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Just a quick post today to show you some shots from the Vivid festival, Sydney 2011.
For two weeks of the year Sydney is lit up like a christmas tree and the pinnacle is the laser light show on the Opera House.
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Wollongong Lighthouse @ Sunrise
Sonia and I just got back from watching the sun coming up at Wollongong and I was that inspired by the awesomeness of the sky we found there that I downloaded my shots straight away and prepared them for the blog!
There are a couple of lighthouses down there so to give some variety to our shots we went our separate ways to capture one each. I stayed at the “main” lighthouse up on the hill and Sonia went down to shoot the older historic one in the marina. We both got some great shots and I even managed to get some video too.
So, on to the good stuff! (and don’t forget to check out Sonias new blog too – she will be uploading hers shortly (www.soniamphotography.com)
Autumn Portraits with Sonia
Hey there, yet again it’s been quite a while since I last posted anything here! I’ve been in the process of moving the site to another host and it’s lead to a bit of quiet time. As part of the migration I’ve updated the sites design, upgrading to a graph paper press premium theme which just rocks!
So anyway, a couple of weeks back Sonia and I travelled up into the Blue Mountains to see what we could capture of the last of the Autumn colours as Sydney descends swiftly into the depths of winter. Mount Wilson was our destination as some of the nicer autumny photo’s we’ve seen were from that area. The air was refreshingly crisp up in the mountains and we had a lovely day driving around, stopping off to shoot a few frames every now and then.
I had a flash unit with me so couldn’t resist the temptation to try some backlit portraits with the sun in the frame, trying to capture that classic warm hazy effect.
The photo’s I’m posting here were made on a quiet little road, somewhere up in the mountains. Only one car passed us in the 20 minutes or so that we were hanging around so we felt quite comfortable setting up the light stand and shooting away!
The lighting setup was pretty simple… I just backlit Sonia with the sun and filled in with a bare flash on low power from my left side. I was able to get a nice wide aperture because it was late afternoon by this point and the light was getting pretty low. I was shooting at around f4 to f5.6, with a shutter speed of around 1/100sec and I had ISO at 800.
This last image was taken a little while later than the first ones. I was languishing behind Sonia as we were heading down to a viewpoint to watch the sun setting from and the scene opened up in front of me. I manually focused the shot to only a few meters in front of myself to create the bokeh in the trees above Sonia and used a small aperture to get the starburst effect on the sun. Another nice effect that I’ve seen in plenty of photos around the internet but it was nice to get a chance to try it myself!
ScratchCam for iPhone is now available!
It’s been a while in the making, but all the blood, sweat and tears have finally paid off and my very own iPhone photography app is now available in the Apple App Store.
I have designed and developed ScratchCam from the ground up and with some help from my partner Sonia (on the graphics side) have managed to take the project from inception to release in around 2 months of evenings & weekends.
ScratchCam is an app that will generate random effects on photo’s taken with your iPhone, making them look like old school, 70′s, scratched and damaged film – effects heavily influenced by exploitation movies of that time as well as the recent resurgence of the genre as seen in movies like Planet Terror, Machete & Deathproof.
The app also gives you the ability to share your photos on Facebook and Flickr without having to leave the main screen.
Here are a couple of screenshots/examples and some links to the all important scratchcam.com website and the download page in iTunes.
Sydney landscapes video
Hey everyone, just a short post today to show you a video I compiled from a bunch of short clips I made over the last few weeks whilst out shooting various sunrises and sunsets.
I made these clips just kinda on the side, with the photos being my main focus on my recent outings but sticking them all together with a few transitions in iMovie and putting a backing track over them really seems to make them shine 
Whilst you’re here, why not hit “Like” and follow our Oz Travel Gallery Facebook page!
This is a short compilation of a handful of clips I made whilst out shooting around Sydney and NSW South Coast.
Music by Gomez