This morning I went to the Anzac Day Dawn Service at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. No matter how many times you attend a Dawn Service, you can’t help but get a little emotional thinking of the ultimate price those young men paid so we can enjoy the life we now do. And the Last Post will never cease to give you goosebumps as it echoes out from the darkness.

I’d estimate more than 10,000 people were in attendance which I think awesome. Especially the number of young children. I didn’t have the best vantage point, but here are some of the better shots I was able to get.

Lest we forget.

Aquabumps is a wicked site showcasing daily life from the beach. I highly recommend you check it out and sign up to the newsletter delivering awesome daily pics right to your inbox. Really demoralising if you’re stuck behind the desk at work though!

The site was set up in 1999 by creative director Eugene Tan – better known as ::uge (yooj) – as an outlet to the daily grind by combining his passions of surfing and photography. But it didn’t take too long before Aquabumps became his full time ‘job’.

I just found this interview with ::uge today and it’s so motivating for anyone thinking about throwing in their day job to work on their passion. It’s a great example of my new favourite quote “the only true failure is the failure to try”. Get out there!





Here are a couple of ::uge’s recent images – all copyrights below to ::uge.

In 2011 three mates and I headed to Utah for four weeks of winter goodness. And the snow gods certainly delivered. Here are some of the shots I was able to get between pow fever. No time for lighting or set ups. Just shooting from the hip!

Yesterday in Auckland it was a beautiful 25 degree day. Today it’s absolutely pouring down. Which provided the opportunity to get a few more images for my ‘Storm’ portfolio I’m putting together to ultimately exhibit.

Here’s one of the shots I got, taken from the beach at Mission Bay.

It was a beautiful night yesterday so I headed out to Piha for a surf. I only spent about 45 mins in the water as the surf was pretty poor, but I spent a bit of time taking a few photos.

This is my favourite. A little self portrait.

Shooting directly into the sun, I deliberately overexposed the shot to blow out the highlights. And I mean seriously overexposed, probably by 7-8 stops. It also gives the image that overall warm/summer hue. I set my aperture at f5 to give a smallish depth of field and pull me out from the foreground. Then camera on tripod, self timer and Bob’s your aunty.

I’m no post production digital whizz, preferring to capture the scene in camera as close to the final product as possible. But I am working on some stuff to put on my walls at home and a Polaroid style photo would be perfect.

I’d love to just whack the shots through Instagram or Hipstamatic and get the look I want, but given I’ve taken all my shots already on my dSLR, I set about searching online for some Photoshop filters I could use instead.

I struggled through a lot of crap guides and tutorials, but found a couple of little gems that I thought I’d share.

1. Spoongraphics

This great little post will give you a really faded, dirty look. Not 100% on the border but that would be easy enough to fix with a different brush.

2. The Best Photoshop Tutorials

And the effect these guys show you how to create is a sweet retro feel. It’s actually a very current advertsing look in my opinion. For denim in particular. They also provide a free PSD file you can download to make the whole process so much faster.

I’m going to combine some of the ideas together to give me the exact look I want. Then stick them onto my wall in a pretty random way with semi transparent coloured tape. That’s the plan anyway! I’ll try and remember to post some actual photos once finished.

I’m pretty stoked to have been selected as one of the top 15 design & photography blogs in NZ by Concrete Playground for The Bloggers 2011 competition. Thanks heaps to those who nominated me. I was really surprised to be told I’d been shortlisted. And thanks to everyone that has voted for me since.

Looking at all of the other blogs in my category, mine is quite different as it is an extension of my website. I set out from the beginning to write content that would help demystify a lot of photography process and jargon. And also help inspire others to just get out there and take photos and experiment. Hopefully I’ve made some headway in achieving that since I started.

Anyway, if you feel like voting for me, head over to Concrete Playground, find my thumbnail and give it a big fat Like.

This is a really awesome competition and idea by the Concrete Team. There are so many great blogs out there covering almost anything you can think of. And this initiative is an awesome way to bring some of them together under one roof.

Here are three of my favourites.

1. New Zealand Design Blog

2. Studio Home

3. The Shutter Pirates

My last few posts have explained that the two basic variables you can control exposure with are shutter speed and aperture. I’ve also stressed that the way to consistently take better images is to get your camera off its automatic setting and take some control yourself.

So let’s look at how you can take the control back.

Your first step is to set your camera to Manual. This will be expressed by an M or the word Manual on your camera’s mode dial. Now look through the viewfinder. See a whole bunch of scary lines, numbers and symbols? It’s not really that scary and is actually very simple if you understand what you’re looking at.

Apart from the frame and focus area, what you are looking at is essentially a light meter. Back in the old days, and still used today by many professional photographers, everyone used a hand held light meter. You probably remember getting your school photos taken and the photographer would walk around with a little hand held gadget and take readings from different areas of the scene. This was telling him the optimal exposure for that part of the scene. They’d take multiple readings, from the shadow areas to the highlight areas, then average these out to arrive at the best exposure for the current light conditions. They do this because you’ll recall that light has different levels of energy depending on its source, time of day or weather conditions. They’d then set their camera accordingly and take the picture.

Today however, cameras have very advanced light meters built into them. You may have heard or seen the term TTL, which refers to the fact that the light metering is done Through The Lens. Even a few years ago the in-camera technology wasn’t as advanced or accurate as a hand held meter and many purists wouldn’t dream of trusting anything else. But camera sensors have evolved so significantly that in the majority of cases you can be confident in your TTL light metering system.

So when you are looking through your viewfinder, you are looking at your light meter as well. Check out the image below which is a pretty typical layout of a viewfinder. I have labelled the main areas you need to be aware of to take an image on a manual setting.

The five steps to take a photo on manual.

1.    Switch your camera to Manual

2.    Focus on your subject by half pressing the shutter release button. This will not only focus the shot (if on auto focus), it will also ensure your light meter evaluates the lighting conditions.

3.    Now look at the Exposure Display. You will see it is a continuum with a + at one end and a – at the other. There will then be a series of bars either running to the + end or the – end. This is indicating your current exposure setting will either under or over expose the image you are about to take. In theory, the correct exposure is when you have no bars either side of the central line and the exposure display is centred. You can achieve this by changing your shutter speed and aperture.

4.    Before adjusting the aperture and shutter speed, remember what you learnt in the past posts. Do you want a small or large depth of field? Do you want motion blur or to freeze activity? Decide your main priority and set that first, then adjust the other accordingly until the exposure display is centred. Remember you will need a tripod if your shutter speed gets below 1/60th of a second.

5.    Take the photo and review the result. The great thing with digital is you can get instant feedback and adjust accordingly.

There may be situations where you purposely under or over expose the image because some lighting scenarios can trick your camera. I’ll cover these in my next post. But before then, just go out and have a play. The more photos you take, the better you will understand what you are doing and what impact your setting changes have on your final image.

Enjoy!

The surf wasn’t so flash today but there was quite a westerly wind. I’ve always wanted to shoot kite surfers so I headed down to Walker Rd in Waterview for a crack. There were loads of people out. Admittedly I went at a terrible time of day for taking photos, around 2pm, meaning I was shooting almost directly into the sun. But it was still well worth the practice despite most of the subjects in my photos lacking detail.

All the best sports photographers say that you need to know the sport to get the best shots. And I echo that sentiment. My early shots were pretty dull as I have never taken part myself, but pretty soon I found the better guys and observed their patterns. By the end I was getting some quite nice shots. Next time I will head down early in the morning as that would put the sun behind me and light up the boarders.

Anyway, a couple of shots.