The Unreal Me

OK here are my next two entries for the year.

January 3rd 2009

I was at the beach with my niece and wife and in the distance I saw this kite. I then saw another kite further down the beach so pulled out my camera with ye olde 75-300mm f4-5.6 MK III non USM, non IS lens and took some photos. When I got it back home and was previewing them, I saw something in it that I wanted to try. So a little cropping and some tweaking and I had this.

Dogfighting Kites

There were a couple of things working against me in this one. First, I was miles away so had to zoom in (No IS = shakey shakey). Second, I didn’t zoom enough so had to crop quite a bit and lose res. The main problem with zooming though was the focus. I have no image stabilisation and a SUPER SLOW DC motor zoom on that lens, so trying to nail a kite that’s zipping around was almost impossible. I was damned happy that I got it as close as I did.

January 4th 2009

I dub this photo “Copout #1″. My niece was visiting and we had planned a pretty busy day and I find that busyness tends to cramp my photography as I don’t want to be stopping all the time and holding everyone up while I walk around all over the place trying to get a photo. That and when I’m busy my brain can’t think. So while we enjoyed an awesome vegan icecream from “The Castle” I shot the brick wall as a safety shot for the day and then at night I went out and shot some sunsets. Unfortunately none of them were too exciting and seeing as I’d already done a sunrise the other day I threw the idea out and put up my bricks.

Bricks

I think the tweaking I did to this could have been a little more obvious to sell the effect. There is a B&W copy on the bottom layer and the top layer is actually only the three diagonal bricks that are in a column in the middle. Then there’s a middle layer of the whole picture, with it’s opacity set to about 70%. The idea was to try and make those three middle bricks pop a little more but not too much.

One plus from this photo is that I discovered the scissors select tool in The Gimp which I used to select around the concrete between the 3 bricks. It’s an awesome tool.

Uncategorized 365in2009, Photography

Happy New year everyone! I hope you all had some great celebrations with people you care about and are looking forward to an awesome 2009. I spent Christmas eve and Christmas day with family and it was all good!

Now that the new year is here resolutions are the order of the day and while I have a rather large list I’ll mention just a few of mine.

First is to run another 1/2 marathon and beat my current time of 1hour 53 minutes. Until yesterday I hadn’t been running for 4 weeks but as they say “Start out as you mean to continue” so I got up and did a small run along Tamaki Drive in the middle of the day – damn it was hot. I don’t want to do that resolution any more…

Second. I am going to spend a lot less time on my computer. Yup, surprise surprise I spend vast quantities of time on it. Some productive, creative and interesting, but most of it not. I’m going a bit cold turkey to start off in that apart from work and a quick email check, several days a week I am not going to go near it at all. We’ll see how that pans out but I started it yesterday and while it was tough it was very rewarding. I actually got some writing (Not on a computer) done.

Third, I am going to attempt a photo a day. Every day, rain or shine I will take a photo. I will then post it up at the end of the day or if time is tight I will save them up and post en masse at the end of the week (So you might see up to 7 in one go). The key thing about this challenge is that it keeps me photographing and thinking about photography. A side benefit I see from this also is that if I just start taking random snaps to fill my quota I’ll be unhappy with the results so I’ll actually try harder to shoot more interestingly and of higher quality.

I have also joined the Flickr group 365 in 2009 where I will also be posting the photo a day. I encourage anyone else to join this group too and if you do, let me know.

So now that’s out of the way, here is my first two photos covering January 1st and 2nd.

The first while not a cop out, wasn’t difficult to produce and is not very flash. I was trying to think what to shoot and then stopped to think about how my day was going. I was relaxing, enjoying thinking about photography and about to have some whiskey so I combined them into a photo.

Relaxing on New Years Day

You may have noticed the insignificant role that the whiskey plays in this photo. I would like to make it clear that this is no metaphor for reduction of my whiskey consumption this year – no no no…it’s just that if I had of kept it in the shot, there would have been this ugly umbrella pole sticking out the top of it thereby making the photo even worse.  Totally my fault for setting up an awful shot.

Now, day 2 is a much better attempt I feel and I personally like the result much better. I got up at 4am because I couldn’t sleep and thought “while I’m up why not get out there and get a sunrise” so I went to Shoal Bay under the Auckland Harbour Bridge and waited.

And waited, but nothing was happening. Everything looked dreary and boring so I decided to jump down under the bridge and take some shots of the supports. When I did – WHAM – The sun burst over the horizon and I got about 5-10 minutes where I shot the crap out of the sunrise. I learnt a lot – primarily how damned hard it is to manage exposure with super bright sunlight smashing you in the face.

Sunrise at Shoal Bay, Auckland

So there we have it. Two days down and 363 more to come. I should end this by saying that one last resolution I have is to become good enough at photography this year to actually get a job in the field. Anything – assisting, small business of my own, or toilet cleaner at the Photo Warehouse. Given my noob-ness in the world of photography it’s a tall order but I’ve set it as a goal for the year because only under pain of forclosure do I want to go back to fulltime software engineering and I need a lofty goal to get me moving – fast!

Have a great one!

Uncategorized 365in2009, Computers, Photography, Running