Smoked Cheese

Double Take

In the world of photography there is never just one way to look an object, by changing the angle, depth of field, distance or varying composition very different photographs can result.

In this first set I have taken two shots of my well loved Coffee Machine.  As you can see by changing how much of the machine to include I have achieve two quite different images.

Below is a series of photos I took at last years Floriade festival, they are all of the same flower/flowerbed but have varying amounts of the surrounding area included.

365 - Week 5

1 Month in and still going strong

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday
 

Sunday

Title Tuesday

Its Title Tuesday once again, whether you are a regular reader or have just stumbled across my blog, please suggest a title in the comments.

 

Don't forget you can still enter our Where did you get that tip giveaway until the end of Wednesday 1st of June only one week to go!

 

Canberra Winter Morning

As usual for this time of year Canberra has been covered by a heavy frost each morning this week, yesterday I toured our backyard with the camera and captured some stunning formations on the plants. 

 

Title Tuesday

Its Title Tuesday once again, whether you are a regular reader or have just stumbled across my blog, please suggest a title in the comments.

Woodwork - Lotus bench

Over the past few weekends I have been working tirelessly (ok, doing a small amount of work each day) to build a meditation bench for Jaime, today the final coat of varnish dried and it was finished. This morning we set up her mediation space outside, usually this lives near our east facing window for her start to the day. The hand painted lotus flower is Jaime's touch, the origami lotus flower comes from fish & lotus. As she says "Breathing in I am calm, breathing out I smile" may this help the calm last.

 

Canberra Photographic Society

Recently I became aware of the Canberra Photographic Society who operate in the Canberra region to promote excellence in photography, both as a recreational pursuit and an art form.  They offer prospective members the opportunity to attend several meetings as a visitor, I am considering becoming a member so this week Jaime and I scoped them out.

On the second Tuesday of the month they hold an Activity night, which may involve a practical activity or a lecture/presentation covering an area of photography (next month they are covering how despite the advances in technology the basics of photography stay the same).   This month was a practical activity on home made light box set-ups, 3 members showed their set-ups allowing other members to try them out. 

My favourite of the 3 set-ups was the remote flashes, naturally I liked the most expensive set-up.  They had 3 flashes set-up with a remote trigger attached to the hot-shoe of the camera, the end result was that the three flashes would illuminate the object and cover the shadow form the other flash.  I used a sea shell as my object, wonderful results.

The other set-up that I was quite impressed with was simply made with a box, some black cardboard (like you get from a newsagent) inside, and three lamps shining through holes on the top and sides.  As you can see below this can create some very impressive results, I will definitely be trying to make one.

The final set-up they had was simplest, a polystyrene box with lamps (no surrounds just the lamps next to the box). This was interesting but the results (my poor focusing skills aside) were not as good as the previous set-up.

It was a very interesting evening, friendly people with lots of experience to share, I am convinced that it is worth becoming a member and will be joining in the coming months.

Canberra Photomarathon - Afternoon session

To finish off from Mondays post, these are my shots for the afternoon session.

The first theme for the afternoon was 'A thousand words', what better way to represent this than the repository of all Australia's literature, the National Library of Australia.

 The next the theme was a little tricky, 'Raw Emotion', but then what can be more emotional than a monument to those who lost their lives protecting our great nation, I chose the Police Monument. For this image I concentrated on the plaque for Thomas Wallings, one of the earliest represented on the monument, showing how too many have followed. 

Next came 'Walkabout', simple interpretation from me here with a path, which of course does not go straight, just like the best journeys in life. 

 The tenth theme was 'Larger Than Life', a brilliant opportunity for some Macro Photography, well as close as I can do with my equipment. Luckily we came across some bees pollinating some flowers, I got so close to take this shot, I am surprised I wasn't stung.

'Heart of the Nation', whether we like it or not Canberra is where all the big calls are made.  My representation of this theme was the Foundation Stone of Canberra, the memory of when the nation was given its heart.

The final theme for the day was 'Earth Hour', I symbolised this through candles whose flames were only half bright.  I achieved this by exposing the photo for 30 seconds and blowing out the candles after 10, this is also where the faint flickering comes from.

This experience has been really enjoyable, its nice to be out there as a photographer.  The main point I am taking away from this though, I am still learning and the more I practice I can get (particularly if I can get feedback from people) the better I will become and closer to being professional.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Photomarathon team for organising the event, I thought they did a brilliant job in putting it all together. I am looking forward to the showcase on the 17th of April to see what everyone else came up with on the day.

Canberra Photomarathon - Morning Session

On Saturday I competed in my first Photography Competition, the Canberra Photomarathon.  The idea of a photo marathon is that each competitor is given a number of themes to interpret, there is a strict time limit on the time available to take the photographs, and they must be in taken in the theme order, this is where the challenge gets really interesting and of course no photoshop the images must be entirely created through camera work. 

Canberras Photomarathon was 12 themes in 12 hours, or there about, with the first 6 themes provided at the start of the day and the other 6 at lunch time, which had to be collected by a person.   I thoroughly enjoyed my experience, I learnt a lot about thinking quick (albeit that I need to practice thinking quick, but that is still a lesson) as well as the importance of the setting up the photo at the time of shooting, do not rely on photoshop later.

Now to share my entries with you...

The first theme for the event was your entry number, mine was 34.

Embarrassingly I was stumped on this theme, but walking through the Canberra centre one of the butchers had steak out for $34.  The only thing I would have loved to do with this is to adjust the colour balance, compensate for the purple light that the butcher had in the window.

The second theme was 'Can't live without', I took the health track with water. 

This image was taken at the fountain near the Canberra Theatre, constructed with clever use of my Polarising filter (to remove the glare from the water), my 300mm lens and the smallest aperture I could.  The small aperture allowed be to use an shutter speed of 1/2 a second (an eternity in photographic terms) and capture the movement of the water.

Third theme for the day, 'Evolution'.  For this I headed to Parliament House where in the black marble of the lobby is shells and creatures from millions of years ago, fossilised in the marble.  To contrast the past with present, the reflection is the entrance to the Great Hall.

Light was the forth theme, such a wide variety of directions to go with this, I settled on creating a path with string lights. After trying the plain fairy lights, I had a go with the flower lights, by keeping the lights on for only half of the exposure I managed to preserve some of the texture of the flowers.

'The Fifth Element', appropriate for the fifth theme.  My entry followed the movie interpretation with the Fifth Element being love.  These hand carved figures Jaime brought back from Germany and to us have always represented growing old together in love. We tried to create heart shaped hands together.

The final theme for the morning was 'Upside Down', where better to show this than children on a playground. Many thanks to all my nieces for playing upside down, it was hard to pick one photo.

I think that is enough for one post, I will put up the afternoons session soon.

JAIME I JAMIE

The Missus has started a new project 'JAIME I JAMIE', once a week she is going to cook a Jamie Oliver recipe, my contribution to this project is to photograph the result, and enjoy the meal of course.

I am learning that taking good photographs of food is not as easy as you would think, there are a lot of different aspects to take into account, Is the food nicely arranged on the plate? what's in the background? what is the main focus of the meal? how do I emphasise the good areas? how do I cover the areas that didn't turn out quite right?

Jaime cooked her first Jamie meal the other night, Welsh Rarebit with Attitude, they tasted wonderful.  I did learn one lesson on using my camera, always check the white balance before taking photos, half the photos I took have turned out blue because I didn't check the camera was set up for outside.

This photo I think was the best composition, however it is one where I had the wrong white balance so it looked like I am in a Picasso blue period.  I have played with the image in photoshop, after a lot of fiddling with the colour balance I think the photo is looking good enough to share, can't beat having the camera set up right in the first place though.

For comparison, this photo has the white balance correctly set, a much warmer feel with the correct settings.

This did get me thinking though about some of my attempts at food photography in the past, so I went looking back through my photo collection. 

 One of my finds is this one from our valentine's themed family lunch we hosted in February, Jaime did a wonderful job of the dessert so I tried to do some cook book style photography on it, are you feeling hungry yet?