My New Zealand holiday photos had been sitting around on my hard drive for about six months already, all the while I’ve been intending to get around to putting a photobook together. Well, this week Sonia and I told ourselves enough was enough and we spent a few nights after work picking our best shots, signing up to blurb and using their software to create ourselves a little memento of our trip.
I originally wanted to design the book using Adobe InDesign so the reason we used Blurb is that it was the only book-printing company that we could find who would print from your own PDFs. However once I signed up and had a little look at their own layout software I really couldn’t believe how easy and flexible it was, so we ended up just using that! Now the only real drawback of using Blurbs software is that you don’t have a PDF file of your book which you could share about the web and all that good stuff. They do however make a “preview” available which you can share on facebook, embed into web sites and email to friends etc (as above). I just had to make the preview display all pages (as opposed to actually being a partial preview) and embed some html into this page.
It’s all pretty cool stuff and we can’t wait to get our book in the post (all the way from America no less!).
Well it’s taken me long enough to get there, but I finally found a new wordpress design that gives me the look and feel that I have been striving for for some time, but is also easy enough for me to make the odd hack here and there to tweak things to my liking. Things are likely to be pushed and pulled around for a little while, so please bear with me whilst I iron out any creases.
And just for fun as this is a photography blog, here is a completely unrelated but somewhat pleasant photo of my girlfriend Sonia’s camera laying around in the grass at Sydney’s Palm Beach…
Driving around Sydney this weekend around the golden hour Sonia and I stopped off at Cremorne Point to get some shots of the city skyline from across the river. Here is a couple of similar shots in terms of subject and composition, the only real difference being the 45 minutes (ok so an hour sounded better for the title of this post!) between them. The first shot captures the beautiful golden light against the buildings as the sun crouches low in the sky off to the right, the second was bout 15 minutes after sunset when the sky lights up with an almost surreal glow as the suns rays are filtered through the atmosphere to create the sometimes unpredictable tones. Incidentally, there is a pretty small window of opportunity when the lights come on in all the buildings and there is still enough sun to give the sky some nice colour.
Enough talk, here are the shots!
Sydney skyline @4.30pm
Sydney skyline @5.15pm
It just so happened that it was also the penultimate evening of the Vivid Festival, a month long celebration of the arts and of which a major feature is the “lighting of the sails” when every night between 6pm and 1am a display of light and poetry is projected onto the sails of the opera house.
Check out the gallery below to see the two photos from above in a larger format as well as a handful of shots of the Opera House in the lighting of the sails attraction.
I find it fascinating that this following tip actually works. I have heard people say that scratches lenses dont particularly bother them and that the image quality doesn’t noticeably suffer depending on the type of shot they are taking.
The tip is that if you want to make a scratch “dissappear” then you need to open up your aperture to a point at which you don’t notice it any longer. In short, the lower your f-number, the bigger scratch you can hide.
I tested this in a pretty crude manner myself by holding my car key a few mm in front of my lens and then taking two shots, one at f16 and one at f4. See if you can spot the difference…
Shot at f16
and…
Shot at f4
Now the key is still visible as a darker area in the clouds, but for the purpose of proving the point I think this is a great example. Of course it will depend on the photos you are making as to whether you can use this tip; a landscape shot where you really want to maximise depth of field with a large f-number might not work, but a nice soft portrait with a small depth of field might never show any sign of a scratch.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this tip – see you all soon!
After a little while away from my camera I finally got a chance to get out and snap some more portraits last weekend. We have at last found and settled into a new flat in Sutherland which makes Cronulla our new local beach, so off we trotted with a camera and a couple of strobes down to the northern end of the beach to see what we could do.
Sonia @ Cronulla Beach
These photos are a mixture of one and two flash setups whilst using the sun as the back or rim light. The session was mainly an experiment to see how far I could push my 2 little Cactus flashes in overpowering the ambient light from the high noon sun. Given that my 5D Mark 2’s only synch’s with the flash at a speed of 1/200s or slower, could the flashes produce enough light to light the subject with my ISO and Aperture closed down enough to underexpose the ambient?
One flash worked quite well, but when I added the second it just gave me that little bit of leeway with my camera settings. I pushed the aperture all the way down to f22 for some shots and still had enough light on Sonia to make the picture.
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