A Toast to the Coast at Mindarie Marina

What better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than tasting good food, beer & wine at the idyllic Mindarie Marina.

We were there last weekend for the annual “Toast to the Coast” Festival and the weather was gorgeous, though sadly a little to hot for some judging by the turnout. There were plenty of people just not the crazy numbers that turned up for the Chilli Festival held here a few weeks before.

That was fine by us, smaller queues and crowds, two things that we are definitely not fond of 🙂

Toast to the Coast, Mindarie Marina, Perth

We are lucky enough to have lived in Mindarie for over 20 years and it would be so easy to take views like this for granted, and it’s probably fair to say we may have done just that in the past. But no more, we live in a paradise that many people can only dream of and we make every effort to fully appreciate what we have and how lucky we are to live in a place like Perth.

We’re also very appreciative of the fact we can walk to our local brewery (the Indi) in less than 5 mins 🙂

Grace Under Pressure!

Recently I was approached by a client to create a 60 inch canvas print of Joondalup Resort.

The client needed the print urgently and I had to capture the image as well as process, print & stretch it. They also wanted it mainly black and white with green and red colours highlighted around the image.

Artistic interpretation of an artists cafe

We were at Taylor’s Art and Coffee House in the Swan Valley a few weeks ago doing another photo shoot for the City of Swan and wow what an amazing place!

Owned by artist Jude Taylor the whole place is like a piece of art, it’s full of old machinery, rustic buildings and little nooks and cranny’s where you can sit and eat. You really have to see this place to believe it.

I knew as I grabbed a few shots around the grounds that some serious HDR processing would be called for to make the most of the scenes, hope you like them 🙂

Did you now you can follow our Facebook Page to keep up to date with what we’re up to at MADCAT Photography 🙂

The Low Down on Choosing ND Filters

I had a question on my Facebook page today about Variable ND (Neutral Density) filters and my answer turned into a full on guide to selecting and understanding ND filters which deserved it’s own blog post. So thanks to Michele for suggesting the topic and I hope I answer your question 🙂 History Back in the days of film photography a professional photographer would have had a wide variety of filters in their camera bags but these days Photoshop has replaced nearly all of them, thankfully! Pretty much the only filters a professional photographer will carry these days are a Polarising filter and a set of ND filters. I won’t go into Polarising filters here except to add that with the popularity of ultra wide angle lenses and images stitching they are becoming less and less used.

Something new in the works …

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, I’ve got a couple of new toys and have been busy learning new skills and looking at some new product ideas.

More info soon …

Water in Motion

This is one of a series of shots I took back in February with my 70-200 trying to capture the feeling of motion in the waves.

I must admit I forgot about them for a while but I was pleasantly surprised when I went back to that shoot in Lightroom a few days ago. The waves have enough form and shape with a little bit of movement to suggest the continuous rolling / pounding motion that you typically see at the beach.

To accommodate this new style of images I have created a new category for my web site online gallery called “Creative”. Keep an eye out for more artistic, creative and abstract images in the near future 😎

Technical Details (WIN1.1): Canon 5D mark II, Single Shot, Canon 70-200mm f4L IS USM @ 200mm, handheld, 1 sec, f8, ISO 100. Image processed in Adobe Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS5.

Themes, Firefox, Google & Internet Explorer 8

Recently I have decided to give the ol’ faithful Internet Explorer 8 a break. It’s not that it’s a bad browser, it’s just not that good either … It’s almost like every version of Internet Explorer is created by a completely new team, they see all the functionality in the old version but don’t understand the “reason” it’s there so they lose some of it and add other bits. All in all each version is better than the last but you always feel like you’ve lost some useful features when a new version comes out. Maybe the IE dev team is a bit like the “Cold Front”, if you’re a bad little Microsoft developer you get sent to the “IE Dev Swamp” until you’ve learned your lesson and are allowed back into the dev team for an exciting “paid for” application.

Anyway, enough rambling about IE, I’m not anti or pro Microsoft but no one is perfect and IE could definitely learn some lessons from some of the other browsers out there.

So on to the point of this post, having switched to Firefox (and now I can’t live without NoScript, but that’s another story …) I started looking at the Firefox Persona’s that people have created and decided to try my hand at creating some of my own.

Whilst not the simplest of tasks (there always seems to be a few things they just don’t tell you) I soon had a few Persona’s up and running and plan to create more as I get the time. Apart from being a bit of fun it seemed like a great way to promote my images to a wider audience. The process allows you to place information about yourself against your profile so there’s always a chance people will visit my web site if they like my images.

To see my profile and current Firefox Persona’s go to http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/gallery/Designer/zMADCAT

This is the age of social media and anything that reaches the masses must be good 🙂 Talking of social media, did I mention I have a Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/madcatphotography, please feel free to pop over and click the “Like” button.

So with a new browser and some Firefox Persona’s under my belt I’m on a roll and decide to give iGoogle another go. I now have accounts with, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader and Remember the Milk (a great free online task manager) and they are all linked on my iGoogle home page. Works like a dream so far and we’re slowly moving all our calendars and task lists over.

Needless to say once I got iGoogle setup I started looking at their themes and just had to create one of my own. I have to say that although the Firefox Persona process was not simple, creating an iGoogle theme was much more complex. Whilst there are several tools that allow you to configure your iGoogle theme in real time they were not exactly problem free and having to co-ordinate the text and background colours as well as the images also made it a bit more time consuming.

So at last I have a Google theme accepted and in use, click here to see it.

World’s Greatest Shave – Mindarie

Friday evening saw us down at “The Boat” @ Mindarie Marina to get some shots of people losing their hair for a great cause 😎

Demon Barber Tino and his wife Lorraine were there from the “Keys Hair Studio” to make sure no one made it out with hair intact if they could help it 😉

The above shot is of my son, Paul, who took the easy route of getting his hair dyed rather than shaved. However the evening raised a total of over $4,000 from the guys and gals that did go the whole hog “Well Done” to all involved.

Here’s a few more shots of the evening’s victims …

    

Something to put on your iPod …

If any of you are into podcasts and yearn to listen to some old guy rabbit on about the “Photography and the Creative Process” then I highly recommend listening to Brooks Jenson’s series of podcasts.

Brooks Jenson publishes a magazine called “Lenswork”, and is a very engaging and interesting speaker who is not afraid to speak his mind on all aspects of photography. You may not agree with everything he has to say but that would be boring anyway,  I find him inspiring and thought provoking regarding the creative side of photography whilst helping me keep my feet firmly planted on planet earth …

If you are not familiar with podcasts then you can download iTunes or Microsoft Zune and search for Brooks Jenson. 
Alternatively got to http://www.lenswork.com/podcast.xml and you can manually download and play any of the podcasts and subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Don’t worry if you don’t own an iPod life will still go on 😯 and you can listen to podcasts on your PC/MAC using either of the above programs (or one of millions of other programs).

Here is a link to one of his podcast which is close to every photographers heart, who knows what your computer will do with it, but at least you can find out if you can play mp3’s.
“The Big Money”