Your visual edge
What I’ve been doing
What a pleasant job today. Out shooting a property in Glenbrook that was the home to a flock of Alpacas. Mindful of Tintin’s experience of spitting alpacas (or were they llamas) I didn’t want to get too close! Just a few photos of these lovely creatures. Hopefully their expressions will make you smile.
One thing I learnt today was they go to the toilet in the same place each time. Is that right? Anyway, looking under the alpaca in the last image certainly suggests he’s been here before!
Well, this morning was quite different to yesterday morning. Today was rather more overcast and the light intensity was much lower. A more diffused light, so I failed to capture what I was looking for. Yesterday the sun poked its rays through the tree canopy and illuminated small areas in a very special way. No such luck today! Even so, the bush remains a wonderful place to walk and look and listen.
The bush area I was walking through was in Totara Park and there’s some really lovely large specimens of native trees. The next photo shows a lovely Puriri tree. The branches seem to spread out for ages and the main trunk has such lovely texture and form. A bit of a favourite for the kereru for the berries. We didn’t see any kereru today, but we could hear them. It struck me that the next time I go into the bush I should record the sounds and play them as a background track to the blog post. If I can get up in time tomorrow I might just try that.
I’ve always been fond of the tree ferns, not just their huge fronds as you can see in the final photo of this post, but the patterns in their trunk. This next image shows the trunk of a tree fern with the textures accentuated by moss and lichen.
Final image for this post is looking up through the fronds towards and brightening sky. It was quite noisy standing here taking this shot. Not from sirens, vehicles, aircraft, loud music or people talking, but from the cicadas. And then the whoosh of a kereru flying above. Quite a special place and well worth getting out of bed to enjoy if you get the chance. So much better than sitting in a queue on the motorway!
What was interesting, however, was how the rain sat upon the leaves of the plants in the garden. The first image is of raindrops on a yucca leaf. Quite a shallow depth of field to ensure other leaves are nicely out of focus. Made me think of Itten and his contrasts. Here you can almost see rough and smooth, wet and dry, harsh/hard and soft.
The second image intrigues me as it looked less like a raindrop on a leaf and more like a creature with a beady eye! I really must try some of those shots where you use the raindrop as a lens.
It was during a stroll out at Conifer Grove that we decided on an early start this morning. The plan to walk through Totara Park and enjoy the sun rising whilst in amongst the trees. I have to admit that the hills seem much longer and steeper since I was here last! Obviously more exercise is required.
It was most pleasant! Peaceful, cool and most enjoyable. Needless to say, I think I’ll try to have less of a snooze in the morning and more of a walk.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
