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Used Ixus 130 + PS Levels 0.85. Also changed from vivid to standard, am happier with the smoother results it gives.

Made a fairly spontaneous trip to the Botanic Gardens on Friday with Kat and her mum. I’d been meaning to go back there for a while on a nice day, and me and Kat both had the day off and perfect weather it seemed like a good opportunity.

I’ve been looking to find a nice natural red to put on top of blue for ages, it’s something that you don’t actually see that much. It worked great.

This next shot was done in using live mode on my camera, which is a much easier way to do funny angled macro shots than trying to use the viewfinder. I’ve avoided using live view on the Nikon for a long time because it seems like there’s a huge shutter delay, but there really isn’t. As soon as you press the button a photo is taken at high speed, all the subsequent sounds don’t affect anything.

This is some weird sound sculpture

With this next shot I experimented with a few different f-values. Ended up with f/16 to incorporate lots of prickly bits, should have gone even higher. The shallow depth of field on dSLRs when doing macro is almost ridiculous so you really need to crank it up. Compact cameras are simply a lot better for this sort of thing.

So saying, the a low f-value worked really well for a different macro shot, here it’s only f/5.6. It good here because there’s a far less depth to capture.

Same flower, same f-value, different angle. Kat’s mum is dancing around in the background.

With this last shot I was attracted by the fluro green colour of the plant. I put a dark, dull plant behind it to help emphases the crazy greenness of it. Once again, I think the f-value (f/5.6) is wrong for this shot, something like f/11 would’ve been better to get most of the green plant in focus. Fortunately it doesn’t matter so much for this photo since the subject is the crazy colour, not the details of the plant.

Sunny days, sweeping the clouds away

Resumed taking Fridays off work, spent some time down at the waterfront taking photos. Also Got the first sunburn on the season :-/

Photos were taken with Nikon D3100 using standard film + default mono. The image quality from this camera + lens is crazy good.

Was really happy with the reflections I got here, gives a good sense of symmetry.

I’ve never noticed these barnacles before!

Have been meaning to photograph these trees for a while. Interestingly the B&W shoots came out far nicer. I think it’s because the interesting thing isn’t so much the green on blue (with lots of distracting colours from cars and buildings), but the fact there are these giant trees in the middle of town. With the second one I like how the tree is wrapped around the lamp post with wires coming out of it.

Re-mounted my new trucks (Paris 150mm) on to my longboard last night, this time using Nik’s little brown wheels which are like 65mm and no risers. Also replaces the stock barrel bushings with softer ones. Wow suddenly these trucks make sense, insanely turny

Was mad keen to have a ride after work so threw the longboard into the back of the car and took my LX3 as well. It was overcast so I’d be shooting black and white.

Went to Lyall Bay where there’s a nice, long, smooth boardwalk which is perfect for skating up and down with a board which is turny and er, maybe lacks stability ;o) Got in a lot of practice doing skogging (pushing with each foot alternating) and carving (turning hard left and right)

Oh yeah, photos

This first shot was taken of Houghton Bay while I was out for a skate Saturday. See if you can spot the plane.

Next two shots were taken today behind Wellington hospital. This first one attracted me because light was hitting the flat surfaced building at just the right angle to give in a nice glowing gradient.

This next one I liked for the ability to make a nice composition.

Used my Ixus 130 for all these shots. The first two shots were taken at -2/3 EV, the last one was taken at +0 EV which fried the specular highlights pretty bad. I made a another shot at -2/3 but messed up the perspective and had much less fried highlights, though was still a tad dark. Looking at this and looking at some old shots I still do think that -2/3 is the right setting to leave it on. Oh yeah and zero photoshop for all 3 shots, w00t

Photo was originally just a test shot, 2 minutes photoshop made it pretty.

Originally took it to because I wanted to take a simple photo of orange on top of blue, the theory being that warm colours on top of blue colours give the feeling that the warm colour advances towards the viewer and gives the photograph more ‘pop’. In this case it was an orange sign on top of a blue sky. Of course, the photo ended up remarkably garish I think the orange in the sign might have been to dark.

Cropped and converted to black+white in photoshop and used the ‘infrared’ setting which gave it a much nicer feel, sort of like a photo from the 60′s. The infrared setting is completely whack so there must have been something truely wrong with the colours beforehand for this to work

Fabric-a-brac is a ridiculously girlie annual event where woman sell their old unused fabric in a hall, some of the proceeds go to charity. Kat offered my photographic services to the organiser in case I managed to fluke a good shot that would get used as some sort of publicity thing.

Overall I was pretty disappointed with the photos I took and the experience itself was weird. A very crowded room full of strangers (95% female) is about as far from my normal photographic zone as possible.

I asked the organiser what she wanted and she wanted to capture the busyness of the event as well as people interacting.

Here’s my favourite photo from the event.

To try and caputre the busyness I took a bunch of photo’s at 1/4 shutter speed to get motion blur. Most the shots come out fully blurry due to camera shake so I used continuous shooting and shot about 3 at once, idea being that I might get one usable one. In this particular shot it worked really well because the two woman are in focus and holding still while everything around them is in motion.

Used my LX3 for this. Learnt that for close quarter stuff like this the round the shoulder strap and attached lens cap are really annoying since they just dangle and get in the way. Will take them off and risk loosing lens cap (nothing that can’t be replaced). They make sense for walk-around cities all day but otherwise they’re just annoying

I got up early on Saturday, around 7.15 and went out for a coffee. On the way noticed the light on this baby church was looking really good.

Photo sort of looked better after converting to black and white because it gave more prominence to the contrast created by the tree leave shadows, but unfortunately it also gave even more prominence to the fried highlights on the stone just under the sloped roof.

There photos were taken on a recent trip to Taupo taken in October 2011. I made the foolish mistake of thinking I’d be clever and not bother bringing my camera charger with me, which, coupled with the mistake of thinking I had a fully charged camera when in fact it was half-charged meant I spent the whole trip paranoid about my battery running out. Never again! Always bring your charger!

This first photo was a of the unit we were staying at our semi-fancy resort at night. The light is from an outside tungsten bulb.

60 second exposure, white balance is shade, and took a lot of tries to get the manual exposure and framing right – low light subjects don’t show up on LCD’s. Must have been lying on the ground setting this up for about 15 minutes.

Next photo is taken at the “craters of the moon” which is a bunch of hotpools.

I love this shot! It’s a classic tourism brochure shot with the path creating a nice fat windy line that goes off into the distance, but what really makes this shot is my lovely girlfriend Kat whose wearing a bright pink dress that looks so completely out of place in this landscape.

Speaking of lines, I got some since ones, and some nice colours, by the Huka Falls.

Also shot some video on this trip with my digicam which is a first for me

Huka falls

I was taking some photos back our unit at sunset and my battery meter was screaming “about to die! about to die!”. The VERY last shot I took was a sweet one, I didn’t know until I got home or not if this shot even saved, I was stoked when I realised that it had.

To get the sunburst nice and big, I used and apeture of f/8, which is as high as my LX3 goes. Higher apeture number means bigger sunbursts.

Also on this trip I worked out how to use my hopelessly bad cellphone camera which is a 3MP (might as well be 1MP) fuzzcam on a Huawei Ideos 8150 (a bottom end smartphone). The colour rendition on this thing is abysmal so the trick is to use it in black and white mode. Oh and do all the usual photographic things like look for nice light and elegant forms

As Ken Rockwell is likes to point out, your camera doesn’t matter. So, so true. I got what was probably the two best photos of the trip from my utterly rubbish cellphone camera.

This one is of an airplane cafe in the middle of nowhere’s ville.

The next pic is in Levin where I started taking photos while waiting for Kat to buy some fabric. I’m not clever enough to say why this photo seems to work so well.

Passed by the Wellington war memorial with good light this morning and found this statue. It had good light on it and a deep contrast which I like. The war memorial is in the background I had I used this angle to make sure the darker stone was behind the statue highlights rather than the lighter stone below it (also took some shots at that level, they weren’t nearly as good)

Originally shot this is colour, though later converted to b&w and cropped because there was some distracting stuff on the left, bother colour-wise and shape-wise. One day I’ll be able to get this stuff right first time