Graham Leggate

Love the museums in London. Below is a HDR taken by balancing the camera on some stair railings. For this type of shot a wide angel lens would have been great. In any case here is my effort with a 24-70 (Nikon f/2.8) on a cropped sensor body (Nikon D90).

I eventually got around to editing a HDR Panoramic version of the National Centre for the Performing Arts. What a fantastic building!

Below is one of the images taken of the “egg” in Beijing. Also known as the National Centre for the Performing Arts, or the Opera House.  The Centre, is a dome of titanium and glass surrounded by an artificial lake. The building seats 5,452 people in three halls and is almost 12,000 m² in size, I was really surprised on how big the building is. Shooting on a cropped sensor with a 24-70 you can’t actually get the entire building in a single frame. I ended up shooting a bunch of images to stitch together, which I will do when I get some time. Below is a HDR of 3 images taken at 2 stops apart.

A couple of weekends ago I had a milestone birthday. I wasn’t going to blog about it, but the cake that a friend of ours made was so awesome that I decided to post some pictures of the cake and give her business a plug. If anybody is needing a custom designed cake which doesn’t just look fantastic and tastes fantastic, then contact Michelle from For Goodness Cake. Thanks Michelle for such a great cake! Also, a big thanks to all of my friends who helped celebrate the evening. I hope everybody enjoyed the pizzas from Cicciobllo Gourmt Pizza’s.

I have started slowly processing some images from our recent holiday, which now feels like it was ages ago (thanks to work!).The image below is taken along the Riviera Santa Maria Elisabetta. The building with the green dome is called Parrocchia Santa Maria Elisabetta, which is a Catholic church.

We are currently in London, which is our main destination for our holiday. We are drawing closure to the 3rd week of being here, and the time has flown by. We have 5 days left, an it’s a busy 5 days, between catching up with friends and family and shooting a wedding for friends. Below are some of my favorite images from this trip.

This is our second week of the family holiday and we are now in Venice, Italy. My wife wisely chose for us to stay on Lido Island. We have a nice little 3 bedroom apartment at the Oasis B&B, not far from the town centre and close to the water front facing St. Marco. I recommend where we are staying, it’s clean, well equipped and well priced. My wife chose for us to stay on Lido as it is more family orientated, it is cheaper than Venice, and you don’t have a million and one tourists around you. Traveling into Venice is easy and is reasonably priced, if you get a multi-day pass. Lido is basically a sandbar Island which is 11kms long. The Venice film festival is held on Lido each year, and it is where there are some exclusive hotels, such as the Grand Hotel des Baines and the Grand Hotel Excelsiors. This is apparently where the rich and famous hang out. The beaches in Lido are some of the nicest is Europe. I guess they are pretty good, but being a West Australian, it is very hard to find any beaches as good as our own.

The easiest way around Lido is on foot or bike. We hired a family bike and went on a tour. According to Sue, I was driving it like a sports car, so we eventually had to swap drivers.

Things to do in Venice:
- Visit St. Marks square
- Go to the top of Campanile Tower and view the fantastic vista over Venice, and also hear the huge bells ring up close
- Visit the other usual hot spots, such as bridge of Sigh, which is covered with screens, which I think is covering scaffolding as they look to be renovating Doge’s palace, Acedemia bridge, and Rialto bridge.
- Catch a vaporetto down the Grand Canal
- Visit Burano Island, which was really scenic and colorful. But the kids were pretty grumpy that day

Below are some of my favorite images from this part of the trip so far.
Sunset looking towards St. Marco, and Basilica

The view from the front of the apartment along the waters edge

A view down a canal on Burano Island

Sue, Amelie and James at the beach on Lido

Beach huts on Lido beach

The view from the top of Campanile Tower looking over Basilica

The Grand Canal

Wandering the backstreets and alleys in Venice

Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo, an aristocratic Venietian family home

Sue, James and Amelie on a bridge in Venice

A road in Venice

Basilica and a thousand heads of tourists

Sue, Amelie and James feeding the pigeons in St. Marks square

Lots of bikes

Well we are one week into a family holiday, which crosses Dubai, Venice, London and Prague. So far so good. Our kids are handling the timezone changes ok, we just have to keep in mind they get tired and hungry at slightly different times than normal. We have been to Dubai a couple of times before, when Amelie was only 3 months old, so we haven’t been there for just over 4 years. We really like Dubai, it’s an engineering marvel. On out previous visits we stayed in some pretty nice 5 star hotels, this time around we stayed in something a little cheaper, but it was still really good. Comfortable room, great breakfast, close to one of the largest shopping malls in the world (actually it is the 7th largest), and it had all of the usual amenities you would find in a 5 star hotel, but at cheaper rate. The hotel was called Al Murooj Rotana. Anyway, on our list of things to do this time around, we had:

• Atlantis Water Park
• Burj Khalifa
• Dubai Mall / Aquarium
• Dubai Marina / Palm Jumierah Monorail – to see Palm Island
• Mall of the Emirates / Ski Dubai

We got to do all of these, we had a couple of restrictions, for example, we weren’t able to take James into the ski park, therefore it meant one of us had to stay out with him.

The weather in Dubai this time around was hot! The temperature darts around during the day between 37-43, then at night it dips to 30. Thank goodness for A/C. We only had a 10 minute walk in the heat from the hotel to the shopping centre, and a fair bit of it was in the shade.

For this holiday, I have packed a fair bit of photography gear, mainly because of I am shooting a wedding in London. For most of the day trips I have been carrying around my Nikon D90, and a Nikon 24-70 f2.8, attached to my favorite strap, the black rapid. I have decided to leave my laptop at home, we had enough gear to cart around with us as it was. So, I’m attempting to use the iPad 2 as my editor, etc. I have shot quite a few images which need to be post processed as HDR’s, so I won’t get to them until we return. I’m also shooting as RAW+JPG Basic, and using Photogene to edit with on the iPad. Below is a selection of images from Dubai.

Testing the ability to edit and post from the iPad.

I entered my first image in to the Epson International Pano Awards. The entrants to this competition are amazing landscape photographers. I was really pleased to hear today that my entry received a Bronze award with an average score of 78.