My Blog

Yep, my trusty 40D is officially goosed, nackered, buggered, no longer working, passed on to the great camera shack in the sky.. as is the lens and the polarising filter that was attached.
I took them all into the local camera shop who are really brilliant, explained what happened and after the obvious questions:
Did you get the shot, you know that for underwater photography you need a special camera, etc etc they quietly bowed their heads , joined hands and offered me a discount on the new Canon 50D which i the replacement or the 40D.
Then they kindly gave me a valuation and note to give the the friendly insurance company to say it's dead and you should buy him a new one, which is nice. (the 50D has a 15.4mega pixel sensor vs my current 10!!).

So.. stay tuned!

Well I was up early yesterday and up early today for more images and I'm pretty happy with those I have for a project I'm working on.
Satisfied with what i had I ventured to Hagley Park to capture form frosty images of the park & the light on the trees when i noticed the fab light on the weeping willows and the mist rising off the River Avon,. Excited i pulled the truck over and headed down to the river to try and find the right shot, I had my fav lens on the Sigma 10-20.. it's fantastic and for me produces really nice blues.
Not happy with what i was getting I turned to get a grad filter from the bag to let me pull the sky down a little when I heard one of those sounds you just don't ever want to hear...... SPLASH..... I turned hoping to see a duck swimming away from me, startled from the bank.. but no. All I could see were the legs of my tripod popping out of the Avon, held steady by the weight at the other end that was my Canon 40D and favourite Sigma lens....

well I’ve been working away a fair bit on the website to get the galleries up and going and of course the downloads / shopping area – that isn’t working quite yet. One of the things that tends to happen a lot to me is rediscovering old images that I’d filed away for either a later date or I didn’t see anything there and really meant to delete them. As luck would have it I didn’t delete these ones which really for me give a good example of why I tend not to delete but keep going back and back again as I learn new techniques to work in lightroom or photoshop.

This one for instance I’m really quite liking and can’t wait till I get it to the point where I’m ready to print it, it’s probably going to need to be a min of A3, depending on how that looks it may get to canvas but we’ll see.

This started as a fairly mundane image that I’d captured with a few , well about 20 or so shots of the same area and I’d done some work on another of the images and won an award at the photo club for that one but I hadn’t done much else, lazy I guess. I got some fab software from OnOne and have now set about reworking a bunch of images that I’d put to the side. Below is another….

As I’ve mentioned in other places, the thing about some images is that you make them and you look at them and think either… nothing there, yet you don’t delete them or you think.. there is something there and I just haven’t figured out what it is or how i want to get the image to look.

This seems to be happening a lot for me at the moment, I’m finding that as I tidy up my image archives, currently sitting a tad over 7000 images of which I’m trying to kill half of them some images pop up and catch my attention. This happened the other week when I was working on the laptop on some images I’d done for a wide angled detail project (yes detail shots with a wide angle 10mm lens… nice!). I came a cross some images that I’d taken in Sept 2006 all based around a bottle of Scapa Malt Whisky my father had left here when he visited and it was around the time we first found out he had cancer.

It was really the 1st time I went out with a specific, intention in mind to make an image I could dedicate I guess, but really wasn't sure what i wanted. I did in the end, come up with an image that I liked at  the time, my young brother really likes it. Anyway the other day I sat down with these images again and within maybe an hour I’d reworked a couple of them to come up with something new that i have to say I love to bits, far better than the original concept and images.

Entitled Slàinte maith which means Good Health, this is far closer to what i think this image is all about for me. It's got a nice balance, it’s all about the drink here or rather the toast. I’m not trying to make an add for the drink but it’s just got  a nice restful feel about it which when your sharing a dram with someone is what it’s about, it’s that relaxing and restful sense with good friends.

So the website has taken a bit of a back seat of late due to a number of things, not least of all Emily’s impending arrival (and all the assorted DIY involved in that) then of course her arrival and to be honest I’ve been completely delighted to just sit & watch here, and I’ve also helped set up another photography club in NZ called Photography with Pixels (www.photopnz.com) which is all geared towards digital photography and is very web based so I’ve done a lot of development on that website, so what about my own?…

Well it’s coming…. One of thing things I tend to struggle with is wanting to have as much of it ready as I can for the relaunch, I’m now I think come to the decision that I just need to get what I have back up there and let people see what I’ve been working on and some of the new images that area around on the site. So I’m planning to try and get the site up and running over  the weekend.

The site has got a whole new look and feel to it, it’s faster, more user friendly (I Hope) and easier for me to keep up to date which is important. I toyed with moving the blog into it as well but so far I’ve resisted the move but I’ve got

• Completely new site
• New Gallery layout
• An improved contact me option to just give feedback or for image sales & licensing
• Downloads section where people will be able to download a few images for things like your desktop

I’m still working on

• A new sales desk
• A new feedback and comments section, the idea of this is that people will be able to go there, look at some images and give me feedback on them, tell me what you think and don’t like…. I’m a big boy, I can take it!
• A new site comments area where visitors can leave me some notes to say hello….

I’ve been doing a fair bit of assorted image making & taking.. the two below are I guess two ends of the spectrum, one is my fully into my passion for landscape, This was captured out behind Christchurch but I’ve done a bit of work on it to get the image to what I was actually picturing / feeling at the time. This is very much as a result of work I’ve been doing with Tony Bridge who has been a bit of a mentor for me in my photography.