Sunday 12 December 2010

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.


Monday 29 November 2010

Sunday 21 November 2010

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.

Wednesday 17 November 2010

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:

Saturday 6 November 2010

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!






Monday 13 September 2010

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.

Friday 10 September 2010

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.

Wednesday 4 August 2010

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:

Tuesday 15 June 2010

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.