I’ve been pretty busy the last few weeks. I have started volunteering my spare time to my church in helping out with our Food Care ministry which provides very cheap food to low income families. On top of that I have also starting helping out with the IT equipment and other technical problems. As of this week I am now head of IT for the church, and I’m loving it, though this is not a real job, it’s still a voluntary position.
Almost two weeks ago I got my new HOYA Close Up Filter set consisting of +1, +2 and +4 filters. These filters are great and really help out with macro photos that I have been trying to take. Here is a shot of a seaside daisy from my front garden with the +2 and +4 filters attached, oh, and this flower is approx. 1 inch in diameter.
All I have to say about these filters is that I’m going to have a lot of fun with them. I’m planing on one day soon going to the botanic gardens in Wollongong for a few hours and see what I can do.
I’m currently really enjoying night photography. I don’t know why, but there is something about the peacefullness at night time. The air is clear, there isn’t as much noise about, it’s just relaxing.
Here is another photo I took the other day. The sun had just set beind the mountains about 45 minutes before. I was trying to make it in time to get some sunset photos, but got held up and missed out.
Tonight (May 9th) is a full moon, so I’m going out again to see what great shots I can get. My current camera, a Fujifilm finepix S9500, as most cameras, has a Bulb setting, but for some reason, it has a time limit of 30 seconds, which is pretty useless, so I’m only currently able to do a maxium eposure length of 30 seconds.
I’m planing on getting a new camera possible towards the end of the year, something along a Canon 50D. That way I’d be able to take some better photos.
Time-lapse photography is a cinematography technique whereby each film frame is captured at a rate much slower than it will be played back. When replayed at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and thus lapsing. Time-lapse photography can be considered to be the opposite of high speed photography.
A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon a video called Bathtub IV by Ketih Loutit (see video below) on Vimeo. What grabed my attention is that it wasn’t filmed with a normal video camera, but with a Digital SLR and time-lapse photography and use of a tilt-shift lens giving the impression that you are looking at a scale model. Since then, I’ve been facinated with time-lapse photography, and would love to try some myself, but unfortunatly my camera lacks the function. So until I can afford to purchase a new Digital SLR, I’ll have to settle watching other peoples videos.
Today I came across Ross Ching who also does some time-lapse photography. His latest work Eclectic 3.0 is also mind blowing. He using a telescope paning tripod and has some amazing shots. Video below.
Now that I have a tripod, night time photography is much much easier, no more blurry shots!!
Here are 2 photos that I’ve uploaded onto my Flickr account that I took with my new tripod (see previous post). Both photos turned out well, and of the two, I like the one on the right the most.
Click on the photos to go to the flickr page. Please leave any comments you have on the photo page.
Tomorrow is my birthday (yes, 28 yrs old) and my wife decided to buy me something that I’ve wanted for a while now, a tripod for my camera, so today we went out and had a look around. She gave me the chance to choose what one I would like. I ended up getting a Manfrotto 190XB with a 804RC2 Head. I don’t know a lot about tripods, but so far, I’m liking it. It’s pretty solid, and has a level bubble to make sure that your photos are level.
I haven’t had a chance to take any photos with it yet, but I’m hoping that I’ll get some good ones. I’ll upload them to my flickr account, so keep an eye out for them.
Seems I have a bit of a cloud fetish. Every time I get a hold of a camera and there are some really cool clouds about, I get happy snappy crazy!!! Below are a couple of photos that I took yesterday with a friends camera.
Please let me know what you think. Am I a sucky photographer??
