note , I love a good discussion about images, it’s what gets the brain thinking and expands ones views beyond their own I have learn many a good thing over a strong debate on a image 🙂
Ironically, alot of the serious manipulation I do and there is quite some in a few images 
, is more about altering the view, for example cloning out things and simplifying the scene than manipulation of the colours. In this image there was actually very little colour manipulation, now the level of manipulation is obviously quite different for each person, some may just apply a preset to the image in camera, others a whole range of tweaks as it comes into and out of Lightroom for example.
This image was stitched in PS and then edited in LR. The biggest manipulation imo, was the lightening of the water on the left, it was quite bright but needed a little push to get it stand out more. I also did some clonage on the right horizon due to some crappy stitching, the horizon was a bit mismatched 🙂 in terms of colour, there was not a great deal done, a tweak on the vibrance, 30 odd in the noise reduction, 20 on the sharpening, a smidge of de-haze, probably about 10 ..and I do recall using a radial filter (i love those) to brighten up the centre a bit more. Finished off with a bit of contrast and extra exposure comp.
So, I have attached one of the frames from this scene, noting that the final image is a 3 frame pano, this frame segment image was shot raw, I applied the vivid preset in the raw converter (CNX2 via raw2nef) and then resized and sharpened down to 2000 px wide, this, for me, is the closest I get to straight out of the camera. I always shoot raw and with the neutral setting because I want complete control over how my image is processed.
In this frame you can see the fishermen, of which there are two, they look different to the final image that is because only one fisherman in the final frame stood still enough to remain relatively sharp, i cloned out the other dude, who was pretty cool since he had a head torch 🙂 but too blurry
So I am gonna call this one definitely not fakery (if there is even such a thing) and whilst it means very little to most, the colours looked like this to me on that morning, and this is one mantra I have for the majority of my images, I want to make it look like what I saw, now my eyes may see more vibrance and have selective objects vision 😉 but hey…
Don’t be limited by the perceptions and judgements of other people, its your image, capture and process it without any boundaries other than the imagination of your mind . There are no rules on how you should process, or by how much, art is not bounded by imaginery lines put on it by history.