Communication Tower

I like communication towers. They always look so alien.

This is Whangarei as well, atop Drummond Park. The main challenge was keeping the camera not-so-wet. (If you look closely at the big dish, you can see the rain drops.)

Look Closer.

It's a photograph of the carpet at a bakery/cafe in Whangarei. It's difficult to see, but if you look closer, there's a sparrow in here somewhere.

Rees Valley

Sun shining ahead in Rees valley. Framing is as-shot.

A (bad) study in cropping.

This is an old photograph from last October (2010), when I had yet to change over to shooting RAW for everything. It was a calm but heavily overcast morning, so the colours are quite uninteresting - so I turned it black and white, and played with levels and curves to bring out some details in the water.

Putting the issue of uninterestingness of the photograph, I wanted to play with the crop.

The shot above is the original crop with some of the blank sky taken out to fit 4:5 ratio. I like the simplicity of this photo, but couldn't help feeling that the point was a either too big or too much to the left, thus resulting in an unbalanced composition.

Also, I felt that the sky was adding very little to the photo. So I made this crop:

I think this is my favourite crop. By eliminating the excess sky and keeping the aspect ratio equal, the boat now seems slightly better balanced. Note how this does not improve the interestingness of the photo. Although I was pretty happy with this, if something is worth doing then it's definitely worth over-doing, so I made this crop:

At this size, the boat takes on some detail and the horizontal details merging into the dark foreground can almost be called interesting, but the photo becomes quite unbalanced and awkward.

How not to photograph a rainbow.

My understanding is that all rainbows are of equal diameter, and therefore it's easy to calculate the minimum focal length to photograph the entire rainbow (I think on the 35mm format it's around 20mm).

Not only did I fail entirely to have the right equipment on hand, the rainbow also failed to develop into anything more than a tiny drip of shattered colours.

Step into the light #2

Taken moments after the first one. The hair at the top might be distracting, but I couldn't remove it without destroying the balance I was after. (I don't have Photoshop to remove it, either.)


In my laziness, I've copy and pasted the post processing steps from the original.

Kaikoura

Taken from the south coast of Wellington, looking at Kaikoura ranges across the Cook Strait.

I took a million shots here, and I wasn't happy with any of them. In this futile attempt, I tried to make a mirror image of the Kaikoura ranges using the rocks and horizons in the foreground. Didn't really work.

Power!

Power generators and power lines, get it?

This is a reasonably new wind farm in mid North Island, Te Uku. There are 28 turbines generating some 60 MW of power, and cost about 200 million New Zealand dollars and around 4 years of construction.

And I was too lazy to walk a few steps forward to miss the power lines.

In the order of decreasing quality.

I have been lazy for the last few weeks, and I haven't taken any photos. This is a punishment upon myself - if I'm keep being lazy, my photos will become shit like this.

I have applied reverse split toning (as in, blue in the highlights) to accentuate the ugliness of the scene.

Sunrise #2

I found an interesting tendency with my photos. Almost all horizontal photos are cropped for 4:3, but almost all vertical photos are 3:2.

This is because for vertically framed shots, I'm more likely to show them un-cropped, and vice versa for horizontally framed ones. May be I'm just slightly better at framing things vertically? May be it's because there's always so much horizon in my photos that 3:2 horizontal framing doesn't really work?

Getting it out of my system.

I have seen this countless times. Small things growing out of the pockets of ignimbrite.

I have also taken a million photographs of the same thing, but never once I have managed to capture what I saw. So I give up now. This is the way of getting this scene out of my system. Next time I take this photo, something better be spectacular about it.

Step into the light.

Sunrise photos continue. Stepping into the light. (She got some water and made hot chocolate. She offered me some but I erred on the side of politeness. I regret.)

Lantern Festival, 2011

The lantern festival is getting bigger and bigger each year. So big, in fact, we couldn't even park. Instead, we sat on Queen St. for a long long time. I poked out my head and took this picture.

I didn't much like it at the time, but after all those sunrise photos, I feel the need for something else. This might be the first 'urban' photo in this blog?