CDB Photo Archive

More photos of my favourite niece!

I uploaded a number of other images here

As a few of you know, I have spending a quite a few of weekends up at Wild Duck Creek Estate, helping David and Liam Anderson with the production of their fantastic wine. This weekend, I brought the camera up and took a few photos of what was going on - namely the picking of shiraz grapes from the Original Shiraz Vineyard at the winery, and then onto picking malbec and shiraz grapes at the Yellow Hammer Hill vineyard. Despite the heat, everyone was in fine spirits and a we got a large amount picked.

Shiraz grapes…

David Anderson

and his son Liam

rest of the photos here

Well so much for scouting around in nice sunny weather (see my last post). When Doug and Mary’s big day came around, the rain put a serious dampener on a lot of the ideas I had in my head. Nevertheless, the day went ahead despite the torrential rain and gusty winds. Everyone survived and had a great time, myself included. We did catch a very lucky break when the rain stopped and we even saw some blue sky for half an hour. We did a mad dash down to a nearby beach and were rewarded with some opportunities. Here are some samples from the day, the rest of the pictures are here. If you were a guest, you might like to see the family and friends section also.

In preparation for a wedding I am shooting tomorrow, I have been down at Phillip Island checking at locations. Here’s a few photos I took while I was down there.

Most of these were taken on Churchill Island, the location for the wedding.

In the same vain as my last post, here is the video slideshow I created for Beatrice and Charles.

These photos were taken at Charles and Beatrice’s Wedding which I posted about a while back.

When I shoot a wedding, I typically create a video slideshow of the pictures I took on the day set to music of the couples choosing. In this case, I haven’t had a chance to chat to the couple so the music was the song playing when Katrina entered the ceremony and secondly their bridal waltz. Usually these videos are given to the couple as a DVD, but I thought I’d try a new, additional form of delivery. Katrina and Greg, hope you enjoy this.

I have always been interested in photo manipulation, even before I had my first digital camera. It was probably around 1994 and I remember hanging out at friend’s place who was into creating some very trippy digital art pieces. He would create a composite image consisting of many different abstract images cut & paste and layered many times into interesting patterns to form a new image. The end result, as was his style, ended up looking like something I imagine you see on an acid trip, but was pretty cool never the less.
This was my first real exposure to Adobe’s magnificent Photoshop product and I remember being rather bewildered by the confusing interface and huge array of functionality that was never obvious at first glance how it functioned. I tended just to play around, clicking random functions to see what happened. I would start with a photo, click all the different filters and see the crazy and weird things you could do. But I never really had a goal of changing the image for a specific purpose.
Of course fast forward to 2007, and manipulation of images is standard behaviour for probably most art and all advertising. Photojournalism is holding out of course. Most newspapers publicly disclose their stance on digital editing, or lack there of, and I agree with them. I think the public deserve to see what happened as the photographer pushed the shutter button, not a manipulation of an image that could potentially change the meaning of the scene. In fact, several years back, a photographer was fired from the LA Times for merging two photos and creating an image that ended up on the front cover of the paper. When the truth came out, his career was basically ruined.
However, I am not a photo journalist, so I think everything is pretty much fair game! In an effort to improve my skills, I have been putting some entries into “chop shop” competitions on a popular car forum. The basic gist of the competition is this. The organiser gives a base image of a car, and you can then go away, do what ever you like to it, but make it look cooler! (which of course is very subjective!) Here’s a sample of one I have done. Here is the original.

This obviously came from some VW catalogue I’m guessing as it looks like it has already had some serious edit work done it :) Anyway, I decided I wanted to change the colour of the car and put it on a new and more interesting background and generally make the car look a bit more sporting. Here’s my attempt at it, I know its not perfect, but I am not getting payed big money to do this sort of thing professionally!

Lets analyse what was done to make this photo different. The obvious ones are the background and the colour of the car. I cut the car from the original picture and pasted it onto a new picture of an empty road with nice blue sky. The trick bit here is obviously making sure the shadows come across and show up on the new background properly. The even trickier part is the car windows. I had to make it so you knew the windows were there, but still be able to see through them to the new background picture. This was done was a change of opacity of the car window section of the photo, along with some blue tint.
I also knew I wanted to put a new body kit on the car, so I hunted around the web looking for images of VW Beetles with body kits in a similar position to my original image. When I found one I liked, I cut it out modified front bumper and side skirts and carefully pasted them on my image. These need to be ’scaled’ and ‘warped’ to match the shape and size of my car.

I then decided some new wheels where in order. These ones where donated from a picture of nice Porsche Turbo :) Again these needed to be scaled to fit my car and ‘warped’ so that the perspective was right.
The colours were then changed using some Photoshop colour filters. The final step was to create some very faint reflections on the bonnet of the clouds above so that it was more believable that the car was actually parked there when the photo was taken.

All up this probably took about 4 hrs work and taught me a number of new skills that might help me make a more interesting image in the future!

About a month ago, I had the honour of photographing Katrina and Greg’s wedding. The ceremony was held in Greg’s parent’s beautiful gardens in Mt Evelyn. This was a beautiful, photogenic location and the couple was blessed with fantastic weather for the day. Here are a number of photos from the day, I hope you enjoy them.

Update: Please see this post for a video slideshow of some of Katrina and Greg’s wedding photos.

Hey guys, for quite a while I have had problems with spammers putting loads of advertising comments on posts on this site. As a result I turned off the comment ability, which meant nobody could write anything at all. I have now added a new spam filter to try and stop this, and all posts you make will come to me first for moderation. So please, feel free to comment away again. I’m going to add one to this pic …

Chang’s Lexus.