Midnight mates - Ben and Jerry

Day 53

OMG this is girlie isn't it :)

But at 11:00 when I was driving past a Service station and needed to get milk, Ben and Jerry's was calling. I needed a sugar hit, and amongst all the chocolate, lollies and energy drinks, there was B&Js.

I got home at about 11:30, set up the gear and took a few quick shots before collapsing into bed.

We had a work dinner/meeting, which was a bit of fun, real nice burgers  - pretty darn close to the best vege burgers in the Sydney basin, as they were promised to be :) The meeting finished at around 10:30pm and we all scurried home.

YN460II in gridded snoot 6:00 high, lowest power, YN460II with blue gel at wall 1/16 power.

Mmmmmmm

Day 35

This is health-food-Sunday. I think amongst all that cheese, saturated fat and high GI pizza base there might be a hint of tomato...

Today was a stinker. Probably the first day in 25 years I have put on shorts and a beater and just sat at home. No Sunday Bunnings trips or anything like that. Thanks to Vids I got a bit of a sleep in, but the bed kicked me out, and I still needed more sleep. The plan is to go to bed a little earlier everyday... ie sometime before 1am would be a big step in the right direction.

Vivek has been good all day. He went to Balvihar classes this morning with kids heaps older, did his stuff and came home. Spent most the day lounging and chatting with us. We were both flat, so we were very happy that he was entertaining himself. The iPad helps a bit too. For dinner we decided to get some Pizza - something we rarely do. Sort the icing on a lazy day.

No complaints from the boy, as you can see.

Softboxes at 10 and 2, silver reflective brolly at 5, high. Bare flash at wall with blue gel. All flashes YN460II triggered by Phottix Strato

Aussie Aussie Aussie - Oi Oi Oi

Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi

Day 25

Today is January 26th. Australia Day. This is an interesting day. Generally speaking, Aussies are not overly patriotic. Actually, Aussies are not overly anything. Today we celebrate being Aussie. Now this opens a can of worms I am not going to discuss here. But I think it is sad when I see the words "Aussie Pride" and the Southern Cross used by "patriotic" people to excuse racist behavior. Call me weird, but to me, that is very un-Aussie.

Moving on.

Today's pic is not quite what I had in mind, but I sort of like this one - as much as I can ever like a self-portrait!

Softbox 9:00 and 3:00, reflective umbrella 6:00 high, bare flash 12:00 low with blue gel. 35mm f/2 set at f/6.3 I think, iso100 1/200s. Triggered cammera via YN602. I think my batteries in my camera or my wireless are going flat - 1/250s gave me not a full x-sync :( Shot with EF35mm f/2 lens - rapidly becoming one of my fave lenses!

PS: The beer is from Belgium, the flags and sunnies are made in China. I think the singlet is too, and I know for sure the flashes, wireless transmitters and backdrop are. The Camera is Japanese made, and so are the lenses.

Now that's being Aussie!

Smokin Hearts

Day 22

Back at work today after one day off. Was a steady day, one or two moments of craziness and frustrations... but on the whole not a bad day. Today's pic I was hoping to take a photo of some guests, but by the time I got home an showered after work, they were waling out the door. So I had to do another improvised indoor shoot.

So I'm just playin' today. I decided to see how hard/easy it was to shoot smoke... it'd be nice to have some lovely curls of smoke to compose into photos, or at least the ability to create them if I wanted to :)

So today's pic is just that - smoke. The smoke has come from one of those scented smoke cone thingies - I didn't crop it out so it looked more believable. This is a freaky shot - I put a red gel on my flash, and I had a blue gel on the wall behind. I focused on the cone, and then snapped a few shots to see how it looked, and this is what I got. I DID cut the blue out by reducing the blue channel output, as it looks better on black. But the smoke itself is 100% SOOC, honest to goodness.

Noir

Day 20

Today I thought I would try black on black. I have never really tried this, and I was keen to see how it would go. However, I had to first unpack my bicycle, which I had only half unpacked after I returned to Sydney from Hong Kong 13 months ago. It still had no pedals, and I had packed hard foam-rubber around the tubes to protect it, and they were still on it. I had also gaffer taped cardboard to the frame. I learned the hard way, gaffer tape comes off real easy in the first day or so, but 12 months later it is not so agreeable. So I spent the next 45 minutes cleaning gaffer residue off my head-tube and carbon seat-post, as well as off the top-tube, all the while trying not to scratch the black metallic (soft!) finish. Finally we have a bike with pedals, mostly clean finish, and most the bits found.. except the cover for the rear flasher, you can see the batteries in the pic :)

The end photo is ok. A little bit of levels in Photoshop. I'd like to have more specular light off the tubes but I had limited room for my softboxes, so the ideal angle was not possible. If I turned them toward the bike, the backdrop became visible. So this was the best I could do today.

Softbox (gridded) at 8:45 and 4:00 at 1/2 power, handheld snooted flash on a stand held at 12:00 at 1/32 power to get specular off top-tube. I like the possibilites here.

woohooo

Day 18

Yeah. It has been one of those days. Where you feel like a flat tyre but have to appear like everything is just fine and dandy thank you very much...

I actually think my wife has more of these days than me. She somehow manages to raise a kid, do some Lab research for her PhD, work part-time as a vet, look after me, AND look after her parents. Some days you can see little cracks in her amazing resolve, but other times she seems a lot like the yobbo in the photo - some half crazed "yeah baby, all is rockin' here"... hmmmm....

Today was just a long day at work, after I had spent until 2:30am looking through old photos, realising I had deleted a lot of important ones :) AND keeping a LOT of junk. Gotta find an easy way of keeping this under control. I thought LightRoom would help, but sadly it interferes too much with my RAW workflow... maybe Bridge? Never really used it..

Anyway, the yobbo is me (as you know). I seem to do better at stupid poses than "normal" ones. Says a lot about me huh? Softbox at 10 and 2, silver reflective umbrella at 6pm above camera. Bare flash at wall behind me with green gel on front. I seem to be getting to the point I haven't used a light meter to set my flashes since about day 3, so for easy set-ups like this I am just guessing the settings pretty much ok. I learned a lot of this and the basics on how to eyeball your settings by knowing your gear and the logic behind it all from Wizwow. This was shot at f/7.1 with my 35mm f/2 lens. Gotta say I am loving my 35mm and 85mm primes a lot more than I expected to - I reach for them before I even consider my 24-105mm f/4L. Maybe just a passing fad?

Speed Demon

Speedin' on the freeway...

Day 17

We'd given up on the young fellas old bike. It was a "Hip Kids" bike, which was supposed to convert from a pedal-less push bike to a pedaled cycle. I bought it new from the company on the net. It was an awesome concept, with an amazingly bad design. To attach the pedal mechanism was pretty easy, but getting the chain, training wheels etc to go in place (and more importantly, stay in place), was just a nightmare. And I am sort of OK with tools, thanks. I gave it good time and even carried tools when we used it, which became rarely, then never. It is now sitting on the side of the road, if anyone wants it.

So today we challenged ourselves to buying a new one. I used to cycle a fair bit and have gone through the cheap and nasty bikes all the way to custom frame with Campagnolo Centaur groupset and Vento rims, which is gorgeously adorning our garage floor and gathering dust. I know a bit about bikes, although after walking throughout the bike shop I realized in the 4 years I have not been cycling, things have developed at warp speed, with funky spacey carbon frames being the norm. My steel frame will look vintage when I take it out in the next week or so. I can just imagine the conversations at traffic lights... "wow, a Classic Vintage steel bike, you must have looked after that well"...

Anyway, I was sort of appalled at the masses of crap bearings and general crap on the budget bikes, so we ended up spending a lot more than I would have expected on a kids bike. But it is so big it should last him a few years, and it doesn't look too dorky once you remove the mud guards and the pads, so I'm sure it won't be too much of an embarrassment for said kid to ride to the shops and school in a few years. Sure, he'll have to lose the training wheels :)

I remember learning to ride on one of those kids bikes that weren't quite the 27" wheel but bigger than a BMX - I think 24". I think it was even in the days before BMX were mainstream. Wow. I used to hang onto the side of the house or the fence, and climb up, then push off. I never had the training wheels. for better or for worse. My brother who had already been through training wheels and left his bike under the car, and was given one of those high-bar dragster things with back-pedal brakes to replace it. My sister got a pink bike with training wheels, also with back pedal brakes. I got the second-hand big bike with no brakes. I really should have taken the hint from my parents then - but I was too thick, I now realize.

Anyways, so now the young fella has a brand new Trek. My first "nice" bike was a Trek, but I was 23 at the time and had intended to buy a car, but (wisely) decided to spend a grand on a nice bike instead. Back then $1000 on a bike was a lot of money. My wife, who I had just met back then, thought I was a nutter for spending so much on a bike, but she supported my decision. I think she thought any young bloke who wants a bicycle instead of a car is either really nuts, or really has put some thought into it.

I'd like to think I am the latter :)

The pic was a rush pic. I have to do some searching through old pics today to give a portfolio to a friend of a friend for a possible job... lots of work to do!!

Ciao 'til tomoz.

and, in the red corner...

Day 14, 15th January 2012

These shiny, new looking weights are far from new. I have had them for about 7 years, and they have traveled to and from Hong Kong at least 3 times.. ie from HK to Sydney, then back to HK and back to Sydney. It all sounds silly, but I have moved back and forth on at least 3 occasions, and I have a feeling another bout is to come in the next 2yrs. As my family was still in Sydney for 2 of those moves, I made a trip back to Sydney to see them at least every 8 weeks. This meant I could carry odds and sods to and fro... like 20kg of weights :)

These little fellas helped me thru rehab of a dislocated shoulder I got after being knocked off my motorbike by one of HK's infamous minibuses. I was going to need surgery but decided I would try rehab and physio first, and touch wood, it seems to be ok. But now, 5 years on, I have lost all tone and it is really time to get back into things. So I decided firstly to unbox them, then photograph them in a dramatic light. The idea was sort of like a spotlight in a boxing ring etc. Sort of "meet thine enemy".

Taken with 35mm f/2 at f/8, iso200, 1/250s. One YN 460II in a beer holder snoot with an el-cheapo grid in the end to focus the light. A puff of fog from my little fog machine, then some levels adjustment and silly stuff in PS to make it look a little gritty. Nothing fancy. I made a few silly errors here, eg overlapping the boards on the floor as you can see behind the weights. Not pretty. I could pretend I did it to look like the edge of the boxing ring, but that would only be kidding myself. Another boo-boo is a reflection off the weights on the board down low in the middle. Not sure how I could have avoided that, maybe a better angle or polarizing filter? I do like the star-like specular reflection on the top of the weights on the left though :) No PS there, just blind dumb luck!

neighborly chef - Day 13

This is Sarva. He's a good mate and a neighbor. Today we had the pleasure of his company, along with the company of his family.  Our boys get on real well, so having these guys over is a treat for us all. Sarva is an awesome guest, and he loves to cook. And boy he can cook some nice tucker. This photo I managed to get some OCF gear into the kitchen, take about 4 pics, then bail out. Sarva cooks without recipes, and purely by his nose. Some of his dishes are heavenly. The rest are damn wonderful.

Softbox 10:00, softbox 4:00, bare flash bounced off roof at 2:00. This was taken after 3 glasses of wine, so image-stabiliser was working overtime :)

Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS at f/8 I think. Some PS to bring up light in background and sharpen details a bit. Tried a bit of a comical "super-real" effect here. Like it :)

Day 11

 

 

Today has been another long day! After work I dashed home to see the boy before he went to bed, then I had to pick up my mates family from the airport. I was hoping to take some "crowd" pics at the airport, but felt a little self conscious and was worried the AFP would want to see my SD card :)

This is yet another self portrait. Toying with rim lighting and also toying with making a room look darker than it is. Shot 1/250s f/8 iso100 with 1 softboxes at 10 and 2 as rim. some levels adjustment in PS.