whos looking where and why ? 🙂
Tag Archives: Photography
Lineup
Its interesting to see how people change over the years – we all think about Anzac Day and the old veterans that are there getting older and disappearing, but its also the younger generation that change too and will, maybe unfortunately, be the ones marching in their twilight years.
I have followed quite a number of the march participants over the years, not necessarily deliberately, however they have graced my camera and screen and its hard not to be drawn to the same people, even subconsciously… well its gotta be subconsciously 'cause i can't remember what I had for breakfast 🙂
here is one such dude from HMAS Kuttabul (formerly Ballarat)
and from 2013
https://plus.google.com/+GerardBlacklock/posts/fKpJSR43hMq
Scale
or lack thereof
Kununurra
+Red Nomad's recent image of the view across the flooded Ord river at Kununurra sparked a memory of the time when myself and my partner travelled up the Gibb River road from Broome… back when we were foot loose and fancy free.. ie no kids 🙂
Anyway, back in the day i had this sony point and shoot camera which I took with me – even then in my pretty naive and ignorant photographic state I saw this scene and relised how beautiful it was, as such pretty easy to take a nice shot – I am not quite sure what on earth the composition was about – i looked at it tonight and then forehead slapped myself at all the other possibilities I could have had if I knew what I know now.. then.. make sense? nope.. don't worry 🙂
Here it is and thanks again to +Red Nomad for the memories.
Exif love:
Sony DSC-V3
@ 15.3mm Aperture: f/4 and Shutter Speed: 1/100s
out front – the mighty Ord river!
Graveyard
Not a bad place to end up I supposes, a head stone beneath a tree…providing the timing is right!
I have a number of shots from this spot hidden behind a little chapel in Mount Wilson but I really struggled to present what I saw on the day in the image – I did bracket all my shots since the dynamic range was too much for the camera, however in the case of this image, after using a automated HDR technique I came back to just a single exposure shot…I just could not get that HDR image to look the way I wanted – very frustrating.
So, I ended up with this, its a two shot panorama (there was meant to be another frame to make it wider but things did not work out for that 🙁 either ) using just a single neutral exposure. Its pretty amazing the level of detail/dynamic range you can get from the D750 and a single frame..
anyways, keen to hear your thoughts, love it, hate it, ambivalent? view large
Exif love:
D750 coupled with 24-70mm f2.8 @ 24mm Aperture: f/10 and Shutter Speed: 1/2s
ISO 100
out front – Hoya CPL
Tentacles
At first, they were separated
yet still close
but as each surge of the ocean cycled through
it drew them closer
until they were side by side
and united a force that could withstand
the oncoming ocean
a relentless force and a infinite force.
Until they finally succumbed
to the inevitable destiny
of the ocean
and were pulled in
love until the end
Exif love:
loving the vertical pano style at the moment 🙂
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/16 and Shutter Speed: 2.5s
ISO 250
out front – Hoya CPL, Lee Graduated 0.6x Filter
Fishing
I am not quite sure who was more silly, me for standing in the waves taking a photo of the fisherman, or the dude standing in the waves fishing 🙂
I did like the way the surf created the line up the coast.
Exif love:
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/16 and Shutter Speed: 2s
ISO 100
out front – Hoya CPL, Lee Graduated 0.6 Filter all covered with lots of spotty rain drops 🙁
Katoomba Falls
find the person
from a ball hugging 270 metres above the ground in some crazy designers idea of a joke, a glass bottomed cable car 😉
Well it was not that bad i suppose, but whilst I would not call myself one afraid of heights, this kind of thing still gives me pause for thought:) oddly enough i do not have the same thought when cruising at a few thousand feet above a airport in a dinky little plane, bizarre, i am sure you could write volumes on the psychology of that..
So.. our friendly cable car / skyway guide says to us, "so anyone afraid of heights?", followed quickly by;
"well its too late.. here we go"
this was then backed up with" you are now 270 metres above the valley floor, twice the height of the Sydney Harbour bridge"
but this was the kicker comment
"it would only take the cable car 6 seconds to get to the bottom if it broke" (or something close to that)..
righto..thankyou for that mister optimistic 🙁
Nonetheless the view is nice, the falls are pleasant and the view out the bottom is.. well feels like your looking straight down 😉 We were fortunate enough to get a break in the weather as we went across so I thought i would get a shot of the falls from a different perspective, different in the sense that most of my waterfall images are from the base of waterfalls and involve some trekking and a tripod + filter.
This one is a single shot, not filters, no tripod and while hanging the camera half out the cable car as we trundled across on one of Austria's best products..the cable car. I guess if ya gonna trust your rear end in a cable car, then one built by those who build the ones in the french and Austrian alps, then this would be a good bet.
check out the person at the top of the falls for a bit of scale..
Exif love:
D750 coupled with 24-70mm f2.8 @ 24mm Aperture: f/8 and Shutter Speed: 1/125s
ISO 400
out front – fresh air and 270 metres straight down.
Concord
I was listening to the radio the other day and they were talking about the Concord and when it used to fly to Sydney, it sparked a memory from way back in the late naughty nighties (damn i feel old) when a mate took me on a tour of the Qantas Jetbase at which he was a 2nd year apprentice, this was the same time I was doing aero engineering at uni – talk about throwback saturday 🙂
Its hard to imagine that you could still get into the Jetbase as a guest like this now and funnily enough I have spent alot of hours over there in recent years working., bizarre how life turns out..
Anyway, the memory made me drag up this high quality classy image that i took on something resembling a 3 dollar disposable camera 🙂
Whilst at uni I lived near the airport, and often saw the concord fly in, it was a sight and sound to behold, but to see it up close was something else altogether. The Hangar its parked out front (in the image) of now houses the A380 during turn around maintenance, the aircraft is/was surprisingly small, i was expecting something quite a bit bigger.
Nonetheless, here's my image and memory of a piece of aviation history.
Exif data:
yeah dunno…its a film camera.. it was scanned into my computer in 1999
but hey, lets take a punt, i reckon its iso 100 film and shutter would have been about 1/750s at a aperture of f/8. The glass out front is clearly high quality
The same, but different
I have lived in Sydney for quite some years and have grown very accustom to the harbour and its views, its always nice to see it from a different perspective. Whilst I would like to think this is an original view ( although i have not seen any shots like it) I am sure, someone, somewhere has stood in the same place and fired off a few shots 🙂
If you have time, check out +Peter Eastway 's latest post, he has some great thoughts about the whole thing about photographing popular spots and he always has very nice shots and a great attitude.
Exif love:
3 bracketed shots (+1ev 0, -1ev) I only used two, manually blended to capture the entire dynamic range.
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/14 and Shutter Speed: 2s (normal exposure) 1s (under) 4s (over)
ISO 100
out front – Hoya CPL and Lee Graduated Filter 0.9x
Lest we Forget
Reflections
RIP Chan, Sukamaran and the other 6.
Snowman
made from hail
If someone said to me they were building snowman in Sydney in April, i would laughed and made a comment about craziness, however, it would appear that this is indeed possible…
Probably most in Sydney would have heard about this freakish weather event (hail storm) we had on Saturday, myself and the girls were driving home/to dinner when it hit, Chaos thought it was a absolute hoot whilst tickles was more reserved 😉
After getting home (after a quick stop at for icecream) , there was only one thing left to do, build snowman and ice slides 🙂 even if it was pitch dark 🙂
lets say the girls slept pretty well that night 🙂
So, here's our snowman, we had enough ice/hail slurry that we could have made another one 🙂
The Penetrator
I always wanted to use that title 🙂 and I think this building is the perfect subject for it.
One significant difference between the D7000 and the nikon D750 cameras which becomes quite apparent in shots like this is the noise and sensor hotspots. Previously when doing exposures like this on the D7000 there would be a barrel load of hot pixels and more noise (for lack of a better term). The D750, in this case has none, yep.. thats right.. zero hotspots and the resulting long exposure is much cleaner (read less noise) – this is to be expected given different sizes of sensors and the pixel density i suppose.
anyway enough of all that boring stuff, back to the picture, this image is taken with the B+W ND1000 filter, which was the second ND filter I purchased, the first was a 3 stop hoya one, just for waterfalls), the B+W was my first introduction into super long exposures and even after the first use I was really pleased with the results, the only drawback, and it is a significant one is that its a screw filter, meaning it can be quite time consuming to get a single shot, ie one must firstly compose, focus, then screw the filter on and then take shot (after putting your DK-15 eyepiece cover on – dont forget that 🙁 )
After sometime of using this filter I did get the Lee bigstopper which is a slide in filter, hence is by far more convenient, however a completely different colour cast and in my opinion less nice than the B+W – that is however based on nothing but my grand opinion. And in case when it goes to a black and white, who gives a rats bum.
back to the penetrator… no fake clouds here – these are all real, yep every single one of them, admittingly I did clone out a bit of another building up on the top left, but it was tiny.. 🙂
Exif love:
D750 coupled with 24-70mm f2.8 @ 62mm Aperture: f/18 and Shutter Speed: a mere 127.3s
ISO 100
out front – ND1000 B+W Neutral Density (ND) – Schneider Optics
Watching, waiting
We have had some pretty bizarre storms in Sydney in the last week, from gale force winds and wet season style rainfall to hail, we have had it all.
Yesterday, about 30 minutes after this image was taken myself and the girls drove home through some streets covered in ankle deep hail stones to find our place had been turned into a winter wonderland (without any leaves or foliage left 🙁 ).
No need for that thredbo visit this year 😉 we got our snowman built in the backyard and ice slide (albeit only big enough for a kid) in the front yard.
As we climbed to the top of the hill at the park amongst growing darkness and increasing lightning, Chaos rightly stated that we should not hang around due to the lightning, luckily she mentioned it when she did, since we pulled the pin on our regular park bash and just as we got to the car it started raining.
I processed this image a few times and then realised, it looked best straight out of the camera. Thus the only PP on this image was the stitching of the frames into a panorama. This will make all ya lovers happy 😉
I hope ya'all survived the weather.
13 shot panorama (portrait orientation)
Exif/setup:
D750 coupled with 85mm f1.4 @ 85mm Aperture: f/2.8 and Shutter Speed: 1/4000s
EV:-0.3
ISO 200