P365 Apr30: Noisy miner

Another very long and difficult day of work today, so I made a bit of time to get outside for a little while. Unfirtunately I wasn't able to find the kind of subjects I wanted to shoot, but I was able to get nice and close to this cute little guy.

P365 Apr29: Laptop screen

It had been a nightmare day of work and I was totally zonked. At 2am I was sitting on the couch, mindlessly surfing the web while I was thinking to myself "What on Earth can I shoot for 365 today?". I guess the result was obvious :) The inset at the bottom right is the original photo at 100%, cropped.

By the way, just in case anyone isn't already aware, you can click on any of the images I post to the blog to view a slightly larger version with more detail :)

Rebekah has been kind enough to allow me to link to the gallery of photos I took with her on the weekend. I've been very busy with work this week, so I've only had time to process a couple dozen photos, but there'll be more to come in the future. Watch this space!

Visit the gallery here: http://neil.creek.name/gallery/v/friends/aurian/

P365 Apr 28 - Rebekah Cosplay

I had the honour and pleasure to do a photoshoot today with Rebekah, a friend of mine and an outstanding costume designer. Rebekah's costumes have been very popular and successful at Manifest (the Melbourne Anime Festival) over the years, but today was the first opportunity I had to spend the time of an one-on-one photo shoot.

We went into the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne, and were fortunate to dodge threatning weather for some great photos. The location was perfect, Rebekah's costumes were gorgeous, and a great deal of fun was had! Above are four of my favourite of almost 550 photos. Once I get permission from Rebekah, I will add a link to this post to a larger gallery of photos from the shoot.

Edit Apr 30:

Rebekah has been kind enough to allow me to link to the gallery of photos I took with her on the weekend. I've been very busy with work this week, so I've only had time to process a couple dozen photos, but there'll be more to come in the future. Watch this space!

Visit the gallery here: http://neil.creek.name/gallery/v/friends/aurian/

P365 Apr 27 - Studio Tank

Naomi and I have just installed a reef aquarium at her work in the Clemenger Studio. The tank even has its own blog: Studio Reefers! It's been hard work but fun setting it up, and it's only very early days yet, and won't be ready for many corals or fish for a little while, however today we couldn't resist but take in a couple of small corals taken as "frags" (cuttings) from our own corals. They look pretty sad at the moment, but hopefully they'll settle in soon. The toothpicks are used to skewer the 'mushroom corals' into the rock in the hope that they will attach there.

P365 Apr 26 - Sand Garden

Late at night and desperate to shoot anything before bed so that I dont miss a day of 365, this is our little sand garden. It's a small tray we keep on the kitchen bench, and it is a very popular and soothing toy to play with. Hardly a guest leaves our place without leaving their mark :)

P365 Apr 25 - NnN

One of the rules of Project 365 is to take a photograph of yourself at least once a month. Well here are Naomi and I for April!

P365 Apr 24 - Inside the microwave

Hmm... Looks like it needs a clean. Taken with the fisheye on self-timer.

P365 Apr 23 - Flowers

P365 Apr 22 - Macro tree

Took the macro setup outside this evening around sunset to see what I could shoot of the trees in our front yard. In the end I captured an interesting lens flare, and a cute little ant on the bark.

P365 Apr 21 - Nomi's Eye

It's amazing how much detail you can see in the iris when magnified so much :) Model: Naomi.

P365 Apr 20 - Wii FTW

Having a blast on friday night with the Nintendo Wii. Andy and Con with the fisheye.

P365 Apr 19 - First macro shots!

My extension tubes finally arrived today, and after playing around with them for half an hour, I can see I'm going to have a great deal of fun :) The coin in the last two shots is an Australian 5c piece. The last shot is a 100% crop of the image (actual size).

P365 Apr 18 - My Desk

This is a typical view of my desk in the evening, complete with anime figurines, cushion for my dodgy left elbow, dual screens and Chibi using the phone/fax as a pillow. He likes to keep me company on the desk several times a day, and make sure I'm awake, by pressing the "hook" button with his cheek, which takes the phone off the hook (hands free mode). He's actually once succeeded in taking the phone off the hook, press a speed dial, and take an answer before i managed to hang up again! Maybe he's calling a girlfriend?

P365 Apr 17 - Jewelery Bookmark

Some of Nomi's jewelery, a bookmark. Full view and detail.

P365 Apr 16 - Pinhole experiment

Another experiment today! Nomi sent me a link with some quite cool photos taken with a pinhole camera, and it occurred to me that I might be able to make something similar with my camera. So I grabbed my camera's body cap, a drill, some tape, aluminium and a pin, and 15 minutes later, I had a pinhole camera. I won't bore you with the technical details of pinhole cameras, but my first results were... not entirely awful :)

The image above was taken without using any lens at all, just a hole in some thick alfoil (a take-away pasta tub in fact). As you can see, it's a bit soft of focus, and all the dust and dirt on the chip stands right out, but it's a recognisable image! I shall have to experiment further... :)

By the way, the cute little figurine is Hazuki from the anime Tsukuyomi Moon Phase. She was a gift from A-Chan and Asham from Japan. She's adorable guys! Thanks so much :)

P365 Apr 15 - Failed experiment

Doh. I was planning to get out and take some photos somewhere pretty today, but my neck/shoulder was playing up, so I stayed home (I have a massage booked this week). I wanted to do SOMETHING productive with my camera, so I thought I'd try out an idea I've played with briefly before. By photographing a mirrored sphere, one can invert and un-warp the reflected image, and by taking photos of the sphere from a couple of angles, merge those images together to create a full panorama from the vriewpoint of the sphere. When it works, the effect is quite striking, as it looks like one is a Lilliputian in a giant's world. It's also possible to get unique angles of confined spaces. I have done this to some degree of success before on my desk.

This time I decided to see what the view was like from under the hood of the car. Unfortunately, it didn't work too well. The surface of the pinball I used is hardly of optical quality, so the glare from the direct sunlight lit up every imperfection on the ball. Also, due to the small size of the ball, imperfections are by comparison very large, and due to the minimum focusing distance of the camera, the ball appeared small in the photo. This resulted in a low resolution, blurry panorama marred by the flawed ball's surface. Incidentally, the black patch is where I've edited myself out of the shot.

I still think this concept has great potential, but I think before I can attempt it seriously, there's a couple of things I need to get hold of first: some extension tubes, so that I can get the camera closer and fill the view with the sphere, and a larger, optical quality mirror sphere. I already have some tubes on their way to me, hopefully arriving this week, however, I have no idea where I'll find a sphere. On the off chance that anyone knows where I could find a 30-70mm optical quality mirror sphere, please email me or leave a comment on this post.

Sorry for the lengthy and technical post, but I'm hoping anyone into experimental photography may have found it interesting :)

P365 Apr 14 - Nomi at the market

Naomi at her stall at Surrey Hills Neighbourhood Centre cottage market. View an interactive panorama here (Quicktime required).

P365 Apr 13 - Egg and Tea

Mmmm, left over easter egg and green tea.

P365 Apr 12 - SWRPG

Every Thursday evening, when we are all available, I get together with "the guys" and we play a session of a Star Wars tabletop role playing game. This is simlar in concept to Dungeouns and Dragons which you may have heard of. This is what a typical game looks like. It's a lot of fun, telling a story, and spending a lot of time just chatting about life. I've played and mostly run various different RPGs and campaigns almost continuously for approximately 18 years now. I love the creative and social outlet.

P365 Apr 11 - Chibi with fisheye

This is our cat, Chibi. He's a big cat. He's very affectionate. I chased him around with my fisheye lens and got this photo. This is the closest I've managed to get something with the fisheye lens and keep it in focus. I should have thought of it before, but setting the apeture to f22 broadened the depth of field enough that I could get his nose to be in focus within a couple of cm of the lens. Using the flash sure helped at that apeture!

*tickles chibi's nose*

P365 Apr 10 - Moon experiment

It was very late, I had no P365 image and the moon was up. I've taken lots of photos of the moon before, so I wanted to do something different. I experimented with a few ideas, and this is the one that I think came out the most interesting. Flash to freeze the foreground, five second exposure, and lots of wobbling the tripod around :) It looks like the "moon's" trail is in front of the trees, rather than thousands of kilometers behind them. It reminds me of those blurry, shaky "ghost" photos. I may have to experiment more and refine this technique :)

P365 Apr 9 - Yarra riverside

Went on a day trip with friends to the Warrandyte State Park and took a couple of 360 degree panoramas down by the riverside. You can see the full interactive panoramas here. (Quicktime required) Click on the thumbnails at the bottom to swap between panoramas.

p365 Apr 8 - Easter

My beautiful niece, Emma shows us all what colour an easter egg made her tongue :)

P365 Apr 7 - Minifest

Today was "Minifest", the mini Melbourne Anime Festival (Manifest). It is just like an anime convention but on a very much smaller scale. Lots of people in costume, events, screening and fun stuff like that. It was great to catch up with several friends I only see occasionally, and plenty of opportunity for me to have fun taking photos of fun and interesting people.

Pictured above is Siera, someone I always have a blast photographing, and Minifest was no exception. She is wearing a hand-made outfit to which she referred as a "mass of plaid".

I also experimented with a hand-held group photo type 360 panorama. Normally I take these with a moderately elaborate tripod setup to ensure a minimum of alignment problems. I was pleasently surprised with how well the hand-held pano came out, although the down view shows a bit of alignment problems. You can check it out here. (Quicktime required)

If you would like to see the whole day's selected photos from Minifest, you can see them here.

Project 365

A friend of mine has inspired me. This year she has been doing something called "Project 365". Its sounds pretty impressive, but essentially the idea is simply to take and post at least one photo every single day for a whole year. This is the url of her photo blog: http://www.photoblog.com/user/aurian

I love this idea. Its stated purpose is multifaceted: Document your life, capture memories, learn more about photography etc. Historically I've had a difficult time seeing things like this through, but this shouldn't be too hard, and it will definately be a good thing for me, to help me with my photography which I always want to keep improving.

There's one essential flexibility with the rules. I don't have to POST a picture every day, just take one. I can post several days backlog in one day, just as long as I've taken something each day. In that spirit, my first post will be of some photos I took a few days ago, and I'll start "365" from there. I'll preface all such post titles with "P365".

If you want to follow my progress, then subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog. You can do that by clicking the orange rss button at the right of the address bar, or by clicking on the button which is not yet part of this page, but I'll add in the near future!

I hope you enjoy this journey. I wonder if I can keep it up :)

Testing blogging from Picasa.

Just posting this to see if I can successfull post to my blog from Picasa. If this works, maybe I'll do it more often! The photo os of Mel modeling one of Nomi's fascinators.