Practicing Photography

The steam and low clouds are lit by the lava within the crater. The foreground leaves are lit by my headlamp that I accidentally left of for this exposure. Light drizzle and crowds of people (but actually, not from this vantage point which is a little further away than the museum and observatory) but still wonderful, alien and just a little scary.

Vanishing Point by Gavin Kingsley Via Flickr: The shadow of Mauna Kea at sunset. You have to be somewhere pretty special to get a view like this.

Mauna Kea Observatories by Gavin Kingsley Via Flickr: Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope 3.58 m telescope and the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini Telescope 8.19 m telescope. Visiting the top of Mauna Kea was a definite highlight for me of out holiday. Freezing cold but insanely beautiful.

The light striking this spider gives her a fantastic bejewelled appearance. She has built her web between bushes in a garden maze and she seemed to leap out at us as we navigated our way around. To both the naked eye and the camera she appears to hover suspended in the air.

This photo may not be the best photo I have ever taken technically but to me it captures really well the beauty of the dawn at Christchurch Airport as I did a morning bicycle ride. The image is noisy from the iPhone 4 struggling with the lighting conditions but the fact that the image could be captured at all is thanks entirely to that device which has revolutionised modern photography.

While sorting through some older images, I found this one taken while walking on the Kaikoura peninsular. I love the colours and composition of this relatively uncluttered image.

Just to observe that Christchurch is still being rebuild following a devastating series of earthquakes that started in September 2010 and unfortunately climaxed with a deadly earthquake in February 2011 that severely damaged the central city. So you don’t see too many tall buildings in this photo but if you look closely you can see a few cranes (I think you’d need the full sized image from Flickr to pull out this level of detail).

Hamner Springs by Moonlight by Gavin Kingsley Via Flickr: Moonlit view of Hanmer Springs township viewed from the lookout of Conical Hill. This image is constructed by averaging three exposures to reduce noise. I’m pleased with the result and I wonder how it would compare to a longer exposure at a lower ISO rating.

This photo exceeds my "comfort" threshold when dealing with spiders, so this image was taken while the spider was captive under a drinking glass. I used bounce flash and my trusty 90 mm Tamron macro lens at f13.

I still have a way to go. I did not take dark frames nor calibration grey frames. I did not process RAW images but rather lossy jpegs. The existence of the longer exposure for the foreground component was not part of a master plan. I’d also like to try more shorter exposures to get less star movement. Still, I think this is an interesting step along the way.

The exposure from the starting frame to the final frame varies by 19 f-stops, or by a factor of half a million. 

One of the problems with the image is the purple haze which is a camera artifact captured in the top right. I was able to greatly reduce this by

This is a macro shot that all seemed to come together for me. I used flash to get some depth of field and the colour of the picnic table makes a great background. I am very pleased with this shot.

I took this shot in December 2010 when I was out in the garden playing with my macro lens. This ladybird was scurrying across the concrete driveway and I was very pleased with this panning shot as I followed the insect with my camera.

I was out for a walk when I saw some incredible colours in the dusk sky. However, these are not those colours (this is enhanced through Photoshop). So this image captures the feeling of the sight without being accurate as to the specifics. To my eye there were greens here, so may another attempt at the processing is in order.

Cape Foulwind on Flickr. This the photo I used as an experiment following through a Photoshop tutorial on the web. Taking advantage of the original RAW file, the sky is underexposed compared to the foreground. Also, the entire photo has been run through a warm filter and then a second layer of strong warm filter has been added with the soft light option. This really makes the clouds pop. The resulting image is pushing the envelope in terms of how the photo looks versus how it appeared to the naked eye, but I like it. It transformed a rather average capture into something interesting.

And here is the other photo I have chosen to decorate this blog. Lake Poaka (Lake Pig) is a small lake in the Mackenzie Basin in the South Island of New Zealand, a starkly beautiful part of the country. The lake is tree lined so I had to poke my camera through the foliage to take this shot. I'm really pleased with the outcome except that I should have cropped out the couple of sticks on the left. I guess my wife's scrapbooking skills have made me lazy. I have read some opinions on the internet about how true to life these sort of landscape photos should be. This is pretty much true but I have taken the saturation settings and nudged them up a notch or two. Nothing drastic, but I like the colours in the image and I want to emphasise them. I'd be interested if anyone else has any opinions on this.