My New Photo Blog

I've decided to start a new blog to share some of my photos, both old and new.  Don't worry, this blog will still operate (hopefully I'll post more than what I have in the past few months).  You'll find it at: http://ecstaticfanatic.wordpress.com/

The first weekend in July 09

Over the weekend I got a couple of opportunities to use my new camera. Thankfully the weather was fine and sunny for both days. On Saturday I went to Cumberland State Forest and has a wander through one of the walks and the nursery that is in the forest. In the nursery there were a few black boy trees that had just been watered. It was late in the afternoon and there was little light. Here is one the the photos:


Then on Sunday, I went to the lake in Norwest Business Park. It is a nice place there, and with the sun out, it made for a lovely afternoon. There was a guy who builds remote control power boats and he was running them around on the lake. They were rather noisy, but they were very fast and handled like they were on rails, turning sharply. I had a chat to the guy after he has crashed one of the boats into the wall on the edge of the lake (fortunately no major damage was done), and he was saying that the plain white boat was capable of speeds upto 80km/h. Here are a couple of photos I took:



Click here for a photo album from the weekend.

The Eagle has landed

My new toy has come in, and I now have it in my hot little hands, after waiting a bit over 2 weeks.




What is in the bag?




Yep, that's right, a Canon 500D Premium kit, with the 18-200mm lens.





And here it is, unboxed :-)





As I go taking photos, I will post some of the good ones up here.

HDR Photography

The other week a friend and I went out to take a few photos and create a HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo. My friend is a photographer with W&B Automotive Photography. This outing was inspired by this thread over at mx5cartalk.com that was talking about HDR photography.

So Andrew and I headed out on a Wednesday night a couple of weeks ago and found an empty car park where we could take some photos. Basically the idea with shooting for a HDR photo is to take a photo at the correct exposure and then bracket that with a couple of photos that are over exposed and a couple that are under exposed, generally changing the exposure by 1 stop at a time.

Once you have your photos with multiple different exposures, you can then use software to blend the photos and create the final product. A common piece of software used for HDR is Photomatix. Below is the final result. Thanks Andrew!