November 7, 2011
Brighton Fireworks
We took the kids over to New Brighton to watch the Nov 5th Firework display, which was indeed spectacular. It’s a very popular event, but most people seemed to want to hang around at the back of the beach, which was perfect for the few photographers around who headed down to where the wet sand left by the outgoing tide was tailor-made for good reflections without the camera/photographer getting too wet!
Always enjoyable watching my council rates contributions going up in smoke...
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Full gallery here.
Posted by conor at 12:52 PM
June 30, 2011
Practising with a Canon 7D
One of my colleagues at work, Greg, was kind enough to lend me his Canon 7D for Evie's next gym competition this weekend, so I took it along to her gym club for a practice last night. These are taken at ISO3200, which is about 4 times faster than the maximum ISO I would take with my old Canon 350D. It really is gloomy in the school hall in which they practice, but these came out pretty well - the high ISO capabilities and accurate auto-focus of the 7D really are a step up from my 350D. Still, I hope there's more light in the gymnasium at Villa Maria this weekend for the competition and that I can get some reasonable shots...
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Posted by conor at 4:54 PM
March 30, 2011
Peaceful
Some beautiful calm clear evenings up here, and I've been meaning for a while to go and take a couple of photos of the house looking cosy now. And it certainly is cosy. We've had a number of recent mornings where the temperatures are around freezing, and after a sunny day the previous day, the interior temperature of our house will still be about 17-18° in the morning with no extra heating at all. Passive solar house designs and appropriate thermal mass are definitely the way to go!
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Posted by conor at 12:07 PM
February 21, 2011
50mm goes sailing
From the calm-under-pressure skipper with a confused looking afterguard behind him, to a YMCA moment-of-madness from Trev II, here's a snapshot of the Wednesday night fun this summer.
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Posted by conor at 12:26 PM
February 13, 2011
Quiet portrait session with the kids
Still loving the new lens I got for Christmas. Evie wanted a photo with the fan that Granshe brought from China last year, so Ruairi decided to grab the similar scroll hanging on his bedroom wall.
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Posted by conor at 8:52 PM
February 7, 2011
Speedsters & Sparks
Ruairi and I went for a spin round the mountain-bike track at McLeans Island Forest, and we had a blast. Great to be able to take it at his pace, and by the end he was buzzing, and a lot more confident with his bike-handling. He brought along the class mascot Patrick, who he was lucky enough to bring home for the first weekend of the new school term.
After that, I took myself off to experiment taking some firework photos at the Classical Sparks event in Hagley Park. Probably didn't experiment as much as I should have with different camera settings, but I got a couple of okay shots.
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Posted by conor at 12:39 PM
September 12, 2010
The Peak was buzzing…
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Posted by conor at 3:23 PM
July 22, 2010
Bridge Hill Panorama
Posted by conor at 11:41 AM
June 24, 2010
Finally thought I'd try out Flickr
Posted by conor at 3:12 PM
June 21, 2010
Photos revisited
I upgraded to Adobe Lightroom 3 a couple of weeks ago, and revisited a few old photos with it. One advantage of shooting raw images (as opposed to JPEG) is that old photos can benefit from advances in processing software simply by reprocessing them.
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Posted by conor at 4:41 PM
March 28, 2010
The extra latitude with raw images
I’ve been playing about with the Canon Hackers Development Kit (CHDK) which is free, open-source firmware for a range of Canon Point & Shoot cameras. We’ve got a cheapy A430, which out of the box takes distinctly average images. Most Point & Shoot cameras will only record JPEG images. However, this is usually just a restriction imposed by the factory firmware installed on the camera. CHDK adds so many extra features to cameras that it supports, including support for recording the raw data from the camera’s image sensor (I shoot almost exclusively raw on my DSLR). JPEGs are 8-bit image files (i.e. 8 binary bits of information per pixel). My Canon DSLR has 12 bits of information per pixel (with 12 bits, each colour channel can be between 0 & 4096 instead of between 0 & 255 for JPEG), and the newer Canon DSLRs record 14 bits of information per pixel. CHDK “only” allows our cheapy A430 to record 10 bits of info when shooting raw, but the two images shown below are a fair example of how much information the camera can actually retrieve from the sensor when it’s not being crippled by the combination of the low-end factory-installed Canon firmware and the 8-bit JPEG file format. Note the difference in both the highlights (the sky) and the shadows (garden areas), and the more accurate white balance.
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| The image processed in-camera in JPEG | The raw version processed in Adobe Lightroom and converted to JPEG. |
Posted by conor at 9:32 AM
March 3, 2010
On the way to work…
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Posted by conor at 10:22 AM
March 1, 2010
Ellesmere Sunset
A quick trip round to Lake Ellesmere for a potential sunset and a bit of sketching. We left it a bit late, making it a bit rushed when we got there, but still pleasant, and still enough time for Sheila to get a quick sketch in by moonlight.
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Posted by conor at 1:31 PM
December 7, 2009
Star Trail stacking
Last night up at Castle Hill turned out to be as calm as could be, and I’ve been wanting to practise stacking star trail images (see here for a tutorial and some stunning sample images), so it was a good opportunity to take a few and try it out. Each of these is 5 x 300 second exposures stacked together with another 300 second dark frame to minimise the noise. If you look closely at the full-size image, you can also make out a satellite crossing the frame in the right-hand of the two images below. They’re not particularly interesting as is, but it was good to practise the stacking technique, and I’ll look forward to trying some more interesting ones in the future. It was a beautiful night to be out; I could hear morepork calls in the forest up behind the village.
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Posted by conor at 4:34 PM
September 22, 2009
Post-makeover Portraits
A picture says a thousand words, so I won’t bother adding anything…
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Posted by conor at 9:25 AM
September 13, 2009
Sunset at Lake Ellesmere
We had the last field trip of my University of Canterbury landscape photography course to view the sun setting over Lake Ellesmere, and the photo gods obliged. The conditions could not have been better.
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Posted by conor at 7:12 PM
September 6, 2009
Photography overload!
Last minute decision to head to “Daffodil Day” at Otahuna House, Tai Tapu to check out the gardens there, and basically enjoy some beautiful spring sunshine.
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Posted by conor at 10:17 PM
Landscape Photography on the Peninsula
I spent a great day out photographing on Banks Peninsula on another Canterbury University course, tutored by Paul Daly (who among other things shoots for NZ Geographic, a magazine which we avidly subscribe to). Another great opportunity to indulge myself with my camera. My newly acquired 10-22mm lens absolutely rocks.
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Posted by conor at 10:04 PM
September 3, 2009
Improving Composition
I’ve signed up for a couple of photography courses at University of Canterbury over the next couple of weeks. The first one involves a walk-about session in central Christchurch plus a review session. Here are some of the shots I took during the walk-about.
Posted by conor at 12:45 PM
August 9, 2009
Sunset/Moonrise over Huntsbury
Snapped this on the way home from work one night this week. The “bright” house coincidentally belongs to friends of ours.
Posted by conor at 12:41 PM
August 1, 2009
Air Force Museum
I had a wander around the Air Force Museum at Wigram Airfield while Evie was at her Saturday gymnastics class.
Posted by conor at 9:45 PM
March 17, 2009
Lake Matheson revisited
Posted by conor at 10:00 AM
February 25, 2009
Scrabo Panorama from last year's UK trip
I've just revisited this panorama using a Photoshop plugin called Topaz Adjust. Makes it a lot more dramatic, I think.
Posted by conor at 11:54 AM
October 31, 2008
Leaf, what leaf...
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Posted by conor at 11:51 AM
July 24, 2008
Hurricane plays
Posted by conor at 1:44 PM
June 27, 2008
I love Luminosity Masks
Luminosity masks in Photoshop are a great way of lifting certain parts of a photo. In the photo below, Evie's face is very much in shadow, and I wanted to lighten her face without simply raising the exposure of the whole image, which would have caused most of the image to become over-exposed. Luminosity masks (used in various ways and in combination with other masks) allow you to apply an adjustment to an image based on how bright/dark each individual pixel in an image is.
You can read more about luminosity masks here.
Posted by conor at 6:05 PM
June 25, 2008
"Revisited" Warbirds photos
I've just been revisiting in Photoshop some of the photos I took at Warbirds over Wanaka in March. Here they be.
Posted by conor at 1:41 PM
June 2, 2008
Crisp starry weekend in Hanmer
Enjoyed a long weekend up in Hanmer Springs with a couple of cold starry nights (still enough for some 40 minute star-trail exposures), an enjoyable dip in the hot pools, a trip up to Acheron Homestead, a spin on the bike down Jollies Pass, a round of minigolf, and a walk in the forest in the rain.
Posted by conor at 11:20 PM
April 7, 2008
Warbirds over Wanaka
Okay, so I got a bit carried away, and pulled the trigger on about 700-odd shots at Warbirds. But I think I got a few nice ones, certainly enough for me to look forward to a few winter evenings rugged up in front of Photoshop. The event was great, well run, wide range of planes, etc, and even though the weather on the day we went wasn't great (and it was cold!), we had a great spot just beside the runway itself, and got to see a lot of the planes up close. We also headed up Mt. Irons nearer Wanaka itself on the other flying day, which gave us a different perspective on the planes and parachutists above the airfield.
Posted by conor at 6:25 PM
Late (great!) summer holiday
This year's holiday (well, summer holiday, since we've already got a holiday to the UK in August lined up too), was a bit of a tour round the South Island culminating in the Warbirds over Wanaka airshow at Easter. We started off by heading up to Golden Bay for nearly a week at Ligar Bay (same bay as last summer), which was great, and got us in a relaxed mood for the rest of the holiday. Then we spent a week camping down the West Coast, staying at Westport and Fox Glacier. Great weather for the Coast, and I was pleased to be able to get down to Lake Matheson to get some nice photos of Aoraki & Tasman reflected in the still waters of the lake - a beautiful spot. Then it was on through Haast Pass to Lake Hawea near Wanaka where we had rented a large house on the waterfront for 10 days. Among other things, Ildica & I had a great overnight in Brewster Hut, high above Haast Pass, with some beautiful weather, and a scramble up to the top of 2154m high Mt. Armstrong, where we had great views north to Aoraki, and south to Mt. Aspiring.
Posted by conor at 4:00 PM
February 18, 2008
Beautiful Castle Hill (again)
Spent an overnight at Castle Hill again, leaving Christchurch in torrential rain (long overdue) to find the rain had stopped in the mountains an hour and a half away. The next day dawned beautifully clear and calm, and with an extremely photogenic "pond" in place at Kura Tawhiti (Castle Hill) Conservation area. I've also got a new lens for my camera (a Canon 55-250mm IS lens nominally for the Warbirds over Wanaka air festival we're going to at Easter), so it was an excuse to practise with it - great for long range candids of the kids for a start!
Posted by conor at 12:22 PM
January 21, 2008
Revisiting older photographs
Here's a photo from 2007 I've just revisited with Photoshop, and I'm quite pleased with the result. It's one of my favourite photos of Ruairi. This was taken in a cottage at Lake Heron only a couple of months after his second birthday.
