Sydney Harbour - 5:50am

The view of Sydney Harbour from our hotel one morning this past weekend. I don't want you thinking I've become some kind of early-bird ... I mean you can if you want to but it's just not true ;-)

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This was taken leaning out of the window a ways to get the left pylon of the Harbour Bridge in shot. It's also shot handheld at 1/30th of a second with an aperture of f/2.8 and ISO 6400... I mention this only because it demonstrates my laziness in that I didn't use my tripod which was sitting on the table next to the camera ... mind you the tripod wouldn't have got the camera out the window so anyways ... err.. was there a point to this story?

Here's a second picture taken at sunset the previous afternoon from the ferry between McMahons Point and Circular Quay. There must have been a bushfire burning inland which brought the smoke across the sun and created the haze visible beyond the Sydney Opera House in the sunrise picture.

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In an interesting aside I posted this image on Google+ on Saturday afternoon and by last night it had been viewed over 60,000 times ... I guess people like it :-)


The One Project

Toward the beginning of the year I had lunch with my friend Hilary Wardaugh, an accomplished photographer around Canberra, and she described a project she was putting together. Hilary explained that she had a Nikon FM-2 manual film camera with a 50mm f/1.8 lens laying around and was planning to load a film into it, compile a list of photographers and pass the camera to each photographer and ask each one to take a picture. Once the picture has been taken, it became the photographer's responsibility to contact the next person on the list and arrange to get the camera to them. At the end of this process, about 3 months, Hilary will get the film developed and scanned. Each photographer will their digital negative and can process it as though preparing a print in the darkroom ... that is curves and levels and filter colours but no pixel based PhotoShop edits et al. The processed negative will be passed back to Hilary who will then arrange printing of the image for the purposes of exhibition. Two shows are currently lined up for the prints, one local (at the Huw Davies Gallery in Manuka) and one in Sydney (as part of the Head On Photo Festival).

The camera travels in a box containing the list of photographers, a cable release and a book in which the photographer is encouraged to write a short piece about their picture. The project is called The One Project.

So far so good... the only stipulation was that our picture had to be a portrait!

No pressure... it's only a single frame... I mean it's not like the other twenty-odd photographers are all accomplished photographers (they are!) and will be doing their very best as well... reading through the book I smiled when I saw that everyone else was obsessed with light, exposure and focus ;-)

I wanted my portrait to be of my artistic collaborator Marina. I have photographed Marina extensively over the past two years and together we came up with the idea that often you only have an impression of someone through the images you see of them. So I put together a grid of photos I have taken of Marina and projected them digitally across her face and arms and splashed across a dark background the pictures resemble stained glass. I set my digital camera to emulate the manual settings of the FM-2 and to act as a light meter for correct exposure. The effect is one of an essentially dark shadowy image with bright pictures shaping contours but ... visible upon closer inspection ... you see Marina illuminated and looking out from the shadows. It looks great.

Then it was swap the camera over on the tripod, recompose and recheck the settings (and recheck them again!) ... I re-posed Marina and got the composition right and while she was looking perfect I felt it was right pressed the shutter release ... pa-tchang! Done! In my excitement however I had failed to warn Marina I was about to take the picture and she thinks she may have blinked but can't recall where the blink may have been in relation to the exposure. I'm sure it'll be fine! I do feel like a goose though! My main concern is that given the dark nature of the photograph (light-wise not emotionally-wise!) and the different response of the film to shadow and highlight my contribution to the project may in fact just turn out to be a black frame! But then that's the risk you take in trying something less safe I guess :-)

The Box containing the camera and artists notebook
The Box containing the camera and artists notebook

 

The photos I took with the digital body look great and I would include them in this post but I don't want to publish anything until I see how the film version came out which won't be until November. I'll do a contrast and compare then as a separate post :-)

But I would like to thank both Hilary and Marina. Marina firstly for being my muse and sharing her art, ideas and vision so freely with me ... my world simply wouldn't be the same without her in it. And Hilary for coming up with the idea of The One Project and making it happen, for the necessary artistic angst and discipline (well OK maybe I didn't take home all of the discipline lesson) this project inspired in me.


On the Inside Looking Out

I've written before about those special moments when a picture reveals itself right before your eyes. Some days when you're ready to take a photograph ... to capture something special a scene can prove elusive ... there are, I believe, times when it's almost as though you have to be 'open' to a photograph's materialisation. By that I refer to perhaps a process or state of mind whereby you as the photographer are open to the image that present itself to you. It's like realising there is an image waiting in front of you or even anticipating an image's appearance ... this one represents one of those moments

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A young touches her finger to the water wall at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne

Back story: A recent trip to Melbourne, Marina and I had just been to visit the Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. Marina had wandered outside and I went to retrieve my camera bag from the cloakroom. As I walked across the foyer of the gallery toward the exit I noticed this young girl outside touching the glass of the water wall with her finger. I quickly reached into my camera bag, grabbed the camera and took a few pictures (before her father came and dragged her away from an anticipated episode of soaking). This one was my favourite... on the inside looking out.

The exhibition at the NGV is spectacular btw ... should you find yourself in Melbourne ;-)


Barriers: Skull with water drops - Series One

He's back on the drops again! This time in experimentation for a show coming up in November with my artistic collaborator Marina Talevksi. The show is to be called Barriers: break or break through and features a skull or representations of a skull or many skulls or many representations of the same skull ... we haven't quite decided yet ;-)

Barriers will be our second formal exhibition together after 2 Tens & A Tomato in 2014. Suffice to say that the show features skulls and in preparation for this I experimented on the weekend with some waterdrop refraction images featuring a skull... trying to get an image of a skull to refract in a water drop. It was tricky but I'm rather pleased with these initial results. You can check out my other forays into drop refraction photography in my WaterPlay gallery :-)


Projected

I have, for many years, wanted to play with a photographic technique called 'Projector Photography'. This is essentially where a light source (in may case a digital projector) is used to throw patterns or other images upon a subject and the results captured in the camera as a photograph. I know it's all been done before and this technique has been around since the very beginning of photography but I'm thinking the important thing here is that it hasn't been done by me yet ;-) and to further this minor notion of inflated self-importance I recently obtained a digital projector (a little XGA Epson) and began to make some experiments ... the first of which I'm happy to present here.

For the technically minded: For the pattern I created a vertical line image in Photoshop using the pattern editor and transferred it to my laptop connected to the projector. I was running the image through Lightroom in fullscreen mode. This enabled me to play with the image size (and hence the width of the stripes) and also apply a hard vignette to make the projected images smaller and circular. The images was captured using a Nikon D600 with an 85mm f/1.4 @ f8 and ISO 640. At these settings the exposure time was around 1/6sec and so I had to remain quite still ... excepting the frame where I took advantage of the slow shutter and deliberately moved my head from side to side. These setting also showed that I have plenty of light to play with using increased ISO settings on the camera.

All in all a successful first experiment I thought ... can't wait to put my favourite model in front of it :-)

I have many ideas for patterns or images to project ... spiderwebs, water, fire ... I'd interested in any ideas you may have for the technique.


Published :-)

In other news one of my photographs, part of a series I did for local poet P.S. Cottier for her little poetry collection Paths Into Inner Canberra, has been published in The Canberra Times newspaper and syndicated to The Age online site ( the newspaper sites are syndicated so they appear kinda the same ;-) )

Links


Reupholster your office chair

OK .... while I'm not about to turn this blog into a DIY extravaganza site, I did do something this afternoon that I thought I'd share. I reupholstered my boring computer chair into something altogether more beautiful ... alright it's still an office chair but it's a more beautiful office chair... and I found it such an easy and straightforward task that I'm presenting* it here to inspire your creative juices.

Firstly, the original ... as you can see functional but rather dull.

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The original look.

Next I found some material from a local fabric shop that took my fancy.

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Well, it certainly hides the ugly original anyways...

Then I assembled the tools required. The tools I used were a staple gun, a screwdriver and some scissors (oh and there was some spanner action a little later to remove the seat cushion from it's base but I didn't realise that until after I'd taken a picture of the tools I thought I needed ;-) if I were a real DIY blogger I would have rectified this)

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Staple gun, screwdriver and scissors

I decided to tackle the back support cushion first. I undid the backrest support to release the back support cushion and undid the small screws that held the plastic cover over the rear of the cushion.

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The back support cushion with the plastic cover removed exposing the staples

I decided to keep the original fabric for additional cushioning and also because;

  1. there was nothing wrong with it; and
  2. I was feeling too slack to undo all the staples and remove it.

Next, cut a piece of the fabric to size and began stapling it to the cushion.

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When finished stapling it looked like this

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The underside of the back support cushion all stapled up

It was a little sharper than this in real life*

Then it was time to remove and tackle the seat cushion. This required the use of the afore-mentioned spanner I neglected to include in my tools photograph above...

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Then, same process:

  1. Measure and cut a piece of fabric to fit the cushion with enough extra to reach up and over the base for stapling.
  2. If your fabric has a pattern that has a definite 'right way up', it's a good idea to check this before cutting the fabric!
  3. Pulling reasonably tightly, but not tightly enough to cause creasing in the fabric, begin stapling the fabric to the cushion base. I started along one edge and worked my way around.
  4. I found folding the fabric at the corners before stapling worked well.

My stapling was lot neater on the seat cushion...

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The finished seat cushion.

Replace the plastic casings for the cushions and reattach them to the chair.

 

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Voila! A reupholstered office chair.

The whole exercise took me less than an hour and $15 in materials ... cheaper than replacing the chair and it fits wonderfully with my decor.

Have you revamped a piece of furniture? Got pictures? I'd love to see them :-)

*with apologies for the crappy smartphoneography...

ps ... I feel I should also note that the print I chose features a pattern of cranes in various poses and not the camouflage print the thumbnail makes it out to be ;-)


Gretchen Chappelle: life in still motion | scenes from the pacific shore

While in Sydney two weeks ago I had the pleasure of viewing my friend Gretchen Chappelle's most recent exhibition 'life in still motion | scenes from the pacific shore' at the Art Est. Art School and Gallery in Leichhardt, Sydney. Gretchen has, over the years, developed and refined a post-processing technique involving layers and motion blur to effectively isolate subjects in a frame whilst taking advantage of the colour fields surrounding them. I remember thinking 'Wow, that's cool' when I first saw her post one. Apparently, many folks have asked about the technique with a view to emulating it and while a number have tried I don't think any of them have mastered it the way Gretchen has.

A work by Gretchen illustrating the processing technique © Gretchen Chappelle 2015

I liked the prints in the show (and of course catching up with Gretchen!) but the gallery was a long way out ... Marina and I caught the train to Summer Hill and then walked at least a kilometer (Google Maps claimed it was 600m!) into the burbs of Leichhardt before we came across the gallery ... Gretchen arrived on her bicycle more or less the same time we did. I thought that Gretchen's work deserved more of an audience than was going to stumble across this out of the way place ... it needed more of a walk-in viewing audience/customer base and this wasn't the space that was going to provide that. Then, I guess those galleries cost more to host shows and the commission they charge is generally higher too. Still these are the lessons we learn when showing :-)

Good on you Gretchen ... the show looked great :-)

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Gretchen standing with one of her larger framed works

The show ran for the month of May so, due to my slackness in promoting the work of friends you can no longer trek into Leichhardt and see it for yourself ... it being quite suddenly June...

Links


Assorted Landscapes

As part of my ongoing efforts to add content to my newly humming website (you have to imagine a happy humming here instead of the slow dirgey throaty song playing previously!) I have added a new gallery of images entitled, rather imaginatively, 'Land'. I would add that although there is indeed  a landscape in each and every photograph in this collection I will confess up front to there often being a great deal of sky in them too. Anyways, please enjoy :-)


Website Blues

Oh I've been suffering the website blues ... for some months now (actually pretty much since I launched the new website!) the site has been been performing very poorly. By poorly I mean it took an inordinate amount of time to load and in some cases refused to display anything once it had loaded. I found this having a let's say 'detrimental' effect on my posting rate as I was constantly trying to improve the delivery of content rather than actually creating any! Thank you to all the people who took the time to let me know that they could not access the site and the blog! I mean what's the point of having a photography based website/business if no one can see your work!

I had tried optimising all my images, streamlining the code, caching plugins and even dabbled in some CDN (Content Delivery Network) action but nothing seemed to make it go faster. To cut a long story short I got in touch with the techs at my hosting provider (VentraIP) and asked if they could investigate this for me. They found some incorrect setting in my PHP version which, once corrected, made the delivery hum right along. A few more tweaks including updating the way my site caches content and delivers it has really increased my delivery speeds to a fraction of what they were before. Now that the site appears fully functional I have been inspired to update some of the image galleries and overall appearance parameters to make the site a more streamlined experience. Do please give it a go if you find yourself so inspired and let me know if it's not behaving itself! I will have strong words with it ;-P

Website blues? Not as blue as this Koi I captured at Taronga Park Zoo in Sydney turned out ... but still it's a pretty picture ... so pretty I had it printed up large and it now hangs on my wall. I'm thinking of doing a series of them and getting RedBubble to make some cushions and tote baggy things for sale.

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Masked

So we made this little movie ... an arthouse piece in a world that plainly isn't. In the movie, we're wearing masks ... well, in the latter stages we're wearing masks plural seeing as we had only one mask when we began filming and had to share it. It wasn't until I came across a supply of masks in Chapel Street in Melbourne over the final weekend that we were able to appear together both wearing masks. But that's an aside.

It's a strange feeling to be wearing masks in public, on the street, in coffee shops and shopping malls. Noone seemed to think it particularly odd, we didn't get asked to leave anywhere and anywhere people did look a little alarmed we just assured them we were "making a movie" and everything was fine! One thing I did notice though was that when I was masked, people I was flashing a reassuring smile to as they walked past or lingered couldn't actually see said reassuring smile; just some nodding weirdo in a mask.

I did take the opportunity to take some stills as we were shooting but likely nowhere near as many as I perhaps should have :-)

Here's a few.

You can watch the movie here


Lights, Canberra, Action!

Well, we didn't win any prizes at our inaugural LCA film festival ... but ... we did get our art piece This Too Shall Pass shown to a rather large crowd and people were coming up to us after the event and saying how much they enjoyed it and how good it was to see an Arthouse film make it into the finals ... so it went pretty well really. We're now planning our next film project and that's kinda exciting too :-)

Lights, Canberra, Action!


Hot Baby (Take 2) = much happier baby

Back in December I did a baby photo session of then four-week old Bjørn. That sunny Sunday reached 39°C in the afternoon … and little Bjørn was a hot baby and hot babies tend to be a little cranky. I got loads of lovely pictures of Bjørn but they were largely split into two groups … peacefully asleep or grumpy :-)

Now, I do know that parents love pictures of their children looking happy and smiley so I undertook to do a second session to capture some of the said happy and smiley pictures. Fast forward through the 4-week blur that is Christmas, travel, new year et al and little Bjørn is not so little now ... well ok he's still pretty little ... just not quite so little ... anyways on with the pictures! :-)

We met up at the Botanic Gardens on a Sunday morning and I foolishly wore a white shirt and as I lay on the damp dewy grass in amongst the wallaby poo ... this became apparent ... this foolishness. My shirt looked as though it bore external witness to a coffee drinking problem ... which is quite untrue ... like really.