Graham Leggate

Over the weekend I was playing with the little ones in the new mostly built alfereso area and shot off a few frames. I think a few of them are keepers, if not for any other reason than I’m their dad

All shot using a Nikon D90 and 50mm f/1.8. Still surprised at how sharp these little lenses are for the money.

On Tuesday night Kheng and I decided to head out and do some photo’s. We didn’t really have anything in mind, we just wanted to get out and shoot some landscape type shots. Well, I guess these are more urban and cityscape, rather than landscape.

Hard to believe our youngest is going to be 1 on Sunday! It feels like he has been around forever, but it doesn’t feel like he has been with us for as long as 1 year either! All I know is they grow up really fast. We headed down to a little park on the coast near the Wild Fig cafe on the weekend to get some fresh air, and here’s a couple of snaps of our little boy, who seems to weigh a ton, a week before he turns 1.

It has been a rather wet day, and it is pretty hard to enjoy our place in the wet at the moment. Both areas in our backyard are building sites! I thought I would do some portraits of the kids whilst they were playing. A quick edit in Aperture, and I’m happy All these images are taken using the Nikon D90 and Nikon 50mm f/1.8D lens.

Well, the backyard is near a new low. I have had this same feeling a few times before whilst renovating. There is a cycle you need to go through to get something great out the other end, which means that at some point things are going to look there worst. So currently we are working though water proofing the garden beds with bitumen, which in hind sight we should have done before we put soil in them. Hopefully the soil will go back into the garden beds on Monday/Tuesday. The other renovation is putting up a new balcony, balcony roof, alfreso area and re-paving. The paving starts next Saturday, by the Monday we will again be in yet a new low. All the exiting pavers need to come up and around 12 cubic meters of sand will be needed to re-level the yard. Anyway, it’s all progressing nicely, no complaints from me. Hopefully by the end of July we might be finished.

Here are some pictures taken from my dry hotel room, it seemed to rain constantly for two days whilst I was in Sydney. Unfortunately my visit to Sydney didn’t lend it self for me to get out and about to do any photography, however I did some quick pictures late one night from my hotel room, on the 26th floor.

This picture was taken hand held from the 26th floor, with a Nikon 18-105 VR, ISO 2500, f/5.6, 1/15th.

This image was taken with the camera sitting on the window sill, ISO 200, f/8, 13 seconds

I haven’t posted much in the last coupe of months. We have been pretty busy with renovations on the house. We are currently getting an awesome Western Red Cedar alfresco area and new balcony put on the back of the house and getting the backyard re-paved. I might post some before and after pictures of the renovations at some point. This week is yet another busy week, off to Sydney tomorrow for work.

Anyway this post isn’t anything to do with photography, but I thought somebody out there in the internet world might find this a useful plug. I was listening to a photography podcast a week or two ago, and they mentioned some software called Woopra. Woopra allows you to monitor visitors to your website in real-time. Very cool software!  Basically they provide you with the ability to easily hook into the service from your existing website by adding some javascript or for specific websites they provide plugins (sites like; WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Invision Powerboard, Movable Type, TypePad, and Blogger). You install a desktop client (java based), available for OSX, Windows and Linux. Then you can sit back and monitor who, what, wherefrom, how people are getting to your site. You also have the ability to open a chat session to a visitor as well. Very cool software. We typically use Google Analytics for our main site, but one annoying feature is that the stats are always a day behind. Anyway, if you run a website or blog and are interested in getting some more detailed stats, then take a look at Woopra. Below are a couple of screen captures from the desktop client.

I haven’t posted anything for a while. So I thought I would post a behind the scenes photo from a family portrait session on Sunday.

First one was taken by Matt, a behind the scene shot of Kheng working hard

The second is a quick snap of Matt and Kheng.

This is for the family. The image below is of Amelie doing an Easter egg hunt in the backyard. She had lots of fun over the weekend and has been a little angel.

Following on from my last post I had a pano which I was working on. There are a few flaws in this pano, which I’m sure somebody will point out. I did have a good version, however Aperture decided to crash and I lost the edit Anyway, here is my most recent edit, faults included! I’m sort of sick of looking at it, so I think it is just better to post it.

This is a 4 image pano, each exposure was taken at ISO 400, f/11, 2.5 seconds. In hind sight, I should have dropped the ISO and increased the exposure time to get a more consistent look on the water.