MikeHawkey.com

photos and other things…

recent posts

about

  • Black and White Garbage

    Garbage B&WAs posted yesterday, Wednesday night I attended the Garbage concert at the Auckland Civic. Being concerts can be iffy about cameras, especially ones with Lenses that look big, I took along a Ricoh CX6. A great little camera with 10.7x zoom, as with all small point and shoots, it struggled a little with focus at times, and certainly had some noise at the higher ISO’s. Turns out other people (non officials) had walked in with their DSLR’s, so I could have taken something more substantial, but never mind – a great little camera with a big zoom that fits in the pocket, and has many of the custom aspects my usual GRD IV has.

    Capturing Shirley, Duke, Steve and Butch, I cropped in a little on todays image. To deal with noise, I decided B&W was the way to go, and also pushed the contrast and slightly adjusted sharpness. All done in CS5.

    Today marks a bit of a changeover in post image shooting for me. We purchased a new Mac, and my Linux machine, although still in use, is slowly getting things transferred over from. I like to use all OS’s, so will continue to do so, but mostly for now on OSX. Likely I will continue on with Gimp, but I also have more opportunity to keep in practice with Photoshop and the like also – something I have mentioned before, I am well out of practice with. As we are still battling with ISP issues, I have not yet managed to get Gimp on the Mac, but will attempt again over the next few days.

     

     

  • Garbage

    image

    A quick post before the end of the day.

    Shot on the Samsung s2, I hope to share some more tomorrow’ish.

    Garbage rocked the Civic at Aucklands CBD. A great concert, many many years since they came to NZ.

  • Ranginui and Papatuanuku

    Rangi & Papa

    Ranginui and Papatuanuku (Rangi & Papa) are the two primordial parents relating to the creation of the universe in Maori legend. To summarise loosely (check the full story here), Rangi and Papa lived embraced together. Their children were always stuck in the dark, cramped and unhappy. Eventually they decided to separate the two, and one of the son’s, Tane-mahuta successfully pushed them apart by resting his back on the ground and pushing up with his legs, Rangi and Papa screamed and cried, but they were forever separated – heaven and earth.

    For today’s image I shot a simple grassy ridge and sky. Pushed the contrast and leves in the sky and slightly on the grass. Converted to B&W and added a vignette. Shot on the GRD IV and edited in Gimp.

    All going well, this posts tonight. Ongoing ISP issues still…hopefully resolved tomorrow! Also off to a music concert tomorrow night. Hope to get some shots.

  • The Vibrant Driveway

    image

    Just a quick note today. Our ISP is again playing up and typing on the mobile is a little testing after a super long Monday!
    Shot on the GRD IV, cropped and reduced in Gimp.

  • Looking to the West

    View to the West

    For the last few days I have been shooting with my Ricoh GRD IV set to a custom setting ‘positive film’. I have written before about the great menu system on this little fixed focal length compact, with full manual controls.Positive film is a setting I have not, until this last week, used. I must say I like the colour settings it provides. Of course, one can just shoot straight raw/jpeg and adjust in post processing, but sometimes its fun just to customise it in the camera (as the Ricoh does very well) and shoot. Hence aside from resizing and signature, today’s image is from camera.

    With an overall busy weekend, I got up early and took the opportunity to take a walk around the Bayswater area on the North Shore. Stopping at a cliff top, looking out west, we can see the Bayswater Marina, and then further in the distance, to the right, the Auckland Harbour Bridge.

    As the sun slowly sinks towards the horizon, we see the end of another weekend. Im not quite sure where the weekend has gone!