Early Arrival

Flying into sydney just on dawn

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Crossing Jakarta on a Sunday

If you are taking photos from a moving car it can be hard to avoid blurred objects, particularly those close to you. As the light was failing in a typical hazy evening in Jakarta I got lots of fuzzy vechilces but I as left them in this series as the add to the confusion. They convey the darting and erratic traffic better than prefectly exposed images might.

Series of "sunday evening traffic in jakarta" on the way to the airport, for photofriday topic :chaos

Up the creek

Up the creek
Originally uploaded by imageo.

This photon was taken up a small tributary in a mangrove swamp, on the east coast of kalimantan, at low tide.

I was looking to create a abstract composition of three layers. There is a theory that placing strongs changes (such as the horizon) at the upper or lower third position makes for a more interesting composition. I think it worked.


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Cutting through the haze

Original sky
Originally uploaded by imageo.

At the moment in south east asia, it is towards the end of the "drier" season and the air is very hazy with dust and smoke, from forest fires. So the sky is perpetually grey and makes for boring washed out looking photos. So I have cheated in the photo below. I added the blue sky using a gradient tint (this example was created with picasa) If you look closely you will notice it has tinted everything, including the roof of the ferry terminal and nearby lighting tower. Since the roof is strong and dark it doesn't detract from the overall image.




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The Orchid Garden

The orchird garden, Terminal 2 Changi Airport

Late afternoon, central Australia.

Late afternoon, central Australia.
Originally uploaded by imageo.

I had a lot of difficulty trying to find this on google earth and therefore my geotagged location might not be reliable, going mainly on flight times I'm pretty sure this must be near flinders ranges.

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Pretty in pink (&red)

The one takes shape

P8070585
Originally uploaded by imageo.

I've been busy sculpting a one and a zero, as street numbers for my place.

They will be eventually covered in mosaics. The one will be a sea horse and the zero a crab! Thats the plan, but at the moment they are just at the chicken wire covered with hessian and plaster stage.

Its all a bit of a coincidence because the photofriday topic is one



This composite photo was created with picasa collage

Rain drops keep falling

Dont't put your camera away when it starts to rain. Get up close!

Panorama: Towards Wilson's Prom

You will definitely need to click on this image to see the higher resolution version, to appreciate it.

I have an aolympus camera and it has a panorama mode buiolt it to help you both position the camera and maintain exposure settings during the photography and a simple to use bit of software that helps "automatically" assemble the images into a single picture on your computer. This panorama is based on 8 adhacent "Portrait oriented" (ie long axis vertical) shots

Life in a rock pool.

getting close (again)

Rather than use digital zoom, I use the maximum optical zoom (only 3X) then cropped in tightly on the little yello brested bird. (see also When 3X is not enough)

Tropical Dawn

Lihir Island, PNG

Whilst I do have a number of nice purple & violet flower photos, I decided to be a bit more adventureous for my first submission for Photo Friday, a nifty net-based weekly photo challenge. You see a lot of those who had submitted before me had posted flower photos, so I wanted something different and then I remember some lovely delicately coloured dawns back up on lihir.

Photofriday: Violet

Watching the heavens

Watching the heavens, originally uploaded by imageo.

It seldom snows in Melbourne but there is supposed to be a 40% chance it might. From where I'm sitting it looks like there is a 60% chance it won't. Still it is the perfect time to photograph clouds

The above post was made from my phone. I was hoping to travel down to South Gippsland today but extensive snow down there in the morning was causing extensive road alerts. Because I could, as well as looking out the window at the sunshine, I also checked out the weather in more details on-line. And stayed home,


If you live in Australia you can check the lastest weather details at the excellent Bureau Of Meterology Website, including live radar and satellite imagery (as above)

Photo Project :: Going, Going, Gone

You can do some pretty magic post processing with suitable software. I have Corel Photobook, but most packages will have a cloning tool. This clever little tool lets you copy a little bit of an image over the top of another part of the image. Normally the bit you copy will be a little round shape with a feathered edge, and you generally have control of the position of the first shape and the relative offest involved in the copy. It is great to copy bits of texture to hide blemishes, power lines, sun flare, the list is endless. In this case my "clean up" is to simpliy the image, make it a stronger composition


Starting with my original photo

I cropped it a little

then i used the cloning tool to "cover" up the bit of the beak on the righthand side and completetely hide the swamp hen in the forground. If you click on the image to see the larger version you might be able to see the little sections of the image that have been duplicated over the swamp hen. Note I used a few different parts and overlayed the texture to look natural.

When 3X zoom is not enough

My Olympus camera only has a 3X optical zoom, (which I do appreciate) but this generally does not zoom in enough to get naturalistic bird photos. This swamp hen was not afraid of me and I could get quite close, but i did have the camera set to multi-shoot mode, so I could choose the best photo later. Also it meant I didn't have to worry about the "delay" (for focussing and exposure readings, since they are keep the same between shoots).

Swamp Hen struts his stuff

PS I do have a further 3X digital zoom, but i have found camera shake so hard to avoid, as well as lower quality of digital zoomed images have discouraged me from using digital zoom much.

Available Light during the day

Sometimes deep in the shade you will find that your automatic digital camera suddenly sets of the flash. This is unfortunate as it will wash out the lovely lighting and you may do much better looking at the little pools of light as available light (or nightscene setting). You can get beautifully rich colours this way.

Cameraphone Googl'ing

This is not exactly photography but if you have a WAP enabled cameraphone, you must admit being able to google from it is pretty neat!

Tapestry of light

Most camera guides say never point at the source of light. Yet may great photos can come form close encounters with the light.

Point at the photo and read its story

from "snap shots" to blog

I was looking at the spreadhello blog and noticed a few features of hello I didn't know about. Did you know it can do screen captures With hello running, {Alt}{Shift}3 captures your whole screen, {Alt}{Shift}4 just captures your active window and passes it onto bloggerbot.


And the little hello icon with the green arrow in internet explorer tools, has the ability to create a link to a web page as well as taking a snap shot of it.

PS I used all three features to create this image. Can you figure out how?

A good day for a panorama

Today was mainly sunny but towards late afternoon a cold front and clouds rolled in. As the first appear the light became magic, so I grabbed my camera and headed up to the top of wheelers hill. There is a sweeping view towards the dandenong ranges that I have tried to capture a few times in a series for a panorama. Well the lighting today was perfect.


A full 180° panorama

"Zoomed In" Panorama

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MoBlogging

MoBlogging, originally uploaded by imageo.

Blogging directly from your mobile phone, is now available on blogger, but only in the USA. So how an I doing this from Australia?

PS: Well I have a Flickr photostream, and flicker will let you email in photos using a ""secret email address", more importantly you also get another address, it has "2blog" at the end of the secret AddressName. I have an telstra I-mode phone, so I can send emails from it. When you email the special flickr address, its a long address so I had already stored it in my phones address book, the photo is posted and then a blog entry constructed. Using the subject line of your email as the title, and the text you send in the email as the body of the post and the photo is posted according to the default format you have set up in Flickr.

Well it worked but there where a few hickups

• Telstra only lets you email 1kb as an attachment in I-mode emails
  
• So I had to reduce the image size to "email size", unfortunately it put the image in a 90 degree rotation & portrait mode
  
• The typing of the text is a bit tedious (or it it just me)

And finally this is the actual phone photo @ 1.3 mega pixels,(you'll defintely need to click on it to see the difference in detail.)