Random shots

Wallscape

Taken with Pentax K-x and my new friend, a classic 25 years old Pentax-M Series 50mm F1.4 lens. Back in the day, this was clearly the best choice for a Pentax standard (50mm) lens, and still easily outperforms the majority of modern equivalents. Remarkable for their open-aperture bokeh effect and superb light-to-film drawing properties, the translation to digital is a natural. Obviously being of such vintage, it has manual focus, so in these shots I stopped it down to F16 in an effort to compensate for poor focussing technique.

Abbey's latest offering - Mum n Pup

From my niece, Abbey

Hi! This is my surfing mouse isn't she cute.

love ABBEY xxoo

Ducati Monster

Awesome bike and yes, I know, not a great photo with a solar eclipse for back-lighting, I had to work this shot to retain detail.

Some additional post-production, over and above the healthy norm, may or may not have occurred in the making; I'm not saying.

And another lens

A few test shots from my new Pentax 50-200mm zoom lens. I was mostly checking out the bokeh effect at longer focal lengths/open aperture on close-up subjects.

Colour and B&W conversion:

Playing with my new lens

Here are a few test shots using my new Pentax 17-70mm zoom. A superb lens, aside from me having a few camera-in-hand balance issues using it - the lens is weighty, shifting the centre of balance noticeably away from the camera body. Flowers make great testing subject matter!

wtf?

September 2010

Saturday 18th September 2010 - ACTAFL Grand Final
Ainslie 88 beat Eastlake 63
Perfect day, boisterous crowd and a free-flowing game. I took a handful of photos, really need a longer lens for that kind of thing though. The first shot in this sequence is of Paul, Ainslie's star water runner/trainer.





















19/9 - Well, I got the month for my friends daughter's Christening mixed up and missed going, very bad; instead today I went to a Ramadan festival for my cultural fill up, that was until I ran to a mate who mentioned that there was a car show about 500m away (old Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, BMW etc). I must have met every car owner, and chatted with them about their vehicles - one guy had started collecting Mercedes-Benzes in 1965 just before he retired, thinking he must be 90+. I did manage to take a Ramadan photo...






Car shots follow.












































Floriade shots - it was very crowded for photography, I might return midweek for a few hours to do better justice to the exhibition.

August B&W's

It is election time at the ANU.



And here we see a water fountain in Civic; shutter speed was 1/500th of a second, which didn't completely halt the water droplets mid-air, leaving a real sense of motion.

Gantry crane shot

Here I used a wide angle lens setting and let the property developer's fenceline, crane and sky do the talking.

For any construction equipment fans, this is known as a gantry crane.





Other shots:

Okay, here we go, it's winter

Saturday 12th June: Well it is time to begin chasing some elusive defining images of winter. Today I was driving past the Molonglo River when I noticed how still the water looked and the harsh/warm afternoon light. So, I turned around, found somewhere to park and began heading along the bike path next to the River, taking a lot of photos and meeting the occasional curious onlooker, it soon got dark and pretty cold.

Right, I admit a small amount of licence has been taken with this first image, basically the orange/yellow saturation levels are bumped and so to the overall contrast. My camera is set to produce a flat image, meaning it looks pretty dull and lifeless until you do some post-production work.



This shot is an exercise in framing and trying to capture a decent amount of the colour space in front of me.



A couple of opportunistic black and white shots here; the light was dying so that created a lot of shadow to compensate out.


Late afternoon/near dusk makes for some interesting coloured lighting.


The second of these is my favourite image from Saturday, where light found a target, it was still quite strong, although getting very low and orange/reddish warm; shadow areas blue casted.