“The Refinery’ comes from yesterdays walk at the Chelsea Park – which belonged to the Chelsea Sugar works. Built in 1884, and added to later on, CSW is our biggest supplier of sugar. As well as being a bright orange in colour, I was drawn to mishmash of buildings, knowing that each serves a purpose in the production run.
Playing around in Gimp, I added a few cross-processing layers and slightly tweaked the colour balance. Lastly I added a light vignette.
Been a long day, not much more to add.
With a nice and clear, but cool sky, we took a stroll down to Chelsea Park. Walking a few tracks I didn’t cover on my last visit I brought along the Sony Nex and its new telephoto lens. When I tried it out earlier in the week the low sun, combined with hand holding and limited wildlife made me want to give it another go today. Down at the bottom of the reserve is a large pond full of ducks, seagulls, shags, geese and a few swans – so I was spoilt for choice and shot images of each.
I chose today’s image ‘Black Swan’ as I was drawn to the composition and the ripples of water softly emanating from the swan. In post production, using Gimp, I used the National Geographic filter set, making small adjustments to its use of sharpness, saturation and contrast. I also cropped the image slightly to remove the foot of the swan which interfered with the soft ripples of the water.
I’m quite happy with the result, and the performance of the lens at 210mm.
Each passing day sees more and more spring blossoms coming out on the trees. Around Auckland’s North Shore has seen a mass of these pretty pink flowers. I have been meaning to stop and capture them for the last week, so took the opportunity today when in Takapuna.
Shot on the GDR IV, in gimp I slightly bumped the contrast up and resized for the web.
I also took delivery on some fun mobile phone camera lenses today.A macro, wide angle and fish-eye, all found on ebay. A quick test suggests they are very capable for the price, so I look forward to the opportunity to get out there and capture something worth showing to you all.
I had noticed a number of macro images used in artistic ‘landscape like’ was when surfing around recently and had a bit of a muck around this evening with my own version of it. Starting with a macro shot of real landscape, at the beach, I went about creating a shot that would not necessarily look like a close up of water running down into the sea. Removing the background, pushing contrast of the foreground, adding a red smudge to the background, and a cross-processing filter to the lot. I result has a bit of a weird Martian landscape feel to it.
As I often state on weekdays, I just managed to get a bit of light after work on the way home. I had packed my Nex and its new lens into my bag, hoping to give it a test out. Whilst I did manage that, and got some nice shots (and some flat sundown ones) I wanted to post up something different to my usual nature/landscape. With the lens at 210mm I set about looking for some wildlife. It proved quite still and dull overall tonight.
Just as I was heading back to the car a few seagulls approached and I managed to get off a few shots. With low light and a long lens the autofocus just missed a number of shots, but I did like this one of the bird heading ‘into the storm’.
In post processing using Gimp all I did was push the contrast to make it look more menacing than it actually was. Shot at 210mm, 1/400sec at 1250iso the push also revealed the digital grain of the image. I’m a grain fan in photos (that old film appeal) so am happy letting it sit.
In about 3 weeks I’m off to Fiji for a week, which is pretty exciting as I have never been there. My current dilemma is do I take a bag full of cameras and lenses, or travel more lightweight (with the added benefit of not carrying so much money investment!). I’m leaning towards taking my Ricoh GRD and my Rollei 35. I’ll also have my smart phone to hopefully post a snap each day also. When I went to the South Island last year I only had my Ricoh and Mju 35mm – I think the compact allows you to travel with ease and think more about how to capture the image. What do you all do?
MikeHawkey.com 