This is my entire make up collection. I'm about as low maintenance as you can get. I hardly ever wear any makeup. If fact the last lot I had I gave to my kids to play with. I had to go and buy some more when I was invited to a fancy work dinner.
I'm not sure if I like the crop (with the lipstick smack in the middle). All comments and CC greatly appreciated.
iso 200, f 4, ss 1/250, FEC +2, 50mm lensFirst up, do you call chickens chooks in the US or is it just an Aussie thing? Anyway, this is one of my little girls. I have two. I only got them a few weeks ago and they are just starting to lay. The kids love collecting the eggs. I would love to have more and do the whole self-sufficiency thing, but for now I have to make do with 2 chooks, a small vegetable garden and a few fruit trees.
Are you sick of sunsets yet. My DH is, but I love them so here are some from today. The first one was taken from my backyard. For the second two I drove up to a small hill near here, but by that time the best light was probably gone.
iso 800, f 1.8, 1/50I have been wanting to take a pic of this sign for ages. This is my local beach. It's a really calm, safe beach, protected by two islands, but the sea at the back of the islands is really rough and dangerous. A penguin colony lives on one of the islands and you can walk over to them at low tide. A few years ago a family were walking between the islands and they were hit by a freak wave and dragged out to sea. 5 of them drowned. It was awful. The rescue helicopters were going over head all afternoon and evening searching for the bodies. I'm kinda getting teary just typing this. This shot doesn't do the subject matter justice. I had a real problem with framing the pic coz there are so many other signs around this one (like the no dogs signs - they have decimated the penguin colony over the last few years). I ran the soft colour action that Phil posted on the board last week and then SCP moody mocha. I dodged and increased the saturation on the flowers.
iso 400, f 22, ss 1/50 
This afternoon when I was collecting the pizza for dinner, I found this little laneway. I had never really noticed it before. As you can see the lighting was really uneven so I had to do lots of PP.
#1 Krisztina's B&W conversion
#2 Aly's very vintage
#3 Just lots of fiddling around. Parts of this one are too overexposed to save.
I thought i would try a different frame today, what do you think?. All comments/CC/HHCC welcome and appreciated.
Not sure of the settings
This is one of those - "it's late and I don't have a photo yet pics". So I came up with this. Nothing serious, just a bit of fun.
These are the street lights up the road, with a long exposure and waving the camera around. I should have been moving the camera before i clicked so i didn't get the beginning bursts.
In PP I rotated the pic 180 degrees CCW and adjusted the red levels slider to give the red. Is it just me, or does it kinda look like a car?
iso 400, f 16, ss 4 sec.You know those days when everything goes right....well this wasn't one of those days. You are probably wondering why a light house when the theme is roads etc, well there is a story. Today we had a really big sea mist roll in at about lunchtime, so after I picked the kids up from school I thought I would go to Port fairy (about 30min away) to take a pic of the light house in the mist. I had visions of the light house shrouded in mist, with crashing waves. After hiking about 3/4 of a mile I got to the light house and as you can see the reality just didn't match my vision.
The worst part was I had forgotten I had to take Joey to Girl Guides until Shane rang me. It was only 15 mins until it started and I still had to get back to the car and drive home. I got her to guides about 1/2 hour late. I felt really guilty, but Joey was really cool about it.
iso 400, f 22, ss 1/125Tonight I wanted to try out something I read about in a magazine recently. Basically it is using the flash to freeze the foreground action, but having a long exposure time to get the motion blur in the background. This pic isn't so good (would be better with more cars, but it was taken at 10:30pm), but it was fun to play. I imagine it would be more affective with both objects moving.
iso 400, f 5, ss 1/2 sec, hand held, 17-85 f4 -5.6 lensJoey wants to ride to school (it's only about 500 metres), but she isn't very good at riding yet so this afternoon we had a practice session. This is the front of her school, they aren't allowed to ride up this part so I made her practice pushing her bike up to the bike shed. I'm such a mean Mummy. Bike helmets are compulsory (by law) in Australia and also school uniforms in almost all schools.
iso 200, f 10, ss 1/500, lens 70-200 f4L This afternoon Chris jumped in the driver's seat of the car, pulled it out of gear and rolled down the driveway. Thankfully he is okay, but my car has a few dents and a broken side window.
I had my scrap booking stuff out tonight so i thought i would put it to good use. I haven't actually done any scrapping for ages, I have even stopped buying stuff. Actually I have enough stuff to last sometime into the next century anyway.
All comments and CC/HHCC appreciated. I'm trying to work on interesting crops for inanimate objects - do these work? Also is the PP okay. I just did a levels adjustment (using the eye dropper on the black background and the white flower) - some I had to adjust the middle slider a bit coz they came out too light and sharpened.
I used my tripod and my new cable release. The last one is a bit noisy.
iso 800, f 5.6, ss 1/6 sec 
iso 800, f 5.6, ss 1/3 sec 
iso 800, f 5.6, ss 1/3 sec 
iso 800, f 13, ss 1.6 secAnother stinky hot day here -> 102F. So late this evening we went down to the beach. This beach has no sand, just rocks and you can't swim there so it's always practically deserted. The kids had a great time looking at all the rock pools and I got to take sunset pics. We came home at about 8:30pm and there were still heaps of people down at the main beach.
I'll have to post the settings tomorrow.
Thank you for all the comments about my banner. I put the blue swirls in to match the little piece of blue sky - my DH hates them too. I think I'll change them to dark grey and get rid of the blue writing too. I have no idea how DH got it to go all the way across the page, but it took him ages to do it with lots of swearing.
I finally have a banner - well almost. I have to edit it a bit so I have only one title, but at least it's something. A big thank you to my DH for putting it up for me.
As you can see by the time on the first one it was getting late and I still hadn't taken my photos, so I grabbed the first thing I could find - Shane's mobile phone.
All pics were taken with iso 400 , f 2.8, ss 250, FEC +2. I oversharpened them to get that kinda industrial look.
I thought I would try out some different crops - What do you think? The second one is my favourite, pity its feet kinda sunk into the fleecy backdrop.
Well I got 5 shots, I wouldn't necessarily call them 5 different angles though. Erica has one pose - standing soldier straight. She does pull different faces though (as you can see from the bug eyes in #2). In #3 I turned the flash on and got her to dance around and used the flash to freeze the action. These were taken late this afternoon using my 50mm lens. #5 is a classic example of why I rarely use this lens - I always seem to end up with cone headed looking kids with really sharp hair and blurry eyes. These pics are all pretty soft (especially on the eyes). The ss is pretty slow, it was a bit too dark inside, I should have upped the iso. I used Krisztina's colour action on these - fabulous action.
iso 400, f 2, ss 1/60
iso 400, f 2, ss 1/50
iso 200, f 1.8, ss 1/60
iso 200, f 2, ss 1/50
iso 200, f 2.8, ss 1/15This is one of the churches in town. I love how it glows in the afternoon sun. There were shadows over half the front, hence no shots of the whole church. Also I struggle with perspective when taking pics of buildings - they always look like they are falling over.
iso 200, f 5.6, ss 1/1600
iso 200, f 5.6, ss 1/1000 
iso 200, f 11, ss 1/200 
My DH collects model trains, somethings he even runs them. I bit like me and scrap booking supplies. The white background is a sheet on the kitchen table. I think I might need a macro lens though coz it was hard getting close enough with my lenses. The settings were basically copied from Barb Kelly's method, with a bit of modifying coz i was using my 17-85 f4 lens. Thanks Barb. I need to work on this more though as I still had to PP.
iso 200, f 5, ss 1/250, FEC +2 
