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I’ve started a new mini project where I’ll be taking photos of buildings around Wellington.

Today, one photo was taken before work, at lunch, and after work.

Had sushi + miso soup for lunch. Then had a power nap (while sitting down) Vic uni by the railway station. Then popped over to parliament for a quick photo. Tried using ‘Neutral’ colours on my Canon to lower saturation/contrast blowout in harsh sunlight, it worked well very happy with results, will try using ongoing for a while. Converted to mono and toned in gold, which I really like.

Various pictures taken on 3 different days.

Some pictures from the zoo from late last year.

A bunch of different techniques from the last few days, using my pocket camera

These first two use the ‘toy camera’ mode

This one is our old flat mate Heater, I silhouetted her behind the sunset

These next one I converted to black and white, and took a lot of care changing individual channel curves to change the colour balance to make it look better. There’s also the slighest Sepia tone in there.

Here’s a vivid picture of a building in Centerport

And this is a pigeon

Mounted my long range lens and plonked myself down on Cobham drive by the airport after work, took photos of aeroplanes landing. I’m sure my dad will be proud

Piper Saratoga (Golden Bay Air)

Beech 1900D (Eagle Airways)

Bombardier Q300 (Air Nelson)

ATR 72-500 (Mt Cook Airline)

Airbus A320-200 (Air New Zealand)

Party Boat (Sweet Georgia)

Seagull

These were taken in mid October 2011. It was coooold up there, I purchased gloves soon afterwards for the next time I do sunsets.

Very glad I took the effort to drive up there, it was a spectacular sunset and I got some amazing shots.

Tried mounting my Dad’s old Nikon lens from the 80′s onto my digital body. Turns out it works great. It lacks auto-focus which isn’t nearly as bad as I expected since my camera gives an indication in the viewfinder if you’ve focused it properly or not. Manual focus forces you to slow down and think a bit more about the photo you’re about to take, which is a very good thing. It’s a really nice lens which gives photos a slightly different feel from my other mid range zoom. Ergonomically it’s great because its very small and light so matches up very well to my lightweight dSLR.

Once again, used landscape scene mode for everything, meaning all the setting generally hover around ISO-400, f11 and 1/400 in sunlight, which is pretty much ideal. I didn’t take a single blurry shot.

Oh yeah and the first image has nothing to do with Shelly Bay, its a leek which Kat grew

Here’s some different techniques, all done using my little pocket camera. I find myself inclined to do wacky stuff with this camera.

This first one has a very strong amber colour cast which I got by setting custom white balance and referencing the blue sky. Probably not what the engineers at Canon had in mind

This next one has reduced exposure to emphasis shadows, as well as boosted saturation and contrast

These next two use miniature mode which is a fun setting that blurs most of the picture to make everything look teeny.

Lastly aground level shot pointing up. Used foliage mode to boost colours. Kat’s garden is looking really good these days.

Took my new zoomy lens to parliament for a cheeky session before work and to the waterfront after work for a nice long one. Very impressed with the performance of this lens.

Everything was shot in landscape mode and I gave zero attention to my camera settings (a very good thing). Interestingly my camera jacks most shots up to ISO-400 with this lens (haven’t checked if it also does that with the regular lens), which is great because there’s zero quality difference between 100 and 400 on this camera in daylight hours and everything gets shot around 1/400 meaning sharp shots with image stabilisation turned off Yesterday I was worried about getting sharp images, but all my testing was done in semi low light. In daylight it’s a total non-issue so I’m very happy

A few shots went a bit cartoonish with the use of landscape film which increases saturation and contrast, though overall I think it improves the good shots and ruins shots that were probably going to be crummy throw away losers anyway.