Longreach Bay, Rottnest Island

This is an image from Australia Day taken on Longreach Bay from the beach just before we travelled back to “True North” (which you can just see to the far left of the image) to watch Merv and Mike drinking the bar dry.

The image is stitched from 8 handheld vertical shots (technical details below) in Photoshop. The detail in these stitched images is just mindblowing, this one has a native size of 45 inches wide @ 360dpi …

Technical Details: Canon 5D MK II, Canon 70-200mm @ 70mm, handheld. 1/200 sec, f11, ISO 400. Stitched manually in Photoshop CS4.

Just before taking this set of images I grabbed a shot of Christian and some of his Fletchlings as we waited for the launch.

If anyone can put names to faces that would be great, so far I have (left ro right):
Photo Vest Guy
Charles Collins
iTNFP Guy (must be Christian as all his other shirts only go to the girls :grin:)
Matt Saul
Cory Fee
Striped Blue Shirt Guy
David Sobik
Leaning Over Guy
Phil Someone
Michael Lee

I’m sure I should know who some of these guys are so please feel free to help me out.

Australia Day, Rottnest + 100 Photographers

I have just discovered the perfect way to celebrate Australia Day, cruising to Rotto on the luxury cruise ship “True North” with 99 other people that share a passion for photography.

Thanks to Fletch for organising such a great day and Mark for making his ship available for such an event.  “True North” is an awesome ship, the crew were excellent and I couldn’t think of a better way to spend a holiday than crusing the Kimberly on this beauty.

Thanks also to the speakers Nick Rains, Glen Cowen, Tony Hewitt and “Fletch the Luminous Masking Evangelist”. It was also good to see Ben from Team Digital again, as Christian pointed out when you get the kind of service Ben delivers shopping around for price becomes meaningless.

I have loads of shots from the trip but I thought I’d post a few of the man in action to start with. I’m no portrait photograher but I had to have a go at sprucing them up a bit …

More pics coming soon …

Photoshop Tip – Changing brush sizes (Updated for CS5)

The Problem
I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m a shortcut fanatic, I want my photographic workflow to be as easy and efficient as possible. To achieve this I have shortcuts, custom panels, actions and presets coming out my ears along with a nifty programmable mouse and keyboard.

I’ll explain more about how I setup my workspaces and hardware in future blogs but for today I wanted to share how I fixed what I found to be a very annoying shortfall in Photoshop.

I frequently use tools with adjustable brush tip sizes, whether it’s for creating layer masks with the brush tool, using the clone tool or the quick selection tool I constantly need to change the size (and hardness) of the brush tip.

In Lightroom this simple task is achieved by rotating the mouse wheel, nothing could be easier or more intuitive. So why is it that in Photoshop we can’t have similar ease of use?

Mindarie Coastline – New Image

I was asked a few days ago if I had any pictures of a particular house along the Mindarie coastline between Mindarie and Quinns Rocks which reminded me of a shoot I did last November but never got around to processing.

So thanks for the prompt, heres one of the images from that shoot showing a couple of the houses along the front (all be it very small) and a somewhat stormy sunset. Hope you like it 🙂

Click on the image to see a larger version or make a purchase.

Chocolate Drops + Loco TV

Yesterday we were up at Chocolate Drops in Yanchep National Park watching the guys from Loco TV doing their magic making a TV show about Sue’s Chocolate business.

For those that didn’t know Loco TV are a local Perth business that make on demand IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) shows. If you want to see more of what they have to offer then check out their web site and watch some of their free IPTV programs. Our favourites are “There’s Nothing To Do In Perth” and “Drive WA”, both great shows to give you an idea of what there is to do in Perth and WA.

It’s pretty amazing watching a TV show in the making and I’m sure these guys make it look alot easier than it is, thankfully I was only a bystander and no footage exists with me in it 😀

Backup on a budget, what you need to know!

Backups are one of those things that often get overlooked as too hard, too complicated or they are simply not even considered. Let’s face it the age old “it will never happen to me” excuse will work right up until it does happen to you, then it’s kind of too late …

The list of things that can go wrong with your PC / Mac / File Server is endless. As an ex Software Engineer & System Builder I know only too much about the potential problems with a computer, any part of your computer failing can damage your data. And don’t think that just because you use a Mac everything is fine, you’re using the same type of hardware platform and HDD’s (hard disk drives) as us PC users and they can fail at any time.

As an example, a few years ago I purchased a new 1TB HDD to put my ever expanding library of images on. Less than two weeks after moving all my files on to it and verifying everything was working fine the HDD simply stopped working. Luckily I had all of my important files backed up but there were still files that I considered “not important enough” to back up and they were all lost. Seems they were more important than I thought and reproducing those that I could wasted alot of my time and effort 😥
I even attempted (and failed) to get the HDD fixed and was quoted over $2,000 😯

Hillarys Boat Harbour Art Markets

The Markets at Hillarys Boat Harbour are back on again tomorrow and we shall be there with our stall as usual.

Here are a list of dates we shall be at the Hillarys Markets during January:
Sat 9th January
Sat 16th January
Sat 23th January
Sat 30st January

I’m getting lots of opportunities to get some great Hillarys shots with all the time we’re spending at the markets, here’s a new one of the boardwalk across the water at sunset.

Click on the image to see a larger version or make a purchase.

Round the bend at Moore River

We were out for a drive up to Moore River a few days ago for a swim at the river mouth and decided to take a quick look for some nice spots along the river first.

At the end of a long dusty dirt road we found this tranquil little spot at a bend in the river. You can launch your boat here, take a swim or even make use of the makeshift camp site complete with a nearly full steel drum bin (I bet the City of Wanneroo never empty this one) and ropes tied to the large tree on the left for swinging into the river. What more could you want …

Click on the image to see a larger version or make a purchase.

Mullaloo Beach

I was down at Mullaloo Beach yesterday with my family for a bit of boogie boarding and grabbed a few shots of the beach while I was there. It’s a great beach with nice gentle surf, ideal for those of us casual surfers (ok, newbie surfers 😉 ) that just want to catch an easy wave and have a bit of fun.

This one is a 180 degree panoramic shot and really shows the beauty & serenity of our Western Australian beaches. What I really love is that even on a hot busy day like yesterday our beaches are nowhere near full and a joy to visit 🙂

Click on the image to see a larger version or make a purchase.