A bit of fun...

It's been a while since I got my digital gear out just to have a play. I haven't forgotten how much fun it can be but I have been bogged down with school, the new job, the tides, the phase of the moon and the alignment of the planets.

I spoke to one of my class mates today and we are going to go to the school studio tomorrow and see what we can come up with when we use a couple of flash units and some new Nikon gear. She has a new D300 and I have a 70-200 f2.8 VR lens... Maybe we could swap for a little while...?

I saw the flower this morning while walking home from the tram, 2 degrees celcius so I didn't spend too much time on it.

The running man is one of Cinta's collection of artistic ephemera. I thought I would try out a bit of shadow play...

Thought I would try the first two in square format???

And last but not least, my new saxophone... This one took a bit longer and I think I will still need some more practice to get it right. There are so many angles on it that it is a little difficult to get uniformly sharp. Being mainly silver with a black barrel sort of lent itself to the B&W treatment.

Hmmm. Still more choices... And an assignment...

Do I need another camera? No, not really (he says with that dejected child who has just had their favourite toy removed look)...

Do I need other gear to take professional quality images...? I could do that now... But there is always something else I could use. ALWAYS!

What gear would give me the greatest advances?

As the title of my blog suggests, "It's All About Light"... The thing that I have the most to gain from is to learn how to manipulate light to my advantage.

This week in class we started the digital imaging basics - straight to photoshop to adjust levels, curves, colour etc... With a rundown of how digital capture works and some of its advantages and disadvantages.

The Assignment...

Our assignment this week is to take 6 images of moving water with special emphasis on getting the exposure correct (I'm not sure why there should be "special" emphasis on exposure, that should always be the aim)...

One of the blogs I visit on a fairly regular basis is the Strobist site. There they show you all sorts of creative, innovative and amazing methods of lighting subjects with "off camera" flash systems. I'm sure that if I search there I will find some ideas for my assignment.

This is the next step for me... Changing the plan and putting the Hasselblad back and bringing the extra lights (Nikon SB800's) forward.

Now that I can "officially" shoot digital images in my course I will try to put more images up here.

Too many to choose from...

One of my (many) problems is that I have too many cameras... And I never thought I would say that out loud!

Recently I purchased a medium format camera (645 format), lens, film back etc, etc... I then saw a package on ebay with two cameras (the same as the first) and a different lens and basically more stuff...

The plan was to buy the lot, create a single good setup and sell off the rest... And here I am months later wondering what went wrong.

So I went in to Melbourne today to speak to a store about trading some (or all) of the gear in on a Hasselblad system. I wasn't sure that the gear I had would add up to a Hasselblad in dollar value so it was with great excitement that I found it came close... Layby is a wonderful thing, the man in the shop now has (some) of my gear in exchange for the deposit on the next camera...

What this means in relation to "too many" cameras is that I will now have three camera systems, a digital slr (with which most of the photos on this blog are taken, a 35mm film rangefinder and the "Porsche of the camera world" the Hasselblad 6x6 medium format camera... Oh, and the point and shoot digital, the camera phone digital and a 35mm pinhole camera (that I haven't been game to use)...

So now that I am flush with choices I have a problem, which camera should I take? What do clients want (when I finally get some)? Each has its own advantages and disadvantages so I'm on a mission to find out what works, what doesn't work and as much as I can in between. In the meantime I'm off to the gym, I need to build up to carry it all around...

Rosters will be the death of me!

Let me start by saying AAAARRRRGGGHHH!!!

Now that I've said that I may need to explain. One of my jobs is to do the rostering at work, it's really quite simple, we have 12 hour shifts twice a day giving 24 hour coverage 7 days a week. We only have a small team but at present we are down two full timers so this is where things are starting to get fun...

We need to cover as many shifts as possible (given that we are short staffed concessions have been made)and the weekends must be covered. Most of the time this works OK. But tonight I have had someone swap two weekend nightshifts (meaning they can't work but their shifts are covered - no problems), another person has asked for the same weekend off to attend a wedding (no problems), now a third person has asked for time off leading up to the weekend... There's no one left!!!

Back to the original statement, I don't like rostering much!!!

History in the making...

I haven't played the saxophone for a few days now because Cinta generously gave me her cold. I was expecting this to happen and really couldn't avoid it, the main problem, if you can call it that is that I may recover earlier than Cinta which will annoy her no end!

Last night I attended the Logies as part of work (and I got home at 4am). For those who are interested/don't know the Logies is an award night for Australian television where all of the actors, producers, TV honcho's etc, get together, accept awards, get "high on life" and PARTY!!! I have included a (shocking) photo of me on the red carpet (does "in the production room" count?)!!! Fortunately I didn't have to perform my medical magic and the night went off pretty much without a hitch.

Oh yeah, I titled this blog "history in the making" for a reason. I have finally done it, I have processed my very own roll of film and now have a black & white negative strip drying in the bathroom! Yay me!!! I took some photos of the shot tower at Melbourne Central (if you click on the link to My RedBubble you can see a colour shot there) and they all seem to have turned out ok...

Why "history" you ask? Well (in my opinion) my Dad may not have been the best of teachers, the conversation usually went something like this... "This is how you do this, hold it like this and do this to it and, as you can see this is the result. So there is no need for you to do it today as I have already done it...". He may have been the very best "demonstrator" I have ever known... As a result of these "training sessions" I was left with a curious desire to do it myself and a finished product that was very well conceived (welding is another of those things that I never seemed to get to do by myself)... Does anyone else have this problem?

So, I have developed a roll of film with chemicals that I mixed up with my own hands from start to finish. This is an historic moment for me... Next comes the darkroom print!!! Wish me luck...

Memories...

The smell of light rain on a dusty road takes me straight back to primary school. It's the smell of the school playground. The smell of two stroke fuel reminds me of mowing grass, the smell of freshly mown grass reminds me of the lawn at my grandparents place and the scary old lawnmower with the blades that extended beyond the edge of the cover by about 2 inches.

Last night at school we did our first darkroom exercise and developed a roll of film. The smell of the chemicals in the dark reminded me strongly of all the time I spent with dad in the darkroom as a child...

Dad used to do the photofinish images for horse/dog racing all around the western half of Victoria. As soon as I was old enough to look after myself for some of the time I went with him.

I would help him set up the gear and make sure everything was in alignment and watch with fascination as the images came out on paper. I used to watch the races from the top of the tower with him and prided myself in successfully guessing which horse was the winner before the print confirmed it.

The darkroom is one, very large, reason why I chose the course that I am doing yet my new instructor was a little dismissive of it last night. "I have to teach you this because it's part of the course but it is going the way of the dinosaurs - digital is where it's at"... He may be (is) right, to a degree, but the processes learned in the darkroom for creating a print are very similar if not exactly the same as doing it all digitally. I think he missed my point a little though... How strong is the memory of working with my dad in the darkroom, how much do I want to do it and do it well? How much do I want that connection?

It's why I chose this course!

The smell of the darkroom chemicals are toxic, they aren't that pleasant (in fact they stink), the process is slow, exacting, technical and takes lots of practice to get even close to right. But all of this reminds me of some great times spent with my father and all of the stories I can tell about the characters I met in the country racing industry at the time.

Memories...