Christmas Time

A few photos from the Warrnambool Show

This photo isn't one of mine, it's Joey. How fabulous is this shot. She came on a camera club outing on Thursday night to Flagstaff Hill. She only had my old point and shoot camera , but she did great.


These ones are a few of mine from the show on the weekend.

And the B& W version

How did my girl turn out so beautiful?

12 more days

until my girl turns 11.

Erica really loves to read

Not all photos have to be masterpieces

Some thing I have been thinking about recently is what makes a good photo. Is it one that is technically perfect, well composed, perfectly focused, interesting subject matter, or is it one that makes you remember the day. When I first got serious about taking photos I used to smugly think that my parents were hopeless at taking photos and my photos were so much better. But I was wrong. For two years I took beautiful portrait style photos of my kids and lovely landscape photos of the places we visited, but never anything connecting the two. My kids aren't going to remember that that lovely close up portrait was taken on a walk to Shelley Beach, that it was a beautiful summer afternoon. I have realised that these sort of photos definitely have there place and I do like to strive to take better photos, but the photos that my kids are going to love when they are older are the ones like this one. Yes its blurry and grainy, but I hope it reminds then of the day when they washed the car all by themselves just so that they could have a water fight afterwards.

Fabulous skies

Today we had the most fabulous blue skies and amazing cloud formations, well for half the day anyway, then it clouded over completely.

Factories - Fonterra (Dennington) and Murray Goulburn(Koroit)

I think I might of added a bit too much grain to these ones.

a bit of fun with photoshop

This is the main street of town. I thought I would replace the T&G building with the Port fairy lighthouse. Now I'm thinking I might turn the street into sea. Humm, stay tuned.

Factories - Murray Goulburn

I have decided to do a series of photos of the local factories. Why you might ask, well I find them really interesting. Apparently other people don't, but hey they are my photos so i don't care. Actually I'm just being pig headed and want to prove the point that boring subjects can make interesting photos. Anyway, this is the Murray Goulburn Milk Processing plant at Koroit. I took this photo at about 8:30 at night. I really wanted to capture the plumes of smoke. i think i might try it again earlier in the night when there is still some blue in the sky. I desaturated the photo, and added some a little noise.

Teenagers

What happens to kids as they approach the teenage years? My girl is about to turn eleven and she has the most amazing mood swings. One minute she is happy and really loving, the next she is crying and then cranky. I love her dearly, but how are we going to get through 5 years of this. Please tell me it isn't too bad. Anyway tonight I made this image to represent all the emotions swirling around her. It did it really quickly, but I was pretty happy with how it turned out. It is just a photo of her overlaid over a photo of a tubular park slide.

Warrnambool Camera Club Blog

last week I set up a blog for the Warrnambool Camera Club - check it out www.warrnamboolcameraclub.blogspot.com

A few photos from my TAFE course

I'm studying a diploma of Visual Arts at TAFE - I only started at the beginning of the year and I'm only doing 2 subjects per semester so it will probably take me 10 years to finish. One of the subjects I'm doing is digital photography. These ar a few photos I used for my first semester assessment.







This one was taken on Anzac day at the 11 am service. I went to the dawn service, but I didn't think it would be the appropriate time to pull out my camera and tripod. I did get to go and take some sunrise photos after it though. This next photo is one of them. Actually this is three exposures combined. I have tried to use HDR programs to do this, but I'v never had much success, so this for this I just used layers and masks etc to combine them.









Joey looking all rock chick. She was so good letting be take photos of her. I wanted to practise the high key kinda look. The focus is probably more on her hair than her eyes, but all in all I was pretty happy with it.







And this is Mike, my photography teacher.

Feeding the giraffes

During the holidays we went to the Western Plains Zoo at Dubbo. The best part (well my favourite) was feeding the giraffes. This is Erica being mugged by giant giraffe tongues.

Griffiths Island lighthouse

These are some early morning shot I took at a local lighthouse. We went over there to get sunrise shows, but arrived a bit early. The jetty one is on the walk to the lighthouse - yep, it was really dark. The glow in the distance in the lighthouse shots are the lights from the town I live in

Cement works at dawn

I took this yeasterday morning, just before dawn. Not sure if I like the warning sign at the bottom, might need a bit of cropping.

the 12 apostles - B & W

Today we went down to the 12 Apostles - the coast line down there is just spectacular. Unfortunately the light wasn't great and it was really hazy, so I thought I would have a play with converting them to B&W. This is only about an hour from where I live. The original plan was to get some sunset shots, but we got sidetracked sight seeing.

This next one is just my crazy boy - I was trying to take a photo of my two girls and then this little head pops up into the view finder. I ran a lomo action on it just for fun.

Fireworks over the Speedway

A few weeks ago I took some photos of the fireworks over the local speedway. All the parts of this image were taken on the same night, just not necessarily all in one shot. The speedway with the lights on is one shot. Each fireworks burst is a separate shot. The green one was pink, but I already had a pink so I changed the colour. The moon shot was taken looking in the opposite direction, but i thought it was a nice addition. There was a thunder storm in the distance behind the fireworks and I did manage to capture one lightening shot, but the pic looked a bit over the top (well more so) with it added.

Little toes

Doing the Tara Whitney thing here.

seagulls

Okay, so they are just seagulls, but I kinda like them. Shane hates them. I keep setting them up as our computer background just to annoy him. I might do a whole series just on seagulls.

Dancers

These are a couple of photos I took a few weeks ago. The first one was taken at a local Highland Dancing competition. My daughter is the one in pink. The second one was taken at a Portuguese festival. I wanted to capture the colour and movement of the dancers. It was a really sunny day so I have to use a polariser to try and get a longer shutter speed. I really like this one.

I'm Back

It's been a while, but here are some photos I took tonight. Nothing special, but they were fun to take.

Tomorrow I'll put up some photos of the house renovation.

Tiger

Last weekend we went to the zoo with my sister and her family. I took about 200 photos and Shane took about 50. I haven't had a good look through them yet, but I thing this is my best one. Shane got some fabulous butterfly shots.

We have just started renovations on our house so my POTD are all shots of my house - interesting for me, but shots of house stumps and footings probably isn't going to be very thrilling for anyone else. I will try to get some other ones up soon though.

Narrawong Beach Before and After - CC please.

SOOC

Adjusted levels, Krisztina's B&W action, sharpening and crop

I took this photo a few months back andit was one I was never really that happy with. I was using my old tripod, which wasn't really stable so it wasn't overly sharp. Because the exposure between top and bottom was quite different I bracketed the exposures (this is the middle one). I hadn't done anything with this image until tonight but all the talk of HDR inspired me to give it a go. Well the results of combining the 3 images using HDR in CS3 where less than impressive - really dull and muddy. So i thought I would just play around. I used the magic wand to select the sky and sea in separate layers and adjusted the levels in each and the erased the bits I didn't want. i really do need to lear how to use layer masks. Then when i was happy with it I ran Krisztina's B&W action. I sharpened the area around the branch, but not the sky so as not to increase the noise in the sky. than i cropped.

So do you think it worked??? CC always appreciated.

The pink wall

We are about to start a major renovation / extension of our house. I can't wait coz our house is classic 1970's - uurrgh. And too small. Anyway, three bedrooms will stay the same, so we are trying to get these updated before the builders start. I told the kids they could all choose a colour for one wall in their bedrooms. the choices they came up with are bright pink, orange and turquoise. (lucky paint is easy to change). This is the pink wall I have just finished painting in my DD's room. How cool is that going to be for a backdrop. My DD's are away at the moment visiting their grandmother for 3 weeks, so I had to con DS to pose for a photo. He will only let me take a photo if I let him pull a funny face - typical boy. So the photo isn't great - but I really wanted to show you the wall.

A sunset one also

iso 100, f 22, ss 1 sec, polarising filter and tripod

I took this at about 9pm tonigh (6th Jan). I cranked everything up as much as possible to slow down the shutter speed and get the misty water effect. I'm pretty happy with this one. but I would like the ss to be a bit slower still. The tide was coming in and it was getting dark so definitely time to go home. You may recognise this scene, it's one of my favourite places to take pics and featured heavily on my blog last year.

bottle in a tree

Okay, so you are probably thinking "why do I have a photo of a tree with a circle around a few branches". Okay, here's the story. This is a Norfolk Pine tree - Warrnambool is full of these trees. A few weeks ago my boss at work was telling me about this tree, The small white dot in the circle is a bottle that has been stuck onto the branch. I have know idea how it could have got there. These trees are really big and really old. So today i finally got around to taking a photo of it - hummm, the result was less than stellar. So the question is how do you take a photo of this that shows the bottle at least relatively clearly, but also shows its position in the tree? or do I just need two photos :)

Butterflies

I did some butterfly stalking in my garden today. I used my 70-200 lens and had to set the iso to 800 to get a fast ss, so they are a bit noisy.