Blog

On Sunday the 13th of May, Sydney’s Parramatta Park became a sea of pink and barely any ground of nature’s greenery as thousands of spectators, participants and all families coming together for a Mother’s Day Classic fundraiser for Breast Cancer Research. The event is largely run across Australia in major cities and rural locations and consists of two main races, a 4KM and 8KM walk and run race for both men and women.

It was an early start for all the runners, walkers and families with an official event kick off at 6:00am, but for myself being one of the photographers for the day, I woke in the chilly hours of the morning. At 4:30am to be precise and the temperature must have been in the negatives (I didn’t check, but sure did feel dramatically cold and chilling). As I began to stumble in the dark in the house getting ready while my wife was nice and warm snuggled under a blanket in bed, I took a shower and got myself ready to head out the door just after 5am and navigating myself to Parramatta Park in Sydney’s west to get there in time before the event officially started.

The sun was still rising, as I walked to the main stage across an empty grass field but was soon to be filled not too long after and I met up with Elaine; one of the organisers and got aquainted and familiarised myself with the event runsheet and the map of the park. There was quite a number of key sponsers there with an established marquee including Hills Triathlon Club, Ford and a new comer this year, Athletes Foot.

(more…)

Image from The Digital Picture

I know I had promised this not too long ago after the recent purchase of the Canon 70-200F4L, that I would write up a review. Well my apologies for the delayed review but here it is in its entirety.

Firstly, I won’t be posting sample 100% cropped in images to demonstrate the sharpness, as there are plenty of resources available on the internet for this and perhaps with much better detail and comparison data. Instead I will be focusing on the general physical characteristics of the lens, how this lens feels when used regularly and how I find its’ quality compares to the other equipment in my arsenal. During the most part of this review, I will refer to the Canon 70-200F4 IS (image stabilisation) lens as a direct comparison; because I feel if you were in the market for a 70-200 F4, you wouldn’t be concerned too much on the 2.8 variants.

But just to put things into a little perspective, the Canon 70-200mm F4L non-IS, is the smallest and lightest option amongst all of Canon’s 70-200mm L variant of lenses, with f2.8 Image Stabilised being the biggest brother of them all. The 70-200F4 weighs in 705g and without the implementation of IS (image stabilisation) this does help reduce the weight quite significantly. Compare this to the Canon 70-200F4L IS USM which weighs in 760g.

(more…)

Well what is the story behind the latest shot in my Project 26? Is it real? Has it been superimposed? Did I take the photo?

All these questions and more will be answered as I shall go on. I was essentially sitting on a couch alone in the house as my wife was out shopping for a few things (why is this part important? Well I will get that in just a moment) I was thinking well what could be the best image to represent the letter “J”?

The first word that came to my mind was, jet. I was thinking – great, now where am I going to find a jet at this time and day? I continued to ponder more into all the things that started with the letter J, I was almost thinking at one moment to try and find an object or something that looked almost like the letter J even. You would think this is easy but it wasn’t you see not many everyday household objects or items do look like the letter J. Think about this and stop reading this article now and look around your surroundings, do you find anything that looks remotely like the letter J? I thought not.

Then it hit me! How could I have been this blindingly stupid – Jump! That was the thought that came across my mind and I figured how difficult can this really be? I will just setup my camera and tripod in a way set a self timer to essentially take the shot while I put myself through a series of jumps (perhaps this was the most exercise I’ve had in a long time and it was torture)

After the first couple of attempts I quickly realised the difficulty in getting that perfect shot I wanted.  I continued with more settings on my trusty camera and tripod setup and this still was not providing me the result that I was completely happy with.

Here are a couple of the ones, that well… didn’t quite make the cut for the winning shot above.

(more…)

So there’s been some absence recently, unfortunately I did manage to get sick again at start of this month. So far this year 2012 has become quite a strange one for me, I ended up being sick during the start of February and also the start of March. Although in all fairness I guess I wasn’t really sick during the beginning of March, I had a migraine that lasted for 5 days straight.

Which of course then I felt pretty sick of having the migraine. But the good news is though I do feel much better now and a lot of things have happened since the last blog entry. I’ve made some additional changes to my Facebook page. More obviously the introduction of Facebook Timeline to pages and I have to admit at first I thought it just does not suit a Facebook page and works just OK for a personal Facebook page. But I have to say, the timeline has grown on me and I hope you guys don’t mind the layout too much – everything is there just it’s shoved in all sorts of different areas and could take some getting used too.

The second most important change that has happened is perhaps the addition of the event photography pages I’ve added additional photos from the Sydney Fashion Weekend event and you can view them here.

While we are still on the subject of the website, you probably also have noticed that comments are closed on articles, although while this is technically true, this is only referring to the comments system of the website instead I’ve opted to introduce Facebook comments for all articles which should make it easier and plus who doesn’t have a Facebook account?

(more…)

Picture by Logitech

I have been deciding on certain things on the hardware side, mostly needing to get some telephoto lens, I still have yet to be in possession of one in my kit. I am currently saving for that.

On the other side of things, I am also slowly in the plans of setting up the back of my garage into a small shoot studio, and let’s not think big here, when I say small, I mean small perhaps one flash stand and umbrella kind of small… but we shall see soon enough. Just keeping up appearances and showing that I am still alive and kicking – I just haven’t been able to update the blog side of things recently because my main PC I use to work on my website is actually suffering from a out of action keyboard.

I know what you’re thinking, that it’s just a keyboard right? Well it’s actually a Logitech K750 solar powered keyboard, and apparently it’s a common issue where most people have been experiencing a lack of reserved energy in the keyboards and eventually lose power altogether despite it being charged in sunlight. There’s more on this issue here

Projects are still being carried out and I am having a blast with them, you can check out my progress of each one here

As you’ve probably seen my twitter feed, you will know that I’ve decided to give myself a challenge and a project to essentially find that spark once again in photography. There’s quite a good number of projects you can associate with photography, some of the more common projects people undertake are Project 365 or for those that are a little more time constrained then Project 52 is the ideal choice.

What are they? Well I’m glad you asked – there are numerous websites and pages on Project 365, but basically you take a photo of one thing, could be anything everyday of the year. Usually something that relates to you or is part of your life. Some people have taken Project 365 is a self portrait project which is completely alright to, after all it’s how you want to portray your work or what relates to as a person.

(more…)

Essentially turning a new leaf…

Those who had the opportunity to see just what this website had consisted of, before it was maliciously infected and unfortunately had left me with no choice but to completely erase and start from scratch so to speak.

Anyway, with much work and planning that has gone into the galleries this time around, the site hopefully is much cleaner and easier to navigate. I still offer my services as per usual, feel free to get in touch with me.