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January 30, 2016January 31, 2016

To the sea!

Fancying a walk with daughter and wife it was decided to head out to the sea. Shame we didn’t check the tide times as the tide was out when we arrived. Never mind.

I’d been looking at some books by Bruce Barnbaum and was keen to try some black and white images again for a change. As many of you may already know, I spend a significant amount of my time behind the camera shooting properties for real estate agents in and around Auckland. These images are alwatys in colour, so to go back to black and white was a bit of a treat. I’m always congnisant of Ansel Adams and his zones which often takes me longer to consider and plan for than the time I’m allowed on an evening stroll. Nevertheless I tried. I was particularly taken with the clouds and felt use of black and white might accentuate their structure more.

Conifer Grove in monochrome looking towards Wattle Downs.

I shot colour also, and there’s a couple more images below taken whilst on the walk. Ansel Adams encourages you to “see” in monochrome which is a lot easier with today’s digital cameras. I’d set my camera to save RAW images to one memory card, JPEGs to the other, and selected to shoot in monochrome. When using the LCD display I then see the image in black and white. Use of the histogram helps even more. By selecting to save in both RAW and JPEG I then get both a colour and black and white image. Remember the sensor in my camera (Nikon D800) is a colour sensor, so the RAW image will be in colour, the JPEG the monochrome version. This isn’t as good a black and white image as it could be as all that’s happening here is that the image is desaturated. How to get a good black and white image from a colour sensor is nicely explained by Vincent Versace in his From Oz To Kansas book.

Sunset over Wattle Downs — Looking out towards Wattle Downs from Conifer Grove. Shame the tide was out.

Vincent Versace has another book – the predecessor to “From Oz To Kansas” actually – entitled “Welcome To Oz” that gives more detail on the way he processes colour images. Versace has worked with the team at Nik Software (now part of Google) in the development of their ColorEfex software plugin for Lightroom and Photoshop. Playing with this product resulted in the last two images you see in today’s post. Shame about the flare in the last shot … or does that add to the mood?

Conifer Grove walkway leading to the sea. Shame the sea was out!

January 6, 2016January 31, 2016

Wide as!

Fisheye view of the bush in Auckland Botanic Gardens

We’d decided on a stroll and I wanted to take a camera … but not carry a lot of weight. I decided to take a fisheye lens and see if I could capture something interesting. With 180 degrees corner to corner this lens is pretty wide. Mind you, there’s a bit of distortion too. All the same, using the lens in portrait mode let me give an impression of height to these totara trees in the Botanic Gardens. To aid you with scale you’ll notice my wife pretty central in the image. This tends to be the way walks work when I have a camera with me. Wifey keeps walking, I stop and shoot, try to catch up and then, if something else catches my eye, stop, compose, shoot then run to catch up again. Maybe if I get her a camera too we could both take shots that were less rushed? Something to think about maybe 😉

January 5, 2016January 31, 2016

Caterpillars!

Down the bottom of my garden I’ve planted some swan plants and buddleia. It’s been wonderful to see so many butterflies in the garden, but also somewhat upsetting. Upsetting because it appears that wasps attack the caterpillar during it’s final metamorphosis. We noticed a few caterpillars go into their fish hook shape but never saw them the next day. Needless to say we then started to rescue them off the bush and have successfully released a few butterflies. Never ceases to amaze me how such a tiny spec of an egg can develop into such a magnificent butterfly. Below are a couple of photos of caterpillars on a swan plant.

January 1, 2016January 31, 2016

Hmmm ….

Well, Happy New Year! I usually get up early and head out to see the sunrise, but this year the weather was pretty bad so I stayed in bed. Whilst doing odd jobs around the house I noticed these wee beasties in the basement. Before capturing them and setting them free in the back yard I had to get a few photos of course.

I’m guessing that the young spiders have a taste for their siblings as there appears to be a few “corpses” in amongst the living youngsters. Made me wonder what percentage of the baby spiders survive into adulthood.

September 26, 2015

Trying something new …

I had such good intentions regarding the maintenance of this blog, but as usual, other things seem to have taken priority. It’s been pretty busy here which is a good thing. One new addition to my photographic arsenal is a Nodal Ninja along with a 16mm Nikkor fisheye lens. The intention is to use this combination to create virtual tours, but there’s a bit of work to do first to make sure the panoramas are stitched properly and the end result looks good. Anyway, earlier today I ventured off to the Botanic Gardens and took a few shots which I stitched together to make a panorama. The files are small JPEGS, so the resolution isn’t that high, but it’ll give you an idea of what I’m playing with. Also, I need to sort out my nadir shots to I get a full 360 panorama. Keen to see my first effort? Click the link …

[pano file=”Gardens-Take1/gardenstest1.html” width=”800″ height=”600″ title=”South African Garden at Auckland’s Botanic Gardens”]

If you did have a look, perhaps let me know what you think.

July 11, 2015

Out for a stroll

View to Rangitoto Island from Te Puru Park

The past few days have been glorious. Clear blue skies and no wind. It’s been really quite cold, but there’s something rather nice about these cold, clear, crisp mornings. The first shot in this post was taken at Te Puru Park looking towards Rangitoto. If you look carefully you may be able to see some frost in the foreground. Not a common occurrence here in Auckland.

We often start our walks at Te Puru Park and head along the clifftop towards Omana and Maraetai. The next few shots are taken as we did this walk a little earlier today.

Looking towards Waiheke Island as I walked toward Omana from Te Puru Park.

I suppose it was as a result of a house shoot yesterday that I was tempted to try shooting into the sun today. To be honest, we’d picked the wrong time to shoot the house and I ended up making a second visit later in the day. It was the wrong time due to the position of the sun and I ended up shooting into the sun. Not always a good idea, but the effects can sometimes be of interest. The lens I was using was the Nikkor 14-24mm f2.8 that is quite prone to flare. Indoors it’s wonderful, but outdoors, on a sunny day, it’s quite a challenge to stop lens flare. Anyway, a couple of yesterday’s images were rather nice, even when shooting into the sun. Somewhat inspired by these images I thought I’d have another go today … but with a different view.

Any dust or dirt on the lens will result in extra spots or reflections in the final image so I tried to make the lens as clean as possible before each shot. Unfortunately, if you look carefully you’ll notice there’s still a few extra highlights around the sun. I’m not sure if this is something to do with the lens or my inability to clean my lens! Perhaps a little more experimentation will determine the answer.

Between Omana and Maraetai with Waiheke Island in the background

Playing with a few filters. Here’s another few from the path between Omana and Maraetai with Waiheke Island in the distance.

July 4, 2015July 4, 2015

What a relief!!

St Pauls Anglican Church, 141 Chapel Road, Flat Bush

I think it started on the 22nd June … hard to say, but I think that was the day. For some bizarre reason, every time I tried to use my Nik Plugins for Photoshop to edit my photos, Photoshop would crash. Talk about stressful! I’ve spent quite some time creating a range of filters and techniques that have now become a significant part of my image processing workflow. Then, on the 22nd June, it all started going wrong. I could open Photoshop, edit and save a file, but any subsequent image I tried to edit would cause Photoshop to crash. I had to open and close Photoshop for each image I wanted to edit and, as you can imagine, this was taking forever. I was at a loss as to what could be wrong. I checked online and found little to help. I suppose, as a last resort, not expecting much in the way of a response, I contacted Google and told them of my problems. They were wonderful! I received a quick response and then had regular communication with them as they endeavoured to identify and then resolve the problem. As you can guess by the title of the post, they managed to fix the issue and I’m now able to return to my usual workflow. So, a big thanks to the Nik Software Suite support team!!

Interestingly, I downloaded a trial version of the latest version of Photoshop hoping this would resolve the issue. No such luck. A crash report was generated and I was asked if I wanted to send this to Adobe. They wanted an email address so they could get back to me. I was very hopeful thinking they’d be keen to impress me with their support with which they’d encourage me to subscribe to the latest version. I’m sorry to say I’m still waiting for a reply. Google responded within 24 hours 🙂

June 20, 2015June 20, 2015

Rather special …

It was a glorious morning and I was there to not only see it, but able to take photographs of it too. It’s not that many years ago that I’d see a glorious sunrise through my car windscreen on my way to work. No time to stop and enjoy, had to get into the office and start work. Thankfully those days are long gone! Now I have the opportunity to not only enjoy watching the sun rise, but photograph it too.

There’s an app I have for my Android Phone called Sun Surveyor. This is very helpful to decide times and locations for sunrises (and sunsets for that matter). Using this app I could see where the sun would rise in relation to the trees at this particular Beachlands location. There’s a number of trees, with a gap through which you can see the water, and … according to Sun Surveyor, the sun would rise through this gap. The next shot taken with a wide angle lens, gives a better idea of the trees that frame the view.

Somewhat tricky to determine exposure with scenes like this as some areas are very dark whereas other are extremely bright. In situations like this I always use LiveView and the histogram. Sometimes I’ll take several images at different shutter speeds and then blend the images together to ensure I don’t lose detail, but for this shot I was happy to have the darks as dark as they are.

Oh, want to see more of the house that has these gorgeous views? Take a look here.

June 16, 2015

Up in the air!

Rather a lovely day today here in Godzone and a chance to get out with the drone. It is becoming increasingly apparent that a common language and a predefined plan are essential to get reasonable footage when shooting video. Filling out the storyboards and planning the shots beforehand are not really optional.

I popped out to Barry Curtis Park first thing with my daughter just to play with the controls and get familiar with the responsiveness of the craft. It was a bit windy which didn’t help, but we had a heap of fun all the same. Later in the day a few shots up at Nathan Homestead with my son … but again pretty windy so we didn’t really get much time in the air. Just long enough to get a shot of the homestead. Looking at some footage of a tree we realised just how windy it was that little bit higher off the ground. Nevertheless the gimbal provided pretty good stable images which was impressive. Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.

June 15, 2015

Pacific Music Awards 2015 … soundcheck.

It was great. A really great show with a wonderful atmosphere. A thoroughly enjoyable evening with some very talented musicians being recognised for their achievements.

Earlier in the day I popped down to see how the stage was set and bumped into Malcolm Lakatani. Always a pleasure to meet Malcolm. He was to back Maryanne Ito later that evening, but as we waited for everyone to arrive and take their places for the soundcheck Malcolm relaxed a little and treated us to a little improvisation. The lighting was just right for the music he was playing. Thankfully I’d brought a couple of cameras! I knew I’d be using a telephoto on the night, but wasn’t sure just how wide I’d need to go so I brought a 14-24mm and 24-70mm on a couple of D800s just to check out the angles. The 24-70mm was perfect for shots close to the stage as well as distance shots.

The light was so lovely and moody. Quite contrasty with just a couple of high spots to the rear and some gentle frontal lighting, but the effect on Malcolm was wonderful. I quite like the contrasty deep shadowy type of image and this was a perfect opportunity to try and capture some shots.

Malcolm was relaxed, having fun just jamming away, sitting on a stool in his stocking feet. The light was good and I was having a wonderful time too. ISO was up pretty high at 2500 and the lens was wide open at f2.8 as I wanted to obscure and blur as much of the background as I could. All shots below were taken with the Nikkor 24-70mm. I hope you enjoy looking as much I did listening to Malcolm and taking the shots!

Oh, and just in case you were wondering about Maryanne, here’s a couple of shots of the lovely lady during her performance at last night’s Pacific Music Awards.