I seem to go missing a lot.

Sorry guys and those who happen to gaze upon my blog from time to time. I said earlier in the year that I would be more consistant with my blog postings, as you can see, it's been a lie.. i've been AWOL for a few weeks.. more than a few really, but it's been a really busy 5-6 weeks lately. I've shot a LOT and i'll try to give you all a glimpse of all the good stuff from this busy period.

The majority of my shoots these past few weeks have been the Title fight boxing match we had in Gladstone, which i'll get around to uploading soon, as well as Harbour Festival - pretty much the biggest thing in Gladstone. I'll get to those in a second, got to start from the start and before all that!

Kids athletics. I wanted to try something different and shoot it at a low angle and really show off the clear blue skies and the kids jumping in the air. I had a few typical telephoto shots which i didn't like that much, they just looked like every other sports photo out there. I really like wide angle photos and i've been using it for nearly everything lately, even sports.

A few weeks ago there was the shave for a cure campaign that i'm sure most of you are aware of. This girl who managed to raise over $3000 in over two weeks shaved all her hair off as well, all for a good cause.

Hard enough having to shave all your hair off, but to have to do infront of the whole school, that takes some real guts.

My favourite photo from the day, capturing real emotion and feeling within the frame. After she shaved her head she ran to her best friend and gave her a big hug.

There isn't too much to this photo, I just like it. This is the President of the Aviary and Bird Society of Gladstone, can't remember the name exactly, but it's something along those lines. He's just feeding this little budgerigar with a spoon which I found really cute. I was experimenting with a light modifier i had made with my flash, where i basically get a bit of black felt and mask off the unnecessary stray light that comes from my flash and direct it against a wall that creates nice soft light. ie. in this photo.

So by this point I think i've skimmed through most of the stuff before Harbour Festival, which like i said before is one of the biggest events in Gladstone. It runs for about a week and it has fete rides, showbags, fireworks, food etc etc. Basically like the Melbourne show, but with a large emphasis on the Harbour and water. To be honest, I kind of expected more, but i guess coming from Melbourne, it's hard to compare. Apples and Oranges, but not to say i didn't have fun, it really was good fun.

There were fireworks on most nights which was good to go and explore different angles and vantage points for shooting fireworks. This is along the mouth of the harbour, I'll try and find the other photos I took and post them up next time.

Like a lot of events there was a lot of music and a lot of performances. These next few photos are a mixture of Battle of the Bands, Youth Talent Quest, Talent Quest, Australian Artists such as Adam Harvey, Kate Cook from Australian Idol, Liam Burrows from Australia's Got Talent and other great shows such as the Buddy Holly musical.

I'd never had too much experience shooting concerts or live shows but I quite like it. It's damn hard with the shifting lights, those damn coloured lights which cause nasty colours and bleed out the images HARD. Trying to meter in these conditions is also pretty tricky, most of the shooting i did was with the spot meter, just to make sure their faces weren't blow out but also trying to balance the ambient lighting in the background as well. Turned alright I reckon.

Of course besides the music there are rides and fun stuff, kids having fun, riding rides, parents paying $10 a ride.. thats right.. $10 a ride.. damn.. Makes the Melbourne show look cheap as.. But good on them. What I enjoyed about shooting Harbour Festival was the freedom to shoot some more candid documentary styled photos, no more posing, standing there socials. I've always been a believer in candids and think they would sell a hell of a lot more than just socials.

For the past 5 weeks I haven't used my 28-70 at all. I mean, not even once. The last time I used it was during the boxing title fight, that was the 17th of March. Why I haven't used it I don't exactly know. 28mm is a nice focal length on the full frame but I guess i'm just a sucker for really wide angles. I've been using the 16-35 - although limiting to a degree in terms of f-stop and focal length, i've seem to make do with it. Moving in closer to a subject if need be to get that 'shot' I reckon the close you are to the subject, the more connection you feel with them. really dig it. Most of the shots below are 16-35 except the girl in the train. 50mm 1.4. love that lens too, just EATS light, paired with the D3s..

This last photo is one of my favourites, it's not 100% sharp, but given the situation I was in, where the only light to light her up was some very dim stage lights and the projector light from behind, i think it turned out quite nicely. Luckily for me she didn't move for the 1/3rd of a second i needed to expose this.

I shot the shit out of harbour festival, i think in the 5 days it ran for i would have easily shot over 3000 photos. definitely not good. Coming back from my holiday and being "out of it" for 12 days coming back to shoot was a lot harder than I thought. Before I left i would shoot the bare minimum. Shoot about 10 -12 frames per sitting, making editing a lot easier when time is tight. My first day back, shot nearly triple that. Must've been the nerves.

Last few days I had my first real adventure since being at the Gladstone Observer. I was called up at 9am on my day off and told to meet at the airport for a fatal that had happened on the highway. Immediately I lept out of bed and raced on down to the airport. I had the opportunity to sit in a little prop plane and fly over the crash site and take some snaps. Unfortunately It was a fatal, but on a photographic stand point. It was fun.

The life we live as news shooters is full of contradictions and juxtapositions. One's pain and suffering is good footage for us..

Head on with a fuel tanker at 100km/h never ends well. I would have loved to have been on the ground for this shoot, but being in a plane is still a good fun adventure. While I was up there I had to photograph a bulldozer that fell into a hole at the coal terminal. This was a nicer story. No one died.

I really enjoy shoots where I have time to play around and experiment. This shoot was for the front page where we needed shots of these girls to promote the new hockey ground that we have in Gladstone. $1mil + field.

I had a few stock standard shots of the girls together and if I was pushed for time, I would have left it at that. Luckily for me, it was the last shoot of the day so I could sit around and play with some ideas that I wanted to experiment with. I used the D300s for these photos and set up my wireless flashes behind the girls and fired them when the girls swung for the ball. The reason I had the flashes behind my subject was that I used the sun as my main light source - their face side. The light from behind is quite subtle, but noticeable enough. The lights just ensure they are not in complete shadow on the dark side.

I stood behind the net - for safety reasons - as they fired some hockey balls at me. The only direction I gave them was. "Aim for me, it'll look better." If i go back and shoot pro hockey players, i'll definitely use this technique again.

Alright, i'm nearly finished with this post! just a few more photos and you should be up to date.. should be..

I've never shot in a cemetery before, I would never have had the guts to do so, but that's exactly what I did last week. They had a cemetery walk as part of the Genealogy Society and basically people went around learning about some of the people who once lived in GLadstone. I must say I kind of did enjoy it. It was a real real challenge to try and shoot and more importantly, get correct exposure in a cemetery that has ZERO lights except for stray ambient street lights and the flash lights they walkers were carrying.

I quickly snapped this shot as the girl turned and was reading the tombstone in front of me.

Again, 16-35 f4, which kinda sucks in these situations, kinda wish I had the 17-35 f2.8 sometimes, but I think Vibration Reduction is more valuable than 1/2 a stop of light. I'll make do, it's worked for me so far. As you can see. The D3s eats light. Love it.


Sport, yeah stock standard.

And to finish off, kids playing with bubbles! ok.. that is about it.. that was a long post.. took me 2hours to write it.. granted, i've been piss farting around..

Alright, hope you all enjoy, i'll get those boxing photos up soon, but before I leave, i'll give you a bit of a teaser..

Enjoy!

Until next time (hopefully not too long)

Ciao.

March 6 - Image heavy

The past few weeks have been pretty busy and full on, resulting in me not posting as much as i would like - apologies. So where to start.. Boyne Smelters would be a good start. Right. So Gladstone as many people know is a highly industrious town - boys town really. Big cars, big trucks, big buildings and big pay salaries to some of those workers. Jealous would be an understatement, I wish I made 100-200k a year.. but that's another story.

So BSL (Boyne Smelters Limited) have made this new 'baker' essentially where they bake.. some sort of mineral, to make.. some sort of product.. I really don't know, I should perhaps start taking more note of what I shoot. 

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer, 2012

But it's pretty cool. The whole place is like 150m long with millions upon millions of dollars worth of equipment. This is one of their new high tech cranes that can move along the whole production line and pickup or drop things as it pleases. 

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer, 2012

So as you can see it goes a pretty long way back. They basically bake this stuff that looks like gunpowder.. what they do with it i have no idea but apparently it's a pretty big thing around here. If you have time go and google BSL and you can find out what they do and tell me. 

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer, 2012

I was sent to cover Autofest which was really really good fun! I'd never been to anything like this before and I must admit, I got a bit of a kick seeing all the hotted up cars, doing donuts, burnouts, dragging etc. I shot the absolute shit out of Autofest so there are way too many photos to go through to find a couple of pics to put on here. Sorry. However they had motorbikes that were doing awesome aerials which was probably the favourite thing for me at Autofest.

It was a bit of a challenge to try and frame these guys properly when they're flying through the air at 60-80 some km/s and i have a 200mm attached to my camera. Every minuscule movement from me or the riders equates to massive shifts in focus and framing when looking down a 200mm lens. Luckily for me they were doing this for a good 15-20mins so I had time to get the safe shots as well as a few creatives. 

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer, 2012

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer, 2012

For some reason this is my favourite shot of the 3. Yeah ok, i know in the other ones they're doing cool tricks, plus the framing is nice and tight, but i'm drawn to this image of seeing this, lets be frank, crazy mother f*cker flying through the air on his bike, risking his life, just to impress a few people. totally bizarre. But i like this shot. Him being backdropped by the clouds instead of the blue sky makes a big difference too. - Total fluke on my behalf. 

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer, 2012

From one extreme to another. I shoot chess. The Gladstone Chess club was running a tournament last weekend with a surprisingly good turnout - about 20. The kids basically had 9 rounds to get through and the one with the most points at the end wins. Simple, unlike chess. These kids were absolute chess whizzes. I thought I knew how to play chess, but after seeing these guys play I realised I have no idea whatsoever. Has anyone heard of 'Speed Chess'? I didn't know what the f*ck was going on, but all the kids were raving about it and squealing with excitement and joy when they played it, as if they had gotten a new puppy for Christmas. 

So that photo. I had taken enough shots of kids playing I wanted something a little more documentary and added shots of the kids slamming down the timer whilst playing. Good ole' 16-35mm. 

 Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer, 2012

Won't lie. Shooting chess was actually pretty fun. After shooting cricket, football (rugby) - it's not football. No flippin' idea why they call Rugby football when they hardly even use their feet. Anyway, drifting off the subject, but yeah, after shooting all those sports it's always nice to have something different and a way you can try and make it look interesting and better than what it really is. Yeah, that's right, photos lie. The beauty about situations like this is that I have time to really focus on emotions, movements, really subtle things that people may or may not normally see or think about when they think of chess. 

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer, 2012

Not too much to say about this. They had motorbike racing at the race track and I wanted to focus more on the rider instead of the background. slowed the shutter down to about 1/30th to get enough of the background blurred out and panned with the rider to try and keep him sharp. I always like doing a few of these shots in these kinds of shoots just to keep things different, cos all racing photos look the same - unless people crash of course. 

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer, 2012

Speaking about doing things different, this is a pretty good example of having the time time to play around with creativity to get some pretty nice shots in what is normally a pretty boring event. About the event, it was the Roller Disco at the PCYC - don't ask me what it stands for, but it's basically just a large indoor stadium and the kids in there had a disco, cool music, rollerskating, you get the jist. 

What I really like most about this shot is the lighting in particular. The disco was dark, like.. no lights dark, which I thought was stupid, didn't even have a disco ball with fancy trippy lights going off, none of that, which made shooting in these conditions really challenging. I had already gotten a few close up panning shots of the kids with the 16-35mm where I just got up nice and close to them while they were skating, shot them in the face with the flash and panned with them to get a nice blurry background. I had enough of that and I knew I wanted to isolate a few kids instead of having super wide shots. It would've looked nice if there were lots of kids in there, but having one kid, small in the frame looks boring, so shooting long is a nice way to isolate as well as fill up the frame. I tried shooting without flash with the 70-200mm f2.8, but I was limited by the amount of light in there - nil - and my ISO was already at 51000 with a 1/50th shutter speed, which is not a good thing when you want to freeze motion. My solution, shoot with flash but off camera to get nice dramatic lighting instead of flashing them right in the face. I basically commandeered a table that was lying around, set up to of my flashes on there and waited for people to skate close enough and them shoot away. The technique worked pretty well, but since it was so dark in there, I needed to drag the shutter long enough to absorb enough ambient light, but not so long that the subjects would start to blur. Flash freezes subjects, but at 1/30th its pushing it. I didn't want the ISO too high cos I wanted the images to be relatively clean still. Anyway, back to the image. haha, these girls happened to luckily (for me) fall over right infront of my lights which resulted in a really nice photo i think. The person riding past on the left - total fluke and actually i'm bloody lucky she didn't block my shot, or i'd've been pissed! 

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer, 2012

Gotta love when you do your job too well. The story was about the long grass at the local dog park. Essentially people have been complaining that the grass is too long and there is potential of snakes, etc in there, since they like to hide in the grass. Apparently I made this look too nice and not ugly enough, haha gotta love it. One of my friends Megan said it reminded her of pedigree ads and wanted to buy dog food. Win? 

ps. working with animals. total nightmare.. same with kids.. 

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer, 2012

Like this one.. The Gladstone Hospital has been getting some pretty bad press lately, so we had a good news story about the hospital, instead of one about them causing miscarriages, partial paralysis etc.. bad stuff to say the least. This guy apparently nearly died and the hospital saved his like... I thought that their job description was to save people already, but apparently this story is extra special? nfi. Kid was an absolute tear away, would not sit still for 30 seconds to get a damn shot in! this shot is him running around, tearing the slide off the little fort behind him, but thanks to the magic of photography, it look like he's smiling/laughing having a good time. lies lies lies.. haters gonna hate right. 

I'm going through another one of my fads and I really like portraits where they aren't looking at me.. It reminds me more of Nat Geo stuff, more candid style photos. Here are a few examples of such, and also she's the one who was partially paralysed due to the Hospital.. 

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer, 2012

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer, 2012

In hindsight I think I actually lit this image too well. I would like less light in the back to create a darker moodier shot. So anyway, like I mentioned, you can see these last few shots have been them not looking at me. The kid doesn't count, but I have one of him and his mum both not looking at me and doing their own thing. I've come to the self assumption that there are a few benefits to shooting like this. 1) they look a heck of a lot more natural, as if i'm in their life in their day to day living, and 2) it makes it less awkward for the subjects as even though as silly as it sounds, looking away makes them feel a lot easier having a big camera shoved in their face. Lets see how long I can keep this style going. 

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer, 2012

Clean Up Australia Day. before you say anything, this is NOT staged. The cup really was sitting there. 

I know this has been a pretty long blog post, sorry about that, but i'll finish off with some sport, as usual.

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer, 2012

Really bloody cute kid. Love his enthusiasm and his footy attire. I'm annoyed a chopped his feet off.. sigh. 

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer, 2012

Softball semi finals with my new, old 300mm f4. I'll add lots more photos from this lens when I run it through some more tests. so far so good, but at night time.. mreh.. bit sluggish. I should've pushed the ISO higher in this shot to get a faster shutter speed, but you learn from it.  

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer, 2012

And finally, the first time I got a shot of the wickets being broken! I was actually very very lucky to get this shot. We (reporter and I) had literally walked onto the ground, and I luckily had the camera to my eye while walking over there and machine gunned it as the bowler came in and was lucky enough to get this shot. =D 

Ok. Sorry about the long post but it's been a while. Hope you enjoyed it! 

Ciao.

NEX 5n - Nerdy geeky camera review.

Like the title says.. this is a review.. sorry, there wont be many pretty pictures like I normally like to post.. why?... because I went and bought myself a new toy.. however i've justified my purchase is it will be my new 'travel' companion instead of my beasty D3s. So I guess I should explain why I bought the NEX 5n... well.. there were a few reasons why, but the main reasons were:

1. The large APS-C sensor, whereas most mirrorless cameras were either Micro 4/3's or the Nikon CX format, which i was really quite disappointed with. 
2. The camera is well priced for what it is and what it can do
3. The size! amazing!.. I've always wanted a DSLR in a small compact body, and this definitely ticks all the boxes in that department

Right, so they're the main reasons why I bought it, so lets see it..

There we go.. That's it.. This small little camera packs the same sensor as the amazing Nikon D7000 but only a fraction of the size. I bought the 16mm 2.8 pancake lens (pictured) as my walk around travel lens, perfect just just about most things. I only received it today in the mail so I haven't had much time to take it out for a real spin. However I might do it tonight when the sun sets.. we'll see how we go! 

And here is the Fujian 35mm 1.7 CCTV lens that I bought for a pricey $40.. can't complain ; ) Probably my favourite lens at the moment, really produces some amazing photos. 

So like I mentioned, this thing is SMALL! i've never held such a small interchangable lensed camera before and I like it! I am still amazed that this little toy like camera has the same sensor as traditional DSLR's but in such a smaller package. The down side to these cameras is that they are mirrorless, meaning that you don't have an optical view finder to look through like you would in traditional DSLR's. With these cameras it means that you look at the back of the LCD screen to line up and shoot your images. Unfortunately for me and my wallet, I find it hard to adapt shooting that way and bought myself the Electronic Viewfinder. EVF. The EVF is nice, it's bright and displays all the relevant information, however it cannot compete with an OVF - Optical view finder. The advantage with the EVF is that you can see how the image will turn out, live on screen unlike an OVF where you really need to be wary of the camera meter and some what "guess" the exposure in tricky lighting situations. 

Compared to the iPhone, the NEX 5n is a little shorter, but obviously is a bit thicker. But still! SO SMALL! 

That is a standard Nikon lens cap that I use, which I consider to be small, The NEX in height is smaller than even the lens cap! amazing.. 

So how does this thing compare to my tried and trusted D3s? Lets start with the size difference first off. 

And there you go.. Can really see why this NEX would be a perfect travel companion, especially if one was to travel through rough terrain and every extra bit of weight would make a huge difference. I've always been reluctant to buy a 2nd, smaller DSLR such as the Nikon D5100, D7000 etc, as I always knew that even if the body was small, the lenses would stay the same, and in most cases, it's the lenses which REALLY weigh me down and add onto the weight. The beauty about the NEX system is that it has the ability to attach any lens imaginable to the system, which is probably one of the other reasons I really liked this camera. With my current Nikon gear, I would be able to have bought adaptors to use the older manual focus lenses I had back home, however the body would still be big and not solve the issue of size and weight. 

For camera nerds out there, the NEX shoots RAW and full 1080i/p movies at 50 and 25. I've only briefly used the video function but I can say it looks great. Back to the RAW shooting. This is vital to me as RAW files always out resolve JPEG images and allow the photographer to tweak minor adjustments such as WB and exposure after the image has been taken. The 5n packs a 16.3 mp APS-C sensor, which like I mentioned earlier, is the same sensor as the bigger Nikon D7000 for 1/3rd the price. Sure, there are pros and cons with these systems, but having lug the D3s up mountains, through forests and in extreme heat conditions, this is certainly a welcome change, as I can be confident that the 5n is not a sacrifice in quality. 

Okay, so the 5n sounds great and amazing, suits all my needs and wants, does this mean the DSLR and D3s system is now dead? Definitely not. I have always been a believer in using the right tools for the right job and the D3s will always have a spot in my camera bag. Why? simply because the D3s and DSLR's in general, are built like tanks. Take the D3s for example. Full metal magnesium alloy construction, weather sealed, better battery life, better ergonomics, better screen, faster focus, faster frame rate, I could go on for ages. The D3s will never be replaced for high paying and important jobs, as I know that camera back to front like the back of my hand, and shooting with it has become natural instinct. The 5n is another species, where it offers my DSLR quality but in a tiny package. That is all.

As a photographer I am always wanting maximum quality, and this NEX system satisfies my needs.

SO speaking of IQ, how does it compare to the D3s, Nikon's flagship camera as of February 2012, until the Nikon D4 was announced.

It took me a while to remember which one was which and I had to look at the EXIF data to find out. Ok the exposures and WB are slightly off, but these are straight out of camera jpegs, just to sorta show how the nex competes with big BIG brother Nikon. The top image is the Nex and the bottom is the Nikon. The bokeh or blurriness in the background is quite similar, but you can really see the advantage of that big beautiful full frame sensor when you look closely at the foreground in the bottom image, and how it is out of focus, having only the blue jar in focus, whereas the Nex is still relatively sharp infront of the jar. 

These images were shot at 16mm on the nex which equated to roughly 24-28mm on FX. I tried to shoot the images exactly the same, with the same aperture, both wide open at 2.8 and same ISO of 200. I tried to shoot same shutter speed, but because the NEX has no mirror, the flange distance (distance from lens to sensor) is a lot shorter than the D3s, the NEX will always expose brighter than the D3s when shot at the same shutter speed. These tests were really a way for me to test the bokeh and see how it looked compared to each other. The top image again is the NEX and the bottom the D3s. When looking at the bokeh, you can really see the advantage of the full frame sensor, and that smooth soft bokeh. The blurriness is a lot 'creamier' in a way is more pleasant to look at. The Nex with the smaller sensor has less bokeh and thus results in images not having that same 'look' as a full frame sensor. Remember, this is due to the size of the sensor and not the camera. 

The NEX system has the biggest sensor available, besides full frame, and is the same sized sensor as professional APS-C cameras such as the Canon 7d and Nikon D300/s cameras. 

Shooting at wide angles usually makes seeing bokeh more difficult, so I tried to test the bokeh with a different lens - The fujian 35mm which is about... 52mm on a FX camera. 

At longer focal lengths, the bokeh is exaggerated more and this test meant that the images were very very similar in look. Both images shot at 2.8 and at roughly the same focal length. The NEX is the top image and at this focal length, to see the difference you would really have to look very closely. Unfortunately I was too lazy to do proper tests and ensure the images were exposed properly, that I might do next time, but this was more for the 'look' of the images more than anything. 

Right, so that about sums up my review.. A bit drier than more normal blog posts but I just needed to do a quick review of my new toy haha. 

Ok, until next time.

Ciao. 

February.

Hasn't been too exciting this week, nothing new has happened that I can think of which is super news worthy. The floods around Queensland (un)fortunately are not in Gladstone. Would be nice if they were as the fella who won the APN photo of the year awards last year was in some town where the water levels were stupidly high and the town just inundated in water.. like they say, their suffering is our reward.


Anyway, I have none of that stuff, but what I do have is. 

Kids jumping in the water.. Everyone at work and centro (headquarters?) seems to like this photo.. I personally don't know why, I just had to shoot 15+ kids who were going to the swim champs and I wanted an interesting way to shoot them all. haha. Took about 3 or 4 goes to get EVERYONE in the air or somewhat in sync with each other. 

There's a big boxing match coming to Gladstone pretty soon, and these dudes are promoting it, or behind it really. Long story short. We were in the Entertainment centre and all the lights were off so i needed to light them up somehow in an interesting manner. I had one of the lights (left) and shot it out towards the seats @ 50mm spread to light everything up, and another light (right) on a tripod shooting at the people. 

In hindsight I would have reversed it and had the left light on tripod and right light on the floor as the left side is way too hot and adds a bit of distraction to the bottom left corner, A bit of underlighting would've created a nice effect on them anyway, so i'm a bit annoyed about that. SO... this image is probably 75% there.. also I think the back is about 1/2 - 3/4 over exposed and the front 1/2 a stop under.. 

Just fyi, here's a quick 2min touch up in Lightroom. It's definitely not perfect but you can see it's just  little more balanced. If we shot RAW, no probs.. but we shoot jpeg and this is what happens.. or user error.. 

Me and My Ride at the Ambulance station was meant to be about.. you guessed it, an Ambulance truck, car, thing. Somehow we (I) ended up shooting this girl and her Mini Cooper. Not complaining I reckon it looks really nice. No user error this time.. 2 lights in a tripod camera right, to light her face and body so we got an even light all over. 

Sometimes we get pretty sad stories, and this is one of them. The girl on the right is dying from cancer/disease, I can't remember off the top of my head, but she basically has a few months to live. Young mate on the left proposed to her and are due to be married in March. Really sad. I felt pretty shit after I left. The both of them really love each other which is really nice to see. Bittersweet. He has a tattoo on his neck with her name on it. Very sad. Shot it with the 50mm at 1.4 cos i knew I wanted a dreamy look. Very soft and intimate. Little kid in the background ruins it but I didn't have the heart to tell him to sod off. Natural light, no flash. 

Happier times now. Soccer. This time it's a different perspective and shot to the usual soccer type shots. Well for me anyways. This was taken behind the goals as this guy pelted a free kick. I prefocussed as I knew the camera would struggle to track him and I really REALLY wanted the shot. his face is a little off, but the feeling is there. I like how you see him follow through his kick, the ball is in a good spot and those guys dodging the ball really adds to it. My favourite soccer shot so far. shoulda shot at f4 and up but I was already on 12800 or 25600 ISO, didn't want to push it too far.

I really like this photo too. Made the back page yesterday for sport which i'm happy about. Trial bike riding. not TRAIL bike riding so i'm told. Umm... natural light, 16-35 @ f5.6 and 16mm. got down nice and low and tracked her coming down and snapped away, panning with her to make sure she was sharp. very happy with this photo. Nothing more to really say about it.. haha. There were lots of other photos but this one all falls together quite nice. =]

Now like i've mentioned a few times, i'm doing a little project for myself, which is essentially photographing Gladstone and keeping memories of this town. This is the latest photo i've take in this series. It's the NRG plant, and like its name sake, it produced energy for the town and is one if the biggest in Queensland i'm told. Slow shutter speed to make the water milky and clouds blend. I have done a bit of post work to it, but 95% of it is colour correcting. The plant has very orange ugly lights to it and I really didn't like how it sat against the blue sky/background, so I essentially dropped the orange channel down to a bare minimum and left it with a very cold, eerie sombre colour scheme to it. I think it makes a huge difference and I quite like it. 


There's a photo competition on town which is to show off Gladstone. I will be entering this photo as well as the one I took last post with the transmission towers.


Anyway, that is all for this post.. short and sweet. There may be another post soon that is not photo related.. wait and see... excite excite! 


Ciao.