Lightly Toasted

Watch for me by moonlight

2010-02-04T00:28:17Z

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight, over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding
Riding-riding-
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

He’d a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin;
They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!
And he rode with a jeweled twinkle,
His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jeweled sky.

– Alfred Noyes 1880-1958

This poem takes me back to my schooldays! Alas! I loved poetry then just as I do now. If you know the poem and the story narrated you’d know the landlord’s daughter Bess, and on a sparkling moonlit night such as tonight, thats what comes to mind — The Highwayman!

One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I’m after a prize to-night,
But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light;
Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
Then look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way.

A little respite from my India trip 2010 story, will continue soon.
Thank you A Sue for reminding me about the full moon or I’d have missed the opportunity.

India Trip 2010

2010-02-03T05:38:47Z

After a good week of Christmas and Boxing day jubilations I embarked on a short journey to India. It was on New Years Day. Who’d *ever* want to travel on New Years Day! Yes, well I did — and you’d be surprised the first leg of the flight from Sydney to Singapore was totally booked. So there I was at six in the morning catching a flight! Waking up the whole neighbourhood at five and troubling D, running through immigration kiosk, dashing toward the TRS (Tourist Refund Scheme) to claim my brand new Lens. Ah all that was easy and soon was strapped in my window seat waiting to disappear in the oblivion of blue. I stuck my nose in Judith Lucy’s ‘The Lucy Family Alphabets’ what a great book… Thanks D. Before long we’re descending into Singapore of what seemed a very pleasant flight.

I love Changi Airport. This also happens to be an airport I’ve been to many times and I know my way around well. Now with new terminal T3 there is more to discover: shops, cafes, gardens and lounges yes all in the confines of the airport. T2 the good old terminal has its own charm and while T3 has a slight new feel about it. I love the Orchid garden at T2 amongst the Koi swimming in the little pond right bang in the middle of this busy but seemingly peaceful tranquil place. Very clever and innovative and most of all calming if you’ve gotten off a long flight. Having had the time for my next flight I decided to take my time and shoot some of the orchids. You can never spend enough time shooting beautiful flowers. You really can’t.

Before long I was on board my next leg of the journey to Calcutta, stuck my nose right into ‘The Lucy Family Alphabet‘ where I’d left it last and giggling at every little family faux pas. Ah the poor soul. She does write very much like she talks. And what family doesn’t have their share of great embarrassments! Thanks D I really enjoyed the book. The aircraft had started to descent….. Here I come Sonar Bangla(Golden Bengal)!

to be continued…

MOO Discount for January 2010

2010-01-21T13:51:09Z

Having printed business cards at MOO I can assure you they are great people to work with. Not only were the cards delivered on time but the quality of work was good too. So there you have it, MOO is having a January promotion and if you’re interested to put an order in let me know and I’ll forward you a discount code.

Mosman Bay walk

2009-12-23T23:55:15Z

Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 1/10sec, f/14, 17mm, ISO 100, Bias: 0 ev

If you are a nature lover and like walking Mosman has a lot of little hidden gems for you. There are some amazing walks right from the Balmoral end to the other side through Chowder Bay and on to Cremorne Point. We did them more often before but every good opportunity has us going there for more.

A couple weeks back when I had the Canon EOS 5D Mark II we decided to rock up in the heat of the mid-day sun to do a little walk from the Mosman Wharf to Cremorne Point Lighthouse to try out the new camera. We walked through the Harnett Park along the back roads right along the Bay and came up to this clearing. Clearly I was panting having to lug my gear in the heat. So stopped for a little rest and this was the view that engulfed us. I don’t think we went any further than this. I have already taken a lot of photos by then and it was starting to get very hot as well.

Over the years we have done this walk many times but it was during this walk that I had a bit of a camera epiphany! I was experimenting different lenses with the Canon EOS 5D Mark II and I just knew I had to get one!! That Canon EOS 5D Mark II is mean shooting machine! It really is.

Light Bokeh

2009-12-23T23:57:11Z

Canon EOS 40D, 1/15sec, f/1.8, 85mm, ISO 200, Bias: 0ev

Ahhh bokeh… that magic elixir which makes photos pop! And what more when you have Christmas lights to play with. I’ve been taking a few light shots with my 50mm and 85mm to see which does the job better. In my opinion they are both excellent lenses. The quality of the bokeh is always a matter of distance between lens and the subject, the f-stop and the depth of field, more than just the lens alone. There are some good tutorials at Cambridge in colour and a handy calculator at DOF Master. If you are serious about Bokeh this is must see. Not to mention the lovely DOF table here. Or you could also get one for your iPhone.

Remember though, overdoing most things almost always kills the fun. So even with bokehs do it in moderation and only to add it to make photos pop. Enjoy your Christmas and New Year bokehs!

Resting in the shade, Chowder Bay

2009-12-21T08:50:30Z

Canon EOS 40D, 1/500sec, f/4.5, 50mm, ISO 100, Bias: +1/3ev

Resting under the shade of the tree at HMAS Penguin. It did get quite warm this afternoon. Not in a totally sultry way but it was warm enough to make you aware we’re in summer. D’s colleague from Boston was in town and we took her to Thelma and Louise for brunch followed by a walk around Georges Head in Chowder Bay. Aren’t Sydney siders lucky?

I love the Sydney skyline in the background. Even though I was shooting smack bang in the middle of the day almost 12pm I over-exposed it a bit to get the details in the shadow under the canopy of the tree. There was not a soul to be spotted around that area until of course the time I pointed my camera in the direction of the tree. Luckily though in my opinion their presence seem to add to the photo.

Wrought iron fence at Rest Park, Cammeray

2009-12-16T23:50:20Z

Canon EOD 40D, 1/20sec, f/3.2 85mm ISO 100, Bias -1/3ev

Shot this during my walk yesterday.

Information about St Thomas Rest Park

The former St. Thomas’ Cemetery was the first burial ground established on the North Shore. The land for the Cemetery was donated to the Anglican Parish of St Leonards in 1845 (St. Thomas’ Church) by the prominent landowner and merchant, Alexander Berry. Berry donated four acres of his northern portion of land to the parish for a prominent burial place for his wife, Elizabeth (Edward Wollstonecraft’s sister). Subsequently Edward and Alexander were buried there.

The Cemetery contains the graves of many notable local residents and mirrors the development of the district over a one hundred year period. The first burial was recorded in 1847 and the last in 1950.

In 1967 the Cemetery was handed over to North Sydney Council by an Act of Parliament granting the area as `community land’. It was renamed St. Thomas’ Rest Park and reopened in 1974 following the conversion of the Cemetery in the early 1970s. This was North Sydney Council’s first heritage project.

Ref: www.northsydney.nsw.gov.au/www/html/2270-st-thomas-rest-p…

Bob Hawkes birthday delight!

2009-12-16T23:49:51Z

I normally don’t talk politics in here. Almost never but this is too good an opportunity to miss. When I read the news headlines this morning something got my attention — I quote:

Stripper dressed as John Howard makes surprise appearance at Bob Hawke’s 80th birthday party

Turns out that a stripper dressed as the former Liberal prime minister burst from the former Labor prime minister’s cake – performing a gag which shocked some. Hilarious! I’m beside myself with just the imagery of this mock-up. Could you just image the former bushy browed, long nosed Howard to turn up in drag! And that too of Bob Hawke’s birthday cake! I reckon they would have all missed a beat or two at the Bennelong Restaurant last night, including Kevin Rudd.

But wait what cracked me up even more were a few comments that followed from readers thereafter. Here are some

scott:… I hope the stripper was good looking!
Mulga Bill: Profoundly. Anything that makes me think of John Howard is disgusting.
Crystal: I’ve heard of rats in the pantry. But a rodent in a birthday cake – ugggh!
drew: no doubt he put everyone off their deserts. you could just picture him – still smiling and waving… “hello”
Sync: It’s not the stripper that’s offensive – it’s the idea of Howard!
John: Quite appropriate really. One drops their pants for Bob Hawke, the other for George Bush.

Oh Australia how I love thee. How many other countries have the courage to take the mickey out of their Prime Ministers, present or past? Hardly any! Its all in jest at the end of the day am sure!

Dont miss the video, its all on tape as they say and the ABC report is here.

Cartoon by Nicholson from “The Australian” newspaper: http://www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au

Cammeray Sunset

2009-12-07T13:37:13Z

Yet another handheld sunset! I really hadn’t planned on taking this one but the colours in the sky were rather compelling. It was a rather hurried shot as you can tell from the framing. I wanted to get as much of that natural light I possibly could.

There is a bit of clipping happening there as well but oh well I am glad i had enough time to shoot it. If you see the larger version you’d see a little birdie enjoying the sunset too.

Those soft wispy clouds in the foreground get me everytime

Cottage Point, NSW

2009-12-07T22:41:38Z

Were back from a lovely weekend away at Cottage Point on the north side of Sydney. Its located in the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park approximately 50 minutes drive North from Sydney’s CBD. You can get there by Road, Sea Plane or Ferry. This was shot yesterday before we went out on a lovely long boat ride on the Hawkesbury river. The next day before we left Cottage Point D & I went for a little walk to see the Cottage Point Kiosk and the Cottage Point Inn. This is where the Sea Planes come in and its realy pretty. Almost feel like this is out of a movie — except for one thing…. If you go down to the waterfront which leads to Cottage Point Inn the narrow wharf bifurcates and the left path goes into the Cottage Point Inn restaurant. There’s a lady there probably the owner or the manager — she hounds every living soul off that wharf even if they were to look her way by accident. Luckily D or I didn’t have a run in with her but as I stood there taking photos and at one time had pointed the camera towards the Inn D tells me she was marching my way. Luckily I had taken the shot and turned around.

We were lucky to have Phil’s boat around and it felt being being on the top of the world to do power rides on the Hawkesbury churning a trail along the gorgeous sleepy bays along the river. Some places the water thins out a lot as we had gone in at low tide, but it was definitely worth it. Oh what a weekend.

Summer is here

2009-12-07T08:37:21Z

Canon EOS 40D, ISO 100, 200mm f/2.8, 1/250s

Its the 1^st of December 2009! The silly season is upon us and here in Sydney, Australia we officially begin our first day of Summer. Except it was a coldish day with lots of wind and rain. I stayed back home trying to recover from the wretched cold and cough I have had the last two weeks. In the afternoon when the rain cleared a bit the sky was bright and beautiful.

There were lots of birds about again. We have a lot of cockatoos visiting the pine trees in the neighbourhood. They love eating the cones. Heres one little beauty queen from this afternoon. Aren’t they pretty!

Its crazy how many come for feed around the trees around our balcony every morning and afternoon. Generally these are a bit sober ones compared to the ones around Ku-rin-gai Chase that scream screech and squawk often.

Canon EF 70-200/f2.8 L IS USM

2009-11-19T22:45:22Z

Canon EOS 40D, ISO 100, 125mm f/9.0, 1/20s, view larger

After long deliberation about the Canon EF 70-200/f2.8L IS USM I’ve finally bought it today! Thanks Kim your photos did help encourage my decision too. Read some of the reviews here and as you can see the imagery is rather crisp, it has a very useful focal length coupled with a valuable 3 stop Image Stabilisation! Goodbye shaky photos! I like how The Digital-Picture people write it:

When I really need to make every shot count, the 70-200 IS is one of the first lenses I will include in my bag. It is one of the most-professionally-used lenses available and finds a home in the kit of many, many serious amateurs as well.

Very convincing isn’t it? Well the above shot was a quick and hurried click this afternoon without much attention. Its almost SOOC (straight out of the camera) with almost little or no editing except keywords and slight cropping. Its crisp and notice how the blur is rather smooth — a truly round aperture hole does results in a nicer background blur! The only not so great thing is its weight! But with 4 UD elements capturing very sharp and clear picture with outstanding image delineation this is a very little price to pay!

Here is another one, Cockatoo feeding on the cones

Canon EOS 40D, ISO 200, 200mm f/4.5, 1/60s, view larger

Canon 5D Mark II weekend loan

2009-11-19T12:37:37Z

Sometime back in April I’d talked about Canon 5D Mark II, well guess what I finally got to try one because of the lovely people at Kayell NSW. And truly it blew me away just like every other review of Canon 5D Mark II I’d read thus far! There is a very good reason why everyone wants to own this Canon body! Its outstanding. The things that jumped right out at me in these two days of trial was its ability to handle noise, increased dynamic range (without HDR), clarity and ability to focus well in low light, responsiveness, softer shutter click compared to my Canon 40D, 3″ viewing LCD, peripheral illumination compensation, full HD movie capability. If there is one complaint, its the radial distortion on 17-40mm at 17mm. You’ll only notice this if you look very closely on straight lines around the edges of a 17mm shot! There is also a little vignetting on the corners at 17mm. But the wide-angle goodness you get out of a full frame is worth every drop of gold. Should you frame your shot carefully you can work around the radial distortion.

I’ve added a few images to this post and there are some more here. These photos were all taken with the Canon 5D Mark II. Click on the images to view a larger version. If you’re into Canon bodies and thinking of an upgrade or a new one I’d say give this a trial run.

I’m no expert on reviewing professional cameras, this is only my opinion of it.

Motion Trail

2009-11-19T12:39:42Z

Capturing motion trails can be fun but they test your patience at time! And yes it is a bit of a numbers game too — bit like Russian Roulette (Русская рулетка). We went for a nice long walk after dinner tonight. This was the result after experimenting a bit. A 21 second frame followed by a blank frame to reduce noise. Alright if you haven’t already noticed… the lanes on the left and heading away from where I stood. While the ones on the right are oncoming traffic from two different spots.

Canon EOS 40D, ISO 100, 40mm f/22, 21s

This one below was taken a few days earlier on my walk back from work. The yellow fuzz is a bus zooming past. From the overpass even the slightest speed feels like a gusty torrent!

Canon EOS 40D, ISO 100, 24mm f/22, 0.8s

See where this picture was taken. [?]

Lightroom 3 Beta

2009-11-03T00:53:14Z

If you’re a photographer of any description and use Lightroom this is definitely for you. Adobe has released Lightroom 3 beta. Yes its beta so its not a fully working copy but had a lot of good little touches from the last released version which is Lightroom 2.

Scott Kelby and Matt Klowkowski have put together a Learning Centre for Lightroom 3 beta. A couple of videos that run you through the basic changes and whats new and they are well worth a watch. All up about 20 minutes but a very neat little set of videos. Definitely watch it if you use Lightroom or are planning to get the software and try it. Adobe Lightroom 3 beta can be downloaded from here.

Brisbane Skyline

2009-10-20T00:05:00Z

Canon EOS 40D, f/7.1, 25sec, 50mm, ISO Speed: 100

Its only fair I do one for Brisbane too having done Sydney.

I’d have loved to have this shot a bit wider(more panoramic) but there were a bunch of noisy kids to my right who didn’t want to budge and often ran into my frame: grrrrrr! We stood here for a bit and saw the ferry come in and out of the wharf… the trail a ferry leaves on reflecting coloured night light is rather spectacular.

See where this picture was taken. [?]

Firefox Add-ons

2009-10-16T04:19:59Z

Being a blazing fast browser and scalable I have long since made Firefox my default. I admit it wasn’t easy giving up the luscious goodness of Safari but Firefox does take things to the next level if you constantly write HTML and CSS and use Flickr or like Photography^⌘ !

There are numerous posts about Firefox Add-ons so why make yet another one? Well, I’d like to make one for the ones I frequently use. They are productivity orientated and work for me and am happy to share it with you.

Adblock Plus — stops ads, banners & pesky javascript animations
GreaseMonkey — life changing!! if you use Flickr UserScripts
Web Developer — web designers stepping stone
Clear Cache Button — keep it squeaky clean
Firebug — saves a lot of development time
HTML Validator — keep you (X)HTML error/warning free
Link Evaluator — never have broken links again
IE View — when working on windows
YSlow — for testing and improving page load time

Great! So lets fire ‘em all up and go browse till the cows come home. Well, you may but this undermines the whole reason why add-ons were made. They are to assist your work not hinder. To aid this process Firefox has an easy turn enable/disable button from Firefox > Tools > Add-ons. Keeping them all activated all the time slows your browser down even on a super-fast new machine. Only keep your must have basic ones activated and disable what you don’t need. There are lots of add-ons out there and newer ones coming out everyday. If you load too many add-ons its bound to slow your browsers performance down! The key is to know what kind of tasks you do most on your browser and have a select few add-ons that make your repetitive tasks quicker and effortless.

If in doubt ask yourself:

Do I need to know the exact weather around me every second on right in my browser window NOW?
Do I need to know if every page I browse is HTML complaint to W3C standard ALWAYS?

I’d say NO

As you can tell from the image below how over crowded and distracting the taskbar looks here, imagine if you had this all day long!

A lean and minimal browser will go further a field and achieve more for you than one thats bloated with add-ons and plug-ins and themes!

^⌘As of now, October 2009 — Firefox, Safari and Omniweb are the only 3 browsers that represent true image colour profiles. There is not much point in using a browser that doesn’t display colours correctly. Firefox being an OpenSource also has the advantage of thousands of worldwide developers pitching in their best to keep it clean, open architecture and scalable.

Sydney Skyline

2009-10-15T10:28:41Z

We went down to the Stir Crazy Thai on Broughton St at Milsons Point tonight. A little walk down to the parking and then you’re engulfed with this gorgeous view of the Sydney CBD from the North Shore.

There is a little blur but next time I will surely try with a Tripod. Make sure you click on the picture to view a larger version.

When saying cute is not enough

2009-09-04T14:13:19Z

Canon EOS 40D, f/7.1, 1/250, 45mm, ISO Speed: 200

Chloé loves grass and she was rolling a bit till she finally decided to pose for me. Shot at The Entrance in Summer 2009!

Woof!

Spring is here

2009-09-30T00:25:34Z

Canon EOS 40D, f/4.0, 1/1000, 38 mm, ISO Speed: 400

Where does time go when you grow up. Whoever said time management is a great thing surely lied or didn’t pack too much into their day… or maybe life has evolved more and there are far more distraction today than there were growing up.

Well no, that isn’t an excuse but genuinely seem to be running out of time to do things I always had time for. How bizarre! And then I’ve had the bout of flu luckily not the swine variant. It has left me so drained and lethargic.

Canon EOS 40D, f/1.4, 1/4000, 50mm, ISO Speed: 400

On a much brighter note though we are in Spring! Yippie! There is cherry blossom most everywhere you see and almost every shade of the lovely Azaleas on the sidewalks.

Its such a beautiful time of the year! Time for Spring cleaning to begin soon! But… we could well miss that if we delay it for a bit