Japan 2009
Last month my girlfriend and I took a month off work and spent the majority of it over in the wonderful country of Japan. The timing of the trip wasn’t purely co-incidental, with the late March - early April period being peak cherry blossom season. Cherry Blossom typically only last on the tree for a few days to a week, so the viewing period is pretty narrow. The cherry blossoms actually start blooming in the lower, more southern parts of Japan and work their way up north towards the cooler parts of the country. Needless to say, Cathy gave me a large amount of grief over the large number of cherry blossom photos I took!
We both had a great time in Japan, it is a photographers dream. If you want to take pictures of nature or historic buildings, there is plenty of that. If you want take street portraits, there is plenty of that too. With a never ending supply of kooky and crazy things (well from an Australian perspective anyway) you will need to have your camera with you 24×7!
Here are a couple samples below, the rest you can see here.
A Cadillac Wedding
Anyone who knows me, knows I am a sucker for nice cars. So imagine how happy I was shooting the beautiful Cadillacs (and bride and groom of course!) that Victor and Marie had hired for their wedding. Despite beign rather warm on the day, I think everyone would have pleased it wasn’t the day after, when temperatures in Melbourne hit 47 degrees C. Samples from the day have been uploaded on to my site and can be viewed here.
Nicole and Sam’s Wedding Photos
Well after a few issues on my end to do with my webserver, I have finally managed to post the photos taken from Nicole and Sam’s wedding back in December 2008. Some samples of the day are shown below and further samples can be see here.
Paige and Daniel
In November of this year, Paige and Daniel were married in rather different surrounds - the Melbourne Aquarium! I have to say it was a lot of fun to see sharks, rays and all sorts of fish swimming all around the room. It was certainly a conversation point for the rest of the night!
We also took a number of photos around the Botanical Gardens, with Paige and Daniel being real troopers despite intermittent rain we were battling against. Photos from the day can be see here.
Some more recent Panographs
These were taken only this week. Generally stiched from 4 or 5 photos
…and another random non panograph shot from Sydney’s Darling Harbour.
An old panograph
I took this photo a number of years ago down in Phillip Island Victoria. It was originally a sequence of 3 photos which I had tried to stitch together into a single image without a lot of luck. Lucky for me, software and my photoshop skills have improved, resulting in the image below. This shot really makes me want to get back out and take some more wide photos of our great country!
. More digital manipulation…
On a photo retouching forum of a well know photography site, a picture was recently posted of a woman, who I am guessing would be mid 30’s to early 40’s. The poster, the woman’s husband, asked if people on the forum could spare some time to “retouch” the photo. I always find these types of challenges interesting, and can often be a great learning experience, so I thought I would give it a challenge.
I thought the readers of this page may find it interesting to understand that the way people, women especially, are portrayed in magazines and other publications, can be very different to reality or how the person was shot by the camera. I think the general public is slowly waking up to the fact that manipulation is happening regularly on most, dare I say all, commercial pictures we see.
You can see the results of my work below, a number of things were modified from the original image. The most obvious is the skin. This has been smoothed, and generally made to look younger. The lines under her eyes have been softened, and her eyes have been “sharpened” to give them more of an apparent sparkle. The original image has a slightly cool blue cast, so this was changed to a warmer yellow/red colour, hopefully closer to her real skin colour. Finally the background was slightly darkened to add emphasis to the woman in the centre.
Original Image
Manipulated image
Daniel and Kelly … married!
Well I had an excellent day shooting Daniel and Kelly’s wedding. The weather played along beautifully, we had a great bridal party and some interesting locations to shoot. I am sure everyone had a fantastic time! My shots of the day are here.
To help the bridal couple remember everyone on the day of the wedding, I usually try and get around to most of the guests. If you were there, you might like to see if you can find yourself here!
Joe and Annie’s Wedding Photos
A little while back I had the pleasure of photographing Joe and Annie’s wedding. Congratulations guys! The photos of the day can be found here, and if you were a guest at the wedding, you may like to have a look at these family and friends shots.
