Almost but not entirely abstract.

The aim of the experiment was to try and see the effect of compressing distance using 300mm lens. Except, of course, that I had it in f/4, so everything ended up becoming super blurry.

Although there's only one quickdraw clearly visible, there are in fact four in the frame. I liked the super blurry effect of it, so here we go. The experiment will have to wait until next time.

Yellow

In the continuing theme of yellow things, here's a leaf. Yellow's a happy colour.

Don't fly into the sun, my shutter speed doesn't go that fast.

Yeah, it flew straight into the sun.

Sunrise

If I wake up before the sunrise when I can see the eastern sky brightening, I'm gripped by this guilt that tells me that I'm not worthy of 'photography' if I don't wake up and take photos.

I sighed, resisted for a few minutes, and got up.

An entirely geeky thing.

Predictably, this photo was taken with the previous photo, at Piha.

What I wanted to write about, though, is something entirely geeky - about uploading photos. I have been using Picasa (and I pay for it, albeit a trivial amount of 5 USD a year) but I have been disappointed by a few things:

1. Picasa doesn't let you show photos on backgrounds other than white, and

2. Picasa only shows 60% quality JPEG when viewed by any other way than 'download'.

Either of those things would make me consider the service broken. I still do intend to use it for a full-image store, although I'm not entirely sure why (other than my undying loyalty to Picasa, the desktop application).

To get around the first problem, I've created this blog. That was one of the main reasons I created it. To get around the second problem, I've created an Amazon S3 account (1), created a web-gallery (2) from Lightroom, uploaded it using S3Fox (3) from Firefox (4) which is not my usual browser.

So that's four whole new things that I need to do to 'publish' my photos. I hope this works out well. The photo above is hosted on Amazon. For comparison, here's the same photo from Picasa.

Piha #3

We all know what seagulls look like. So I made it black.

Entirely as shot.

25/02/2011 Edit: updated to S3

Long-Lens Landscape

I'm not entire sure whether this photo complies with the selection criterion 'worth showing other photographers'. The only thing that's going on is a (rather muted) contrast of orange and blue.

However, it's my first attempt at 'long-lens landscape', shot with a 300mm f/4 lens. On a DX body, it's very, very narrow. It turn out, in fact, that 300mm is more of a 'special effect' lens.

It's nothing like how humans see things. In fact, what will fill the frame in 300mm is too small in unaided vision, that it will usually not even attract our attention in the first place. I have to learn how to see all over again.

For reference, I'm using two fingers' width at my arms length, as the longer axis.

Poor Knights Island, aka Hipstermatic 9000

Not that there's anything inherently hipster about the Poor Knight's island diving experience, but having failed to take a good photograph the entire trip (I was too busy being sea sick and dealing with ear pain) I decided to turn one of the less-fail shots into a practice in post processing.

Adobe Lightroom doesn't have RGB curves. Instead, it has a simplified control known as the split-toning. It lets you apply different colour cast to different tonal ranges. This is handy for emulating the old film look, since films had the property of having different colour layers responding differently to the same intensity of light. Some films had green or blue cast in the shadows, while burning into warm yellow on highlights.

This property of films, commonly considered a 'problem' back in its day, is now back in fashion thanks to the imagined nostalgia of the masses.

25/02/2011, Edit: picture changed from Picasa to S3.

Tiritiri Matangi, landscape

I think that about the only remarkable thing here is that I did _not_ move the saturation slider in Lightroom. This is how it came out - not in a 'vivid' mode JPEG, but in a RAW file.

All it took was a circular polariser filter.

Tiritiri Matangi

One of the main reasons why I started this blog, as funny as it might sound, was to have a place to present my photos on the black background.

It is one of the first lessons of photography (or any visual art) that white, or any brightness, demands attention. When the subject is dark, like this photo, having a white background is catastrophic.

So here it is, on black.

Wedding!

On Friday was the wedding of a colleague and a good friend. I wasn't there as a photographer, or even a back-up photographer. I am painfully aware that my kit can appear 'serious' to non-photographers, and that my skills are lacking. So I only brought a 50mm f/1.4 lens, but I sat fairly close to the front row. I also sat right next to the central passage way (commonly and erroneously referred to as the 'aisle').

I have been able to take this shot of the bride's father turning back.

For more photos from the day, here's the link. I apologise in advance for haphazard post-processing.

Soraksan, Korea

Almost everywhere I go, I try and fly through Korea. Not only I have friend and family there, but I also get to shop at the sprawling second-hand camera markets.

For a place that I go to so often, especially on trips, I really don't take many photos in Korea. I think I'm usually overwhelmed by the people and the language to pull out the camera.

Here's a rare (for me) shot of Mt Seol-ak, or more properly called, Soraksan. It was a very hazy day, with very hazy light, and I pointed my (then new) 105mm micro lens at the most impressive looking rocky peak.

All in all, this is not a good photograph - not even a mediocre one. But I just wanted to leave it here as a reminder of my mental state when I took this.

Unusually for me, this is 1x1 crop.

More on Rodeo

It seems that the most difficult part on sorting through my rodeo photos is to pick the ones with enough isolation of the subjects. The people on rodeos are brightly dressed, and they appear everywhere in the frame.

While they can be very nice to photograph, in the background of a wild animal they can be quite distracting. In almost all of the shots uploaded, I had to perform some careful cropping to cut people out. Especially, there was this one dude with a BRIGHT one sock. I guess he was trying to distract the animal. In my photos, he will distract my viewers.

Having said that, I do like the various expressions on the faces in the audience.

At first I was wishing that I had a faster lens in order to capture the subject without the distracting faces in the background), but in hind sight, it's not all bad. Had I brought a faster lens, I probably wouldn't have thought to intentionally capture those guys in the background.

Piha #2

Other than the obvious colour and contrast corrections, there are two major things happening here in the post-processing step: the graduated filter to bring out the details in the sky, and the saturation level of the colour of the hat, on the foreground.

This photo was made on the same day as the previous Piha post. Just on the North Piha side - the light was slightly flatter here.

Zosterops lateralis, Juvenile

I was walking home from the Dundonald St office, and right outside the office was this guy. At the time I had no idea which species it was, but apparently it's a Silvereye (or a wax-eye).

I didn't have the big camera with me, but I did have my Panasonic LX-3 (which now resides with my sister). If there's anything that Panasonic can do better than my big camera, it's macro. I was about 5cm away from its eye when I took this photo.

Knowing precisely zero about this bird, its species, its habitat, or how to care for it, I left it where it was on the pavement. The pavement was not, most likely, its natural habitat, but I was worried about making its situation worse than it already was. I hope this guy made it through that day.

Rodeo Day

As it turns out, rodeos are fun. Actually, this is a bit of a generalisation. Given the current evidence, all I can deductively conclude is that there exists at least one fun rodeo in the world. Unlike in many other animal-involving pastimes, the animal has the upper hand in a rodeo. (Looking straight at you, Spaniards.)

Photographing rodeos is also fun. It's action-packed and the action happens on one predictable spot, very much unlike any team sport.

The main challenge came when I was post-processing the photos. I took around 1,000 photos that day, and after a while, they all started to look the same. I start making mental notes about the quality of the photos, then I feel sorry for the animals, so I judge my photographs purely based on the panic on the rider's face. This is not good.

So it will still take many a day of post-processing (also; I'm lazy) to get through all of them, and choose the ones that are worth showing other people.

If you'd like to see more - here's the link.

Birds in Silhouette

The image is very close to untouched. I did convert it to black-and-white (and cropped some superfluous white sky), but the original photo did not have much colour in it anyway. It was a featureless overcast day, and the tree and the birds were severely, if purposefully, underexposed.

This is one of the rare photographs where my original vision matched up with the final product reasonably well. But when I first saw this photo, I thought my vision was crap, because it didn't look that great to me at the time. That was about 4 months ago.

Last week, I found this photo in my collection, and decided that it was worth showing to other people. Here we go.

Piha

Went to Piha for a small walk, with a 50mm lens. The weather was oppressively humid and cloudy, but then the sky began to clear slowly. I set out to capture the contrast between the shiny foreground (where the sun was beginning to shine) and the hazy cloud at the back. The life guards came into the scene just at the right moment.

With this photograph, I'm trying out two new things: firstly, I read that 2x3 aspect ratio is too tall for vertical viewing and causes the viewer to scan the image from top to bottom, which is not natural. 4x5 is (apparently) better for that purpose, so I cropped off some vehicle tracks in the sand. At the time, I included because I thought it looked interesting. In hindsight, I much prefer the look of the clean sand.

Secondly, it's the rule of third thing. The life guard's boat is (almost too precisely) on the left-top third point. This influenced the framing decision (horizontally) as well as the cropping decision (vertically). I thought that the rule of third made very boring photographs - And that I knew so much better and I should be breaking that rule left right and centre.

I guess I was wrong - I like it right there than anywhere else.