Have been out of action completely this week so no new photos. I have had a chance to go back and do some editing and look at photos of a recent trip so the only opportunity I might get photography wise might be to do some more editing. Anyway, here’s one of a rickshaw in Tokyo. I just started listening to a podcast on the art of photography and its been great but from what I can gather, I think this image falls well short of the rules of composition but I like the way I somehow managed to capture one of the passenger’s hands pointing at something for the other passenger.

Cheers.

This week’s post is nature photography although given the subject it could easily be portraiture. Had a great time taking photos of the snow monkeys near Nagano.

A little late posting this week that’s because I have been out taking heaps of photos and not had chance to sit down and look at them. I am really lucky at the moment as I am away on a trip to Tokyo which must be a would-be amateur photographer’s dream. Tokyo is a mega-city and you just have to experience it to feel what that means, especially coming from the quite small city that I live in. Photography opportunities are boundless – the sights, the people, the culture, the food and it just goes on and on. Then there are the camera stores!
So this week’s photo is simply one of the first that I shot. When I look at it, it’s not a great shot and probably full of mistakes but it’s from the mistakes that I am learning. The composition is not that great and neither is the focus – focus is one of those areas I really have to work on (as is composition)
What I like about it though is for me it captures the moment I was experiencing, the busy pedestrian crossing with the train passing by overhead and the somewhat muted bright lights of Akihabara. I have been here before and the neon lights were something to be seen to be believed but at this time they appear a little muted.
I have so many pictures that I have taken and can’t wait to get home to do some post-processing. I am really interested in street photography and black and white in particular however for some of my Tokyo street shots, I think it is the amazing colours that actually make the shots – colour seems to have such an important role here. Looking at street photography on forums etc there is a huge difference between most of my shots and what others are able to achieve. While they often look opportunistic and candid, images from people interested in street photography seem to have great composition and a great deal of thought, planning and experience seems to have gone into the amazing images they are producing.

Well this is going to be an interesting project and one that I will try to document along the way. I just bought a 1966 MGB to take on as a restoration project. The car is supposed to run pretty well but is in need of some attention to the paint and interior. Last weekend I drove about 8ookm to have a look at it and it did look ok. I guess when you buy a 45 year old car you know you are in for some work and expenses. This week I went back there to purchase it. It really was a question of planes, trains and automobiles to get to the farm where it was located and had been sitting in a shed for the past 2-3 years.
It was going to be an 800km drive to get it home – trailering it was going to be difficult as I couldn’t find a one-way hire trailer anywhere near and moving by truck proved difficult as they wouldn’t take anything extra in the car (such as the tonneau, workshop manuals, spare parts etc).
Driving in the middle of an Australian summer through quite remote areas is challenging enough for new vehicles let alone older ones. Finding out that the temperature guage wasn’t working didn’t make me feel any better either. The farmer who owned the MG had never put the roof on and when I looked at it I wasn’t keen on it either – the stiching had come undone in a number of places and well, basically it stank, Seems like it had been sitting on the floor of his shed for a long time. The interior seemed to have been home to one of the farm animals and was covered in hair (dog’s or cat’s I am guessing).
Once we had settled the change over I took off for home and a few 100 metres down the street tried to turn the headlights on since I was going to be travelling well into the night to take advantage of the cooler temperatures. They didn’t work! Back to the farmers and guess what? They worked when he put them on.
So off I went on the first leg of my 800km trip (about 440km). Since I wasn’t confident with the car and was worried about it overheating I tried to keep the speed down to around 80km/h which meant I was in for a long stint at the wheel. About 200km later I thought I would fill up with petrol at one of the few towns that I would be passing through. It was about 9.15pm and well and truly dark so you can imagine how I felt when after filling up with fuel and resuming my trip the headlights wouldn’t work. I decided to back track a few 100 metres to a couple of hotels on the outskirts of town to stay overnight since obviously I couldn’t go anywhere without headlights. A few metres down the road the lights came on so I decided I was just going to keep driving and not turn anything off.
Driving at night in the Australian outback can be quite beautiful as the skies are so clear and filled with stars. In the open top MG this seemed great however driving at night can be very dangerous because of the animals that tend to hop in front of your car at the most inconvenient time. Kangaroos and other animals are quite active at night (particularly dusk and dawn). Normally I drive a 4wd in the country which is much safer than an MG so it was quite a stressful 400 or so km but I made it to my first destination without any further mishaps.
The next leg was going to be more difficult as the weather was really starting to heat up and the last place you want to have an overheated engine is in country South Australia in the middle of summer. For this leg I put the roof on as the sun can be quite overbearing and I also started my trip predawn to take advantage of the cooler temperatures. There were a few close calls with kangaroos (one dangerously close) so I had to travel very slowly until the sun got quite hot and the roos rested for the day.
A few hundred kilometres on I had to cross a river by ferry and while I was waiting for the ferry and then travelling on it something in the engine compartment overheated and the engine stalled and wouldn’t start again. As I was on the ferry this mean’t a few trips back and forwards across the river until whatever it was cooled down enough to start the car again. I think it may have been the coil.

The MG doesn’t have any heating or cooling – the only thing it does have is free flowing hot air from the engine compartment into the dirver’s seat area so you can imagine how hot I was starting to feel – this was not a pleasant drive!

Anyway, I made it back home where I started to uncover some of the other things that need attention – I think it’s going to be a pretty long list and will keep me busy for some time to come. I hope I have the patience to see the restoration through until the end as it will be a great little car by then.

Continuing the theme of HDR this week’s photo is a 1966 MGB Mk1 which is part of another project but that’s a whole other story. I am not sure if I am a fan of HDR or not but I do really like what some HDR photographers do with vehicles. Architecture, machinery and vehicles of all kinds seem to make great subjects for the creative/expressive side of HDR. Many photographers in the forums that I read seem to shun this very expressive form of photography and seem to insist that HDR should be the pursuit of realistic dynamic range. Those photos do look great but I love seeing people cut loose with the expressive side of it. Photography is an art and the right to manipulate your images as much as you like to achieve the look you are after is central to that. While some HDR may not appeal to all it is important to remember that the images hobbyists work on is their expression of their vision and I think its great that people commit the time to working on it and sharing it.
Cheers,
Jerry

Travelling through country Victoria on the weekend I came across this great old abandoned hut but it was fenced off with barbed wire from the road so it was difficult to get some really interesting shots without trying to clamber over the fence and trespassing. The hut was well obscured by overgrown shrubs as well which was a real pity. I would have loved to wander around it as there was some great textures in the timbers and interesting shadows. It was a pretty overcast morning with mist hanging around and I only could take a few shots. For fun I set my camera to take 3 shots using exposure bracketing to see if I could make the photo a bit more expressive using some HDR techniques. This was a handheld shot so I used the camera’s built in exposure bracketing which unfortunately only give a bracketing range of +- 0.7 EV which is quite limiting (cmon Sony its not much of a software fix to improve that).
I have Nik Software’s bundle so loaded the three images into HDR Efex Pro to see what I could do with it and then tinkered around with one of the presets for a few minutes until I got this look which kind of captured the feeling of the morning and place. It’s by no means a good HDR image (google them and you will see what I mean) but it made an interesting shot for the week.

You can see some pretty ugly dust spots in the above image. For my camera, to remove dust its a matter of cleaning the sensor with a little brush tool and blower that you can get from any camera store and as it turns out, quite a lot of patience. Some of the spots just did not want to come off. I have a mirrorless camera which probably makes the job a bit easier than on a DSLR as with that you may have dust on the sensor and the mirror. The camera cleaning kit I bought had some cotton buds in it too and I ended up giving the sensor quite a cleaning with that to remove some of the more stubborn spots. The instructions for cleaning the sensor on the website for for my camera did not include this approach so I was a bit hesitant as to whether I should do it or not but it seemed to have worked well enough and not done any damage that I can see.
Some dust wouldn’t go so I had to check my lenses too. This is easy – just take some photos say of a bright blue sky with a really small aperture and you can easily see the dust – if its in different places on shots with different lenses you know the dust is on the lens. I was really careful with the back of the lenses though. In all I took about 38 shots with cleaning in between to get rid of pretty much most of the dust across the three lenses I use and the sensor. This wasn’t a particularly exciting weekly project but its one that I am very glad I did and am very happy with the result.

Since my week 1 photo did have some interesting colours in it before I converted it to black and white I did a colour version too. I then experimented a bit trying to find a better crop and also played with NIK Software’s sharpening tool to see if I could sharpen part of the image. I never seem to be able to create beautifully sharp images and this is something I really want to improve. I have to work on improving focus a lot. In the colour image I used selective sharpening on the output. This is the first time I have ever used a sharpening tool and I have to say, when I look at the before and after versions of the photo I can’t see any difference.
Out of the two photos I actually prefer the ‘crop’ for the black and white image – it is the entire image and to me looks a bit better with the path leading away.

Seems like the start of the year is a good time to embark on a new project so here I am going to try and do a ‘project 52′ related to photography. Initially I thought I would do one photo per week but having attempted a p365 (one photo a day) once before I am not looking forward to try to create 52 great photos. Sometimes I think you can’t put a time line on creativity – especially on personal projects when so much else might be happening. So this ‘project 52′ is to try to do something each week related to photography in order to learn more and hopefully become a better photographer. This week (week 1) I took a few photos of a household object and tried to play with depth of field to draw the attention to the object itself.

For post-processing I thought I would convert it to black and white and experiment with that a bit.