Its all about photography
This evening I was fortunate to capture this beautiful rainbow over Newcastle. I headed out to Newcastle Ocean Baths as a result, and here are some of my favourites from the evening.
For all of these, I used my well used 17-40mm f/4L lens and a ND400 filter to get that nice smooth water look.
Last weekend, I photographed another sunset at Belmont. This is from the Squids Ink jetty, looking west over the bay (Lake Macquarie). Here are some of my favourites from the evening.
This is a stitched panorama, make up from 9 bracketed vertical frames (27 frames in total). I shot this using a 5D Mark II, 50mm f1.4 lens with 3 stop ND grad filter mounted, rotated on a panoramic head.
Later on as the sun went down, I managed to capture this classic shot of the jetty. I used my favourite exposure blending technique for this, the shot is a composite of two images. I used a 17-40mm f/4L on the wide end with a ND400 filter attached, exposure around 2 minutes from memory.
Just a quick tip today. We’ll talk about a method I use to quickly determine the best exposure for night photography.
Night photography generally requires very long exposures, often several minutes at a time. To get the best image quality, we need to keep the ISO as low as possible to keep our noise levels down to acceptable levels and also to minimize the occurrence of hot pixels and sometime banding artifacts.
Runs on: Windows, Mac, Linux (requires Adobe AIR)
This is a great program for landscape photographers. Have you been ever out on a landscape photo shoot and wanted to know where exactly the sun and moon would rise and set. This program written by Stephen Trainor does just that. You get an embedded Google Maps layout on the left where you can find the location of your choice, select the date you’re after and it will let you know what time and angles the sun (and moon) will rise and fall at.
And if you have ever found that great location and the sun is in the wrong spot, you can look forward into the future and know exactly what time of the year is the best time to photograph that location.
If you have thought about “I wonder what time of year the sun would be in that direction”, now you can find out!
I’ve just recently (well, about a month ago) returned from holidays in Victoria. It wasn’t a photo trip as such, but I was able to visit some unique spots for some photographs. Here are some of my favourite images.
Here are some panoramas from the Grampians National Park, it is lovely area in north west Victoria. The first one is a sunrise at Baroka Lookout, and the second one a sunset at Reid’s Lookout. Both of these are stitched from a number of vertical frames with a 50mm lens.
Yesterday, I got together with some local like-minded photographers made up of hobbyists and professionals combined, for the 2nd Newcastle Strobist Meet. The last one was over a year ago, so it was nice to catch up and get together with these guys and shoot some photos.
I have to thank Geoff for organising it and Brett for the use of his personal studio for this event.
Here are some of my favourite images from the day. The models were and make up artists were great and really contributed to the look of many of these, and top effort by them. It was a hot sweltering afternoon in the heat (no aircon in the studio), though you wouldn’t be able tell from the photos.
Graeme (below) is an avid sports and wedding photographer himself, but decided he would do some modelling for us today. This shot below was lit a rim light on either side and behind him (speedlights). The glancing light works great to emphasise muscle tone in men.
We have Rachel below (makeup by Bombshell Make Up & Beauty), who worked great with Graeme nicely. We used a floor fan close to them to give it the wind-swept hair look. Rim lighting was used on each of these and all were key lit with a powered monobloc with a large softbox.
