Waves

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What I really liked about this scene was the way the clouds, which were moving very fast seemed like waves on a beach rolling into the shore. This is a image from a few months ago at Circular quay, Anzac day sunrise to be exact.

This was taken using the B+W 10 stop filter and my 16-35mm f/4 lens, which is about a sharp as my 2 year old's plastic knife…. The combination of this lens and that filter creates 1) a fairly soft image but also more interestingly 2) lots of lateral aberrations, not just one colour, ie purple fringing, but depending on what side of the image you look at it could also be green…

Which leads me to a question for all you light room gurus.. LR is awesome for correcting this stuff, however I would like to apply the defringe (under lens corrections) to only selective parts of the image, to prevent it doing weird stuff to places where purple is meant to be 😉 ideally i want to be able just to selectively apply it to the left side of some buildings for example..
I know you can use a control point, however it only gives you a option for defringe, not the full control ie purple/cyan control…

I pulled another swifty on this one.. I had taken a test shot at super high iso just to check the composition, the B+W filter is screw in so getting the compo right is a bit harder than when using the slide in filter types. In the final exposure of 309 seconds, the two boats in the foreground where a bit on the blurry side from the movement, hence I just layered a small part from the test shot onto the final image, even at high iso it was ok and really only accounted for a tiny part of the frame. That said even at the high iso the noise control is pretty darn good anyways…a little selective noise reduction and its pretty hard to tell 😉

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f8 and Shutter Speed: 309.6s
ISO 100
Out front – B+W 10 stop ND.

#b+w

tickles

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blurry- i have plenty of these shots, trying to capture kids in the moment is akin to finding a needle in a haystack, however, like most parents, sometimes the favorites are not the technically brilliant ones, but simply those which capture the spirit and moment…

and this one does that.. but it's darn blurry 🙁 this is quintessential tickles .. toothy smile and full of laughter, for the record, the laughter was all about watching dad's expression as we tried to stick our grubby little snot covered fingers on my nice clean super wide angle lens 🙂 this shot is about 15 centimetres from her face..

so now, off to find my cleaning gear 😉

Techie love:
D750 coupled with Samyang 14mm f2.8 @ 14mm Aperture: f/5 and Shutter Speed: 1/80s
ISO 320
out front – tickles

Single

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Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 19mm Aperture: f9 and Shutter Speed: 303.4s
ISO 100
Out front – and Hoya CPL and Lee Graduated Filter 0.9x and the LEE bigstopper.

1…2….3.. go

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These dried dandelions are a great find at the park, especially the ones which are fully intact and just waiting for a 6 year old to launch them into the air:)

Chaos is pretty good with theses, tickles on the other hand (and i will post a image of her effort) still has not quite grasped the concept of exhaling onto the item, rather eating them seems to be more fun 😉

I have processed this one different to what I normally do, just to try and mix it up, I guess it has taken on a bit of a sepia style, but i am liking it at the moment, the desaturated warm colours seem to really work with her dress (thanks Gran) and the park trees…

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 85mm f1.4 @ 85mm Aperture: f2.2 and Shutter Speed: 1/320s
ISO 125
chaos and the dandelion!

Time

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stands still for no one, it does however pause….. for well constructed jetties.

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f13 and Shutter Speed: 307.5s
ISO 100
Out front – and Hoya CPL and Lee Graduated Filter 0.9x and the LEE bigstopper.

Apartments

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these things seem to be springing from thin air lately 😉 with the hot property market in Sydney its very interesting watch private enterprise move so fast – if only our government worked this quickly on even just 10% of their plans :-/

I like this shot, from bunnings right through to the container terminal, its all there with a smattering of cranes to boot..

Exif love:
5 or 6 images stitched together in a panorama format
D750 coupled with Nikkor 300mm f4 +1.7 TC @ 508mm Aperture: f11 and Shutter Speed: 1/1250s
ISO 800

Land of the long white … periwinkle

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so, apparently Periwinkles are gonna become the next big seafood sensation 🙂 I say, good luck with that, especially if your dealing with the dinky little ones like these…

I actually prefer my periwinkles on the rocks, these little guys are awesome for providing that little bit of extra grip when out on the low tide areas, their little hard shells and the super strong suction on the rocks provide that grip for my sneaky sneakers when balancing my ass to get the right composition…. so i put the call out leave the periwinkles there 🙂 plus.. you know how many you would actually have to eat to actually make a half decent feed ?!!

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f14 and Shutter Speed: 1.6s
ISO 100
Out front – and Hoya CPL and Lee Graduated Filter 0.9x

I do it outdoors

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This dude was about half way through the 6,300 steps in the Charity fundraising event known as Stadium Stomp

The event is run in a number of capital cities, as part of the Sydney event the participants (thats the polite way of saying 'these crazy nuts who like to actually run up stairs') got to run around the Sydney Cricket Ground and also the smaller Allianz Stadium. I am sure the.. participants really enjoyed the fact they got to see the stadiums in very different views, but really i think the majority were concentrating on the pain involved with running up all those stairs.. ya know they invented lifts/elevators for a reason 😉

Anyhoos, the event did raise in excess of AUD65K in Sydney alone and around the AUD180K for the total thus far. They money I believe goes to a number of different charities, you can check out more at the webbie http://stadiumstomp2015scg.gofundraise.com.au

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 300mm f4 TC @ 300mm Aperture: f6.3and Shutter Speed: 1/1000s
ISO 160

Row MM

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Row MM Stadium - (c) 2015 Gerard Blacklock

just bring your binoculars 🙂

Allianz Stadium, or whatever its gonna be renamed to tomorrow has some very nice curves and features, if you can keep it all together!

I have always wanted to try and get some shots within a stadium when its empty, particularly a symmetrical panorama. I learnt a few important lessons with this image and a few other panos I took, 1) technique has to be spot on in terms of camera rotation and position between shots 2) proper pano head would make life a crapload easier 3) Photoshop gets very confused when trying to straighten these kind of wide angle panorama’s 😉

This is a 3 shot (bracketed) pano using the Samyang 14mm f2.8, a real gem, damn sharp (even if you miss the focus like i did here) and then stitched and smashed over the head in photoshop to get the horizon kinda straight and the footy goalposts kinda vertical.

Taken as part of Stadium Stomp 2015 with O. Sydney

Techie love:
D750 coupled with Samyang 14mm f2.8 @ 14mm Aperture: f/8 and Shutter Speed: 1.6s (normal exp) 1/5s (under exposed) 13s (over exp)
ISO 100
out front – a very bendy Allianz stadium

Jabba the Hutt

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swallowed

see if you can find jabba, the original slug from the Star Wars movie 🙂 or maybe just a toad 🙂

I love these kind of scenes, lone rocks seemingly to resist the sea's surge to reclaim them to the depths.

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f13 and Shutter Speed: 98.9s
ISO 100
Out front – and Hoya CPL and Lee Graduated Filter 0.9x and some ND filter

https://blog.avernus.com.au/jabba-the-hutt/

Murky

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This place reminds me of a waterhole where i used to go as a kid, myself and other suitably crazy friends would swim in ridiculous murky waters and jump off rocky overhangs – how i made it to adulthood is still questionable 🙂

Now, many years later, rather than looking at the scene with eyes for what I could jump off, now I look and see how nature has arranged stuff over the last few thousand years and how I can turn it into a worthwhile photo composition 😉

What I like about the panoramic format is 1) well its pretty damn easy to compose and 2) it naturally flows the viewer through the image without the need for complex lines or anchor points 3) there is no limit to the amount you can include in the frame 🙂

This particular location lent it self very well to a panorama, the rock on the right and the overhang on the left 'bookended' the scene and the falls under the morning light just naturally draws the viewer in, the lines of the water/rock edge also help send the viewer right to the good stuff.

Its a 4 shot panorama (landscape orientation), i did bracket the images so I had a slightly over exposed frame, however found that I did not really need it and I liked the way the left and right extreme frames naturally sunk into the shadows.

ya gotta view this large 🙂

Exif love:
4 images stitched in PS CC
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 22mm Aperture: f14 and Shutter Speed: 2s
ISO 100
Out front – and Hoya CPL

https://blog.avernus.com.au/murky/

Fallen Black

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I reworked this (https://plus.google.com/+GerardBlacklock/posts/bnrR3GoBBZ2) image into a BW version – I am not entirely convinced on the conversion and could not decide on whether to push towards a real dreamy scene where teh horizon was masked by the BW conversion or simply go with this, basically a straight BW conversion in LR.

+Chris Sutton this was for you – would have never seen the light of day otherwise 🙂

Exif love:
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 @ 70mm Aperture: f/10 and Shutter Speed: 186.1s
ISO 100
out front: Lee Biggstopper

King Queen of the Scooter Planet

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Tickles has been steadily increases the use of her sisters scooter, so much that she has pretty well claimed it for her own, noting that now if her big sister even comes near it there is a guaranteed on ya back tantrum 😉 Lucky I suppose that Chaos has out grown it 🙂

The phrase, "me scoot" has become synonymous with tickles, wherever we are, school, park, shopping centre, front door :-/ .. it's "me scoot"… I have even taken to ditching the pram in favour of the scooter, otherwise its me pushing a darn empty pram around half the time 😉

So, in tribute to your scooter prowess tickles, its only appropriate that you are given your own planet for it 🙂

tickles, queen of the scooter planet, a very Rocky Balboa moment 🙂