National Tree Planting Day

Posted on by
National Tree Planting Day - (c) Gerard Blacklock

National Tree Planting Day – (c) Gerard Blacklock

Dear Australia, I am sorry for bagging you out a bit when comparing you to the Scandinavian countries 🙂 So I think its only fair that we identify some of the awesome things our great country has, you know.. concentrate on the good things and less on the bad (like the dickhead politicians.. did i say that or think it 😉 )

I live in a really great council area (now amalgamated.. 🙁 c’mon gerry concentrate on the good 😉 ) which has lots of really great community initiatives, one of which is the National Tree planting day 31st July). This was awesome, and all credit does to the Marrickville Council staff and volunteers (?) (http://www.marrickville.nsw.gov.au/nationaltreeday/), it was great to be able to rock up and have everything there ready (gloves, water,and refreshments), and with a explanation of what to do, I know both our children loved it and I think we managed to plant more than we trod on 🙂 . I really like the way there was a large selection of plants placed in the right areas ready to go, kinda makes sense.. but still great idea.

We are really looking forward to heading back to the tree planting spot in a few months to check out the progress,

Eide, Norway

Posted on by
Eide, Norway - (c) Gerard Blacklock

Eide, Norway – (c) Gerard Blacklock

This was our first night in Norway, we had kinda (well me really) underestimated how long it would drive between places and arrived quite late – what appears to be a cruisy 200 kilometre drive is painfully slow with windy roads and more importantly the need to spot every 4 seconds to take a picture 😉
Anyways, we made it to our accommodation in Eide and there was some trepidation out what our place would be like.. it was ok 😉 lols I rate this over any Hotel in Kristiansund, especially at half the price 🙂 and the view was pretty magical. It was nearly 12 midnight when I noticed some pretty crazy colours coming thru the window so I dutifully went and took a shot or two, this image was looking away from the setting sun and the real colour, however with the really low cloud moving very fast and the brilliant red sunset behind me the clouds in the other direction, over the house, turned into a crazy pastel pink. I even had to desaturate these cause they looked too weird 😉

On the right you can see the typical barn that alot of Norwegian places have, in there were a bunch of chooks and in a little pen next to it some young sheep, which the kids absolutely adored 😉
I do find it a little strange that they (the Norwegians) always build two or three storey houses, even though there is heaps of space…

Extreme Waterfalling

Posted on by

at the extreme sports headquarters of Norway

The home to 'veko' (Ekstremsportveko – Extreme Sports Week), Voss, where crazy's get their craziness on and do crazy things like jumping off cliffs with dinky little parachutes and going over cliffs with water in little plastic buckets 😉

Not this little black duck tho, the most extreme thing I did whilst in Voss was stand on a slippery-ass rock and take a photo 😉

6 shot panorama just on dust with a nice glow in the sky.

D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70 mm f2.8 @ 50mm Aperture: f16 and Shutter Speed: 3s
ISO: 100
out front: Hoya Circular Polariser

Sydney Park

Posted on by

I really like this park, its recently under gone some rework to tweak the water course and I gotta say it looks fanatastic and also includes lots more paths, stepping stones and all most important of all, more nice smooth areas for scootering 🙂

I have recently started running at this park, well running might be a bit of a exaggeration at this point, a slow jog that decreases in speed over the session 🙂 with lots of space and and areas where you can run on the grass (rather than concrete) its pretty unique for the inner west. In the past I have taken plenty of images at this park, particularly of runners silhouetted on the hills and during storms and always made some smartass comment about nutters, I guess thats gotta stop now especially since I did even go running in the rain 🙂
Chaos and Tickles love this park too, awesome spot for riding the pushbike and barrelling down puppy dogs with the scooter 🙂 (yeah tickles, i am looking at you here)
So, here are a bunch of pictures from a recent visit 🙂

Sydney Park

In Album 2016-08-24

Lærdalstunnelen

Posted on by

I just had to tally up a few important things from our visit to Norway.. of the 900 road tunnels in Norway we clocked out about 80 of them in our trip, from dinky little things carved in the side of a cliff to the longest road tunnel in the world, at 24.5 kms the Lærdalstunnelen is pretty impressive its even got disco rooms for stopping bays 😉
Some tunnels I drove in had no lights, single lane and full of fog, luckily it was late and i did not pass anyone in that tunnel 🙂 trying to reverse when driving on the opposite side is kinda challenging.
Now, australia has a few tunnels, but these (excluding the SNowy Mountains scheme) are nothing but childs play compared to what they do over here.. these guys do tunnels for the fun of it i reckon… rather than blast some rock away like we have for the Freeway outta north sydney they would have just tunneled it 🙂 apparently they have quite the pride in their tunnel efforts! so me reckons that Westconnex mob should be ditched and we get hold of one of these Norwegian companies. If a country with 5 million people (thats the same as sydney) can generate 900 hundred road tunnels then imagine what they could do in sydney 🙂
Anyway heres a disco tunnel for ya, about 19kms into the worlds longest road tunnel.
4 shot panorama using the super wide 14mm Samyang

Nærøyfjord

Posted on by

Probably one of the most touristy places in Norway, the fjord here was pretty cool, but to be honest after coming from Geiranger, Andalsnes, Trollveggen it was a bit of a let down and and given the the large number of tourists and cruise ships I would recommend one of the fjords less frequented by cruise ships 🙂

Typically I like to get shots when the like is soft and favourable, this is typically at the start and end of the day, however when your on holidays you don't get the luxury of choosing exactly what time you will be at a place. This was one such case, beautiful scenery but the light was pretty harsh and seemed to always be coming from the wrong spot 🙂 however there was a few corners where a view from the back of the boat (over all the tourists) had some nice light in conjunction with a nice compo.

4 shot panorama, note the inclusion of the kayaker off to the right, in addition to the boat, it also gives some scale.

Journey

Posted on by

I think image processing is a real two sided journey, whilst a necessity for anyone who takes images in raw format, makes panos, blending etc I feel the more I know the harder it has become! The more techniques I learn (which is actually not that many) the more it seems to take away from the actual image taking and the more time is spent perfecting the image. Looking at some of my recent files and I noticed a trend in files names typically ending with edit1-edit2-final-edit-final-final-edit 😉 ahhh I remember the days of shooting in jpeg on a sony PS and in hindsight they seem to be better images 🙂

Anyways, this image I have learnt a few new techniques, one of which is the Orton effect, i musta been under a rock not to know what that is – for those uneducated folk 😉 it was coined by a chap named Michael Orton back in the film days and was achieved by taking a couple of different frames each with different exposure and focus, one frame was actually way out of focus, this was then exposed with a sharp version to create a type of soft glow, known as the Orton effect. There are a few presets in common image manipulation programs which now replicate it, one that comes to mind is called glamour glow which does a similar thing, however I have tweaked this with the original technique in mind.

So here with have it, edit1-edit2-edit12-edit-final 😉

Its a blend of 3 frames with the orton effect used 🙂

Downtown Lund

Posted on by

Just a little city or more correctly, a town-scape 🙂 at nearly midnight when there was just about no one around.

Lund is a really cool University town in southern Sweden, very progressive and full of interesting people and the occasional red squirrel (that's cool from our end since we do not have squirrels in Australia)

3 shot panorama image
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 60mm Aperture: f11 and Shutter Speed: 6 seconds
ISO: 200
Out front: nothing and nobody, just a few lonely bikes 🙂

Toy Boats

Posted on by

Not only do the Norwegians do alright at tunnels, their ferries are pretty smick too, although they are a bit bigger in real life than what is portrayed here when plonked next to a few Norwegian hills.

Selje

Posted on by

Just a little quiet town on the west coast of Norway, has a rather old monastery there on a island off the coast a bit.. only about 900 years old 🙂

ON the Edge

Posted on by

Always great to visit Cape Banks, the little streak of clouds was pleasant and complimented nicely with the southern side of the headland with a portrait orientation shot. I have missed the aussie seascapes 🙂 but not the ball freezing weather.

This one is a 2 shot blended image, It could easily be done with a single image, however using two bracketed images means there is less noise and rubbish when pulling the detail out of the shadows, particularly in little pond which are in alot of shadow, it also means you can really bring the colour out as well.

D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35 @ 16mm Aperture: f18 and Shutter Speed: 4s and 8s
ISO: 100