Mt Wellington in the snow.

It’s that time of the year again for snow, Mt Wellington has had a few good dumps over the past few weeks, so I thought I’d head up and take a few shots at sunset. Some bettter light would have been better, but still ok.

This was my first official outing with my new 17-40mm f4 L, and it works great . Nice and sharp.

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LED Orb Art

LED Orb Art, No Photoshop.

I friend of mine showed me some LED orbs he created the other day, and we decide to go out and shoot some more. The shot above was a 2 minute exposure, involving myself and chops to create the 3 LED Orbs. I’m still experimenting and I’m hoping to have a shot not to far away that has 4 orbs of different colors soon, including a “split orb”. Once I’ve “mastered” the technique I’m going to post an article on how you can create your own cool orbs.

More Orbs can be viewed at my flickr page, link below.

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Lauderdale Beach, Tasmania

Lauderdale Beach Tasmania #2

This morning I saw the best sunrise we have had for a few weeks, I’ve been waiting for just the right amount of cloud and light. I shot a few good shots, and could not decide which ones to upload. So I’ve uploaded 2.

I’m really missing my wide angle lens, but the 24-105mm is serving me well. It’s certainly not as sharp as my old 16-35mm. Most of the exposure were long in low light, so complete manual focus and no IS. At 24mm it’s not to bad, and you can still fit a fair bit in the shot, but I’m really looking forward to my new 17-40mm. I could see myself with a 24mm TS-E in the future for sure.

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Taroona Sunset - Black and White

Sometimes you look at a picture and you think, “It’s okay, but nothing special, I wouldn’t hang it on my wall”. Occasionally these shots can be converted to Black and White with fantastic results. This picture has a very rich blue sky and when converted to B&W it was possible to change the hue and saturation of the blue to make the sky really “pop”. The effect was created in Lightroom, and I suspect better results could be achieved with Nik Silver Efex Pro.

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Lake Wakipu - Queenstown, New Zealand.

The weather over the past few days has been wet and cloudy. So rather that go out to shoot I’ve been playing with Lightroom. I’ve spent some time going back over the past few years to find those shots that are not “keepers”, but very close to see if Lightroom can do some magic to get it over the line.

While in New Zealand last year I took some shots of Lake Waktipu ( Queenstown ). The amount of stars visible is amazing, The above shot would have been perfect with less cloud and maybe an ND Grad over the stars with a slightly longer exposure to bring out the lake and mountains. However Lightroom has done a fairly good job to recover some details.

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Ralphs Bay - Towards Mt Wellington - Lauderdale

Allocating time for photography need not be costly. Today I allocated just 20 minutes to go and take some pictures. This shot was taken in Ralphs Bay, just a stones throw from the main road. The sunset was not all that great, but I enjoyed making the most of it.

It was taken with the canon 24-105 IS, because I had no other suitable lens. 2 x hi-tech filters stacked, with an f22 aperture and long 25sec+ exposure, and me, acting as a wind break.

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Lauderdale Beach Tasmania

Ever had one of those mornings when you could not sleep? Decided to grab the camera and go somewhere local for a few shots?

Well that’s what I did this morning, not much of a sunrise, so I decided to change over to the 50mm f1.4 and shoot some portrait shots of some local pillars on Lauderdale Beach. I really need to get a 58mm to 77mm step up ring so I can use my filters on my 50mm, better exposure in the sky would have been nice. However the washed out sky does work well with the glamor filter in post. I’m hoping to capture the same shot soon with a good sunrise in the background.

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Mac’s, don’t you just love them, except when Apple sticks their head in the sand and won’t listen to their consumers. What am I going on about I hear you say?

Since 1988 Apple have been supporting dual monitors with their products, it took Microsoft until XP to do the same.  Having the ability to use dual monitors with applications like Photoshop is fantastic, so whats the problem? Apple supports dual monitors right?

Well, Apple have only allowed you to add additional monitors to your primary monitor, or replace your primary monitor with the add on monitor, take the MacBook, a PC designed for portability, I can easily add a monitor supporting HD+ resolution  no problem, I can then use that monitor as my primary monitor, and I don’t even have to use the 13″ built in screen in my Macbook. But what if I want to use 2 monitors? Well that’s easy you may think, you have the 13″ monitor on the Macbook and you can run the external as well. Does it work? Yes, Practical? Hardly.

There is nothing worse than running dual displays on a macbook (period). It’s the worst user experience of any hardware / OS supporting dual screens. Running the 13″ screen next to a 27″ screen is ergonomic hell. Is this really that big a problem? Well a quick Google of “Dual External Monitors on Macbook” gives some insight into just how widespread the problem is.

Solutions? Well the easy solution would be for Apple to support dual external monitor to allow users to use 2 identical monitors externally on a MacBook, after all most other hardware allready supports this, in may require a docking station, but it works. Currently the only solutions I have seen working involves video splitters, the OS still thinks its one large monitor and snapping windows to one screen etc would be a nightmare (IMO).

Apple, listen to what people want, we want dual external monitor support on MacBooks. We don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on a top end Macbook Pro’s and be limited to “practically” one screen.

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For those of you interested in geeking around, you have have a look at these “solutions”:

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gxm/dh2go/

http://www.gefen.com/kvm/dproduct.jsp?prod_id=3571

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Mayfield Bay Sunrise - Tasmanian East Coast

The Mayfield beach coastal reserve is a popular spot for campers on Tasmania’s east coast, run by parks and wildlife you can stay for only a gold coin donation, but be warned there’s no water and only a drop toilet. With an easterly view towards the Freycinet Peninsula the beach captures fantastic sunrises. I’m still deciding if I should add this shot to the shop for purchase or not.

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Old Jetty - East Coast Tasmania

Long gone are the planks that ran along this jetty. All that remains now are a few weathered pylons. The sunset really brought out the weathered pinks, coupled with the rust, I think they look great.

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