Gearing up....

....for a cookie Christmas!!! It's going to be a good one this year now both kids are old enough to know what's happening :)

A disaster and new start!

I managed to lose 12 months worth of photo's after a failed backup. Stupid, stupid thing to do, I know that but it is gutting knowing I lost all those images of the kids :(

Anyway....onwards and upwards so I decided to try presenting my images a little differently than I usually do with mini storyboards. I think they are pretty neat!

Moshi!!!!

My son now has an obsession with Moshi Monsters. I surprised him this morning with some new ones, but he had to hunt them down as they had escaped into the garden! Great fun!!!

Sunday was a special day....

...a wedding!! Victoria and Daryl's wedding to be specific. I knew that if I took all my camera gear, i'd get carried away and miss out on the spirit of the occasion, so borrowed my brothers Cybershot for the occasion. I'm so glad I made that decision, the reasons to which i'll explain in a minute, but first......

    

                                               

Usually when using my camera gear, I get carried away and totally immersed in what i'm doing and can easily be oblivious to things going on around me. I didn't on Sunday and I gained so much...The ceremony was a beautiful civil affair, and later on a discrete but very emotional blessing ceremony was held in the garden. 

Unfortunately, someone very special to Victoria couldn't be there. Jane, a very close friend of Victoria was cruelly taken away from us on 25th July 2010. There was a very special, and certainly emotional (but happy!) feeling to the day, something I just can't put my finger on. I had never even met Jane, but I think she was there with everyone on Sunday.

I would just like to thank Victoria and Daryl for letting us be part of their day, and would like to wish them all the best for the future!!!! Rock on!

Jane's story can be found here, please visit and show your support for John and Penny. A Facebook page can also be found here. 

Portrait session

Offered to do a portrait session for a very old friend (not insinuating she's ancient or anything!!) to try and get some practice in. Attempted to use a clamshell setup for the lights, but a 30mm is much too short for it so abandoned that pretty much straight away!

Really need to look into some ideas for backgrounds. White/black are the classic backgrounds but i'm starting to get a bit fed up with them to be honest.....patterns might be the way to go....or even outdoors if the weather ever sorts itself out!!!

Selfie!!

I really despise having my photo taken. I resemble the back end of a bus. I find it even harder trying to do a self portrait and find it more difficult than it really should be.

Anyway, seeing as I need the practise and there's no-one else to practise on, I didn't have much choice! Set-up was K7 and Sigma 30mm f1.4 on a tripod set to interval shooting (which is really handy as you can fire a sequence of shots and it will autofocus itself before each one!), Yongnuo trigger to a Nikon SB-24 flash, housed in a gridded Phottix softbox.

New Lights!!!

Not overly convinced by my set of Ez-flo continuous lights, i've progressed onto a Lencarta Smartflash. Better light output, and more flexible! The first shot is through a Phottix 70x70 softbox with white reflector and the second is via a shoot through umbrella with reflector (clamshell setup used for both).

I've got a shoot on Thursday night, so needed a bit of practice!!!

The Wedding

The whole reason behind the South Africa trip was to attend my sister-in-laws wedding. As i've been asked to shoot weddings before and flat out refused because of a total lack of experience, I saw it as a prime opportunity to get some. Couldn't get all the shots I wanted as I didn't want to upset the official tog too much (name of Christopher Munton, quite a nice guy and a damn good photographer to boot, some of the pics are on his blog here)!!! Would love to get the experience to produce shots like that.

Great experience, just a shame I only had the 30mm to work with, quite restrictive, especially in the church.....

Daydreaming!

Doing nothing gets you nowhere, I need practise if i'm going to get anywhere.....so I decided to get out the lighting set-up and persuade my wife to pose for a shot. As I only really do casual studio stuff from home (and the fact i'm skint) meant that the Jessops vouchers I won from Photo Answers magazine last year bought me a set of Interfit Ez-Flo lights. Not the best by any stretch, but the soft continuous light means shooting at wide apertures is easy-peasy!!!

Continuous light at head level at around 8 o'clock, with a white reflector at around 4 o'clock. White balance set to Daylight and ISO400. Sigma 30mm, shot at f1.4 at 1/3200s.

Straight from camera...

After post-processing....slight crop, level adjust on the background to darken it a little, some softening and dodging and burning.....

Out of Africa!

Having just returned from a wedding trip to South Africa, I find i'm still trudging through loaddddssss of images. Some are worth keeping, alot aren't!

The following two pics, aside from some wedding shots, are probably my favourites. The first is of a White Lion cub take at The Rhino and Lion Nature Reserve in Gauteng, Johannesburg. This little guy was really placid and posed for me no problem (shame his sibling wasn't and ripped my shorts!).

Processed in CS3, slight sharpening and a contrast boost to bring out more fur detail, the run through Dynamic Photo HDR to further improve the contrast and tones......

And secondly, a street beggar in Cape Town. I have an immense fear of heights, so as my Stu and Jono climbed (yes climbed) Table Mountain, I wussed out and went window shopping on the Waterfront. There happened to be a band playing on the front, when a frail beggar (and his wobbly crutch) hobbled up and started busting some moves. As he sat down for a rest I took the opportunity to ask him for a pose in exchange for 5 rand. No worries!

Again, processed in CS3, DP HDR, then back into CS3 for some dodging and burning to bring out some more skin detail. One bad habit of mine is always converting portraits to mono, but on this occasion I actually preferred the colour version. A couple of people asked for a mono conversion, so I obliged. I'll post them both up and you can make your own mind up.....

Here Goes...

What am I doing? Goodness knows......It's about time I got into blogging, so here goes. I'm not a professional photographer, I just do it for the love of creating (well trying to) images to document my life. A heck of a lot of my images are of my children, but i'll shoot anything that's available to me at the time.


At the moment, I exclusively shoot with a Sigma 30mm f1.4, with as wide an aperture as possible. If it means sticking my ND4 filter on so that I can shoot at f1.4, then so be it :)


I'll post up my first pics now I suppose, a trip to the local playpark with my 2 and 4 year old.....precious times.