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  • The Question

    Possibly a little more dark than my usual images, no little plastic people were actually harmed in the making of ‘The Question’.

    Playing around with some ideas for the EOS Photo 5 competition whilst the weather outside was again poor I come up with this little arrangement.

    Using the Ricoh GRD IV, the macro function is really quite good. Smaller sensors generally allow you to get closer to the image, in this case about 1.5cm away from the main subject. Macro functions are also generally the only time you get a real small depth of field on smaller sensor cameras.

    Shot in bleach bypass mode, all I did in post processing is add the words and resize.

  • The Dinner

    Some terrible weather had here today. I had intended to head out with the GR1 and get some film shots in town, but heavy rain and wind prevented a successful outing.

    The day otherwise filled up with catching up with friends, I played around a little more with Paper Camera on my Samsung Galaxy s2 and chose today’s image ‘The Dinner’ for my shot to publish.

    Just resizing done in Gimp, otherwise as shot on the App. One could almost make a comic book using it and shooting real people!?

  • The Bicycle

    Another fine day in Auckland and another day where my schedule allowed me to bicycle to work. After reading an interesting article on The f8 Blog, by Olivier Duong, I decided to have a play around with the snap focus on my Ricoh. Its a feature that many GR owners love, especially for street shooting. A standard feature on all Ricoh GR cameras, I will have to give it a try some time on my GR1 also. The benefit? – I would suggest just reading Oliviers article, but essentially it allows you to pre-set focus, which along with a manually set aperature and shutter equals a very fast street snapping machine.

    For today’s photo, I was on the street, but not quite street snapping. Hitting the road with the GRD IV set to B&W, I wanted to get a strong silhouette of shadow as the main section of the image. Did I need snap focus for this? no, not really, but it didn’t harm.

    In post processing I cropped to square format. I could have done this in camera, but as I was riding my bike at the time, and its a fixed gear cycle, I decided post gave me a little more flexibility and slightly more safety. I pushed the contrast a little more and also adjusted sharpness.

    Weekend time!

  • Rock-Paper-Camera

    Whilst looking for some android workplace tools for work today, I came across a review for a camera app called Paper Camera. Intrigued by the description, and always interested in different camera apps I jumped all in and downloaded the pay version.

    I’m aware for some photographers out there, anything other than the RAW image coming from a camera is a no go zone. I for one like effects, plug-ins etc. as part of a wide mix of tools in my shed. Sometimes one wants to capture a moment as it was, other times, perhaps as it felt, and other times again – just in a different way. Each has a place (perhaps a similar argument applies to why I shoot digital and film).

    I only had a chance to use it on my bike ride home, so wont go into any depth, but, its a fun little app that gives the user a host of different ‘paper medium’ live-view recreations of the photo you are taking. You can also record as well as snap pictures, which is pretty cool.

    Today’s image ‘Rock-Paper-Camera’ aside from resizing is straight from the camera (via Paper Camera). My subject, the local concrete makers. Situated on a busy corner, I never get the chance to stop for a photo when driving past regularly – that’s one bonus about being out on a cycle – one can stop with ease, and moving slower you take notice of more sites that one may miss when travelling by motor.

  • Welcome to My House

    I took a stroll into part of Unsworth Reserve today after work. I have passed it may times throughout the years, but never stopped. A great little bush, albeit easy to walk down a dead end track. On my return leg I dove down another dead end path and came across this seat in the middle of no where.

    How it got there I don’t know, but it made me think of the storybook ‘where the wild things are’, and various articles I have read about people who essentially abandon society and go bush (or desert, or island etc).

    Depending how one looks at it, its either a slightly creepy image, or a cool one, imagining oneself waking up in the forest and sitting down for a morning cuppa on your couch.

    In gimp I played around with levels and added a vignette lomo filter. The focus of the image was not quite right, but I liked the content, so ran with it anyway for today.