Competition Winner from the Yanchep Festival of Green Ideas

I am happy to say that the Yanchep Festival of Green Ideas (Sat Oct 31st) was a great success. Congratulations to Dr. Ian Martinus of Yanchep Beach Joint Venture for putting such an entertaining and educational event.

We had live music all day, an Iron Chef competition (providing sumptuous tasting plates), incredible displays of soccer skills from the Ocean Reef Senior High School Elite Squad and wonderful weather. What more could you want I even got talked into a game of 5-a-side with the boys from Ocean Reef, I went pretty easy on them cause these 15 year olds have trouble keeping up somethimes

Competition Winner
I am also pleased to announce the winner from our Mailing List competition, congratulations to Helen Heath from Two Rocks, who has received a matted print of Wagardu Lake in Yanchep National Park.
Make sure you visit us at the “Hot Rods in The Park” festival and enter our competition to win another of our Fine Art Matted Prints.

Hot Rods in Yanchep National Park

This Sunday (15th November) we will be at Yanchep National Park for their “Hot Rods in the Park” Festival. We will have our usual stall which will be located down by the lake along with some new images from the Park.

It will be a great day and a good opportunity to visit Yanchep National Park if you haven’t been there for a while.

The festival starts at 11am and as usual we will be running a competition to win a matted print for all people who register for our electronic mailing list. Even if you’ve already registered you can still enter the competition just by filling in the form

See you there …

New Exhibition

We are currently holding an exhibition of our latest work in the Mindarie Marina hotel foyer. The Exhibition will be there for the month of November so if you would like to see some of our larger prints and canvases then head on over to the Marina.

If you haven’t visited the Mindarie Marina for a while there’s plenty to do while you’re there, have a coffee at the Dome cafe, have a beer and lunch at the Indian Ocean Brewing Company or the Boat or just enjoy the scenery

Here’s one of our new prints that you can see in the Exhibition:

Mindarie Festival & Competition Winner

Last weekend we were at the Mindarie Festival and as usual I was wandering around getting snaps of the event for the Marina. It was a great day as always, the weather was perfect and Claire, Hayley and Martin from Mindarie Marina ran a great event as always

This time, however, we decided it was time we got MADCAT Photography back into runnning some market stalls so we arranged to have a stall next to the Indi Brewery with our good friend Sue Dash from Chocolate Drops. After all, who can resist the combination of Beer, Chocolate and Fine Art

Our stand featured a range of our matted prints along with our Fine Art Greeting Cards, Canvas Bookmarks and our brand new Fine Art Fridge Magnets. As you can see from the picture above the stall was manned by Maggie and our son Paul (though Paul seemed to migrate to the Chocolate Drops stand alot for some reason ), and I’m happy to say that we had a very sucessful day and will be running more market stalls at upcoming events around the region.

If you would like to know which events we will be attending you can check back here regularly or subscibe to our mailing list on our new web site. We currently have several events lined up, including the “Hot Rods in the Park” at Yanchep National Park, the “Yanchep Festival of Green Ideas” at Club Capricorn, the “Oceana Festival” at Mindarie Marina and a new Exhibition in the Mindarie Marina Foyer during November. More details to come soon …

We also ran a competition for people who signed up for our electronic mailing list to win a matted print of Mindarie Marina. After the event we put all the names into a hat and the winner was Daniel Mare from Orelia. Congratulations to Daniel, your print is in the post and should get to you any day

This competition will be a regular at our market stalls, so come along to see us and sign up for our mailing list, we don’t even care if you’ve already signed up, everyone is welcome to enter.

New Online Gallery + Special Offer

It’s been a while coming but finally our new Web Site & Online Gallery is live, complete with easy to browse gallery and shopping cart.

There are still lots of improvements in the wings including online credit card payment, keyword searches, and our own stock library of local WA images.

We’d love to hear what you think of the new site (good or bad) and please feel free to try out our new ordering system. As a special bonus to blog readers if you mention “Blog Special Offer” in the comments field when placing an order we’ll send you out a Gift Voucher with your order worth 10% of the order total (excluding shipping costs).

To qualify for this special offer you must make a purchase through our web site during October 2009.

New 5D Mark II Christened

Well I finally did it, my new Canon 5D Mark II has arrived and it’s already giving me some great shots. I’ve been trying it out while walking the dog and getting some interesting shots with the weather we’ve been having recently. Ironically, the one thing I have failed to capture is any lightning, not that I haven’t been trying but it seems it’s just not meant to be.

I took this image last night on the way to the beach with wife, son and dog in tow. The orange glow in the sky was just spectacular and I only just got this shot in before the heavens opened up and well and truly soaked all of us along with my new camera. Needless to say the family were not impressed with getting drenched in the name of photography and the dog never got his walk but the camera seems to have survived without any problems and at least I got one good shot

I actually took a few more shots after this one without realising that there was a drop or two of water on the lens, oops.
Note to self: “When it’s raining so hard that even the dog is complaining there’s a good chance your lens is getting wet and it’s time to go home …”

Now, it’s time to go process some of that video this damn camera is making me take

P.S. A new firmware has just been released for the 5D Mark II allowing full manual control whilst taking movies.
As if I don’t have enough to do without having to learn all this new movie stuff too. If only I had a twin brother to do it for me …

Bunker Bay

I’m finally starting to get through some more images from my last trip down south. As we were staying at Bunker Bay I got some great opportunities to stroll along the beach at sunset and then stroll back in the serene darkness . You really can’t beat a walk on the beach just after the sun has set on a remote empty beach.

On our first night the sky was pretty clear of clouds so we took the opportunity to pay a visit to the bar and sample a few cocktails. After all if you’re going to stay at a resort it’s only polite say hi to the bar staff and enjoy the view

This image is from our second night and the sunset was spectacular. I walked all the way to the east end of the bay and was rewarded with some incredible skies as the sun set behind the tree line.

This image is a 3 shot stitch using my soon to be retired 5D and 70-200 (at 200mm). At 13secs the exposure has a lot of movement in it which really accentuates the clarity of the tree-line and rocks on the point.

I dare anyone to find the stitching lines in the water

Sunset over Sugarloaf Rock

We were down South staying at Bunker Bay again a week ago and we were rewarded with some beautiful sunsets. Almost every time I go down south the weather is dismal, but this time we had a great combination of blue skies and cloud cover.

This one was taken about 30 mins after the sun set and is a single shot image. I also took quite a few stitched images as the sun set behind the rock so hopefully there will be some nice big panoramas to come from those.

Perth from Kings Park

I was down at Kings Park last night after dropping off my sister-in-law at the airport and was lucky enough to capture a somewhat dramatic sunset after a day of rain and storms. The colours over the city were spectacular and there was even a bit of lightning in the Perth Hills.

This is one of the last pictures I took last night (no lightning in this one unfortunately) but still some dramatic colours in the sky. This one is just a 2 image stitch but I also have some 6 to 8 image stiches from earlier which I will post soon.

Stringybark Winery Bushfire Fundraiser for the Victorian Wildlife Carers

Stringybark Winery in the Chittering Valley are holding a fundraiser this Sunday Evening for the Victorian Wildlife Carers assisting in the rescue and rehabilitation effort in Victoria’s devastating bushfire areas.

Many locals have donated their time/services/products for this fundraiser. There will be a Raffle and Auctions on the night (including a framed print of one of our Blue Wrens and a hamper of chocolates from Chocolate Drops) as well as a Juke box, face painting and much more for the family to enjoy. There will also be a Sausage Sizzle and Counter Meals available with full bar facilities.

So if you have nothing to do on Sunday evening then pop up to Chittering Valley and have some fun whilst helping the Victorian Wildlife and their carers.

Stringybark Winery Fundraiser
2060 Chittering Road
Sunday 1st March 2009 6.30pm
Tel: (08) 9571 8069