Graham Leggate

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.

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

Matt, Kheng and I popped out today quickly at lunch to take a quick photo of an old shop in Osbourne Park. Was a little difficult to get close too, as it is all fenced off. The light was pretty harsh at lunch time today, so I wasn’t expecting to come away with anything useful. However I have an image to post. The image started out as a HDR, but then turned into the B&W… probably didn’t need to do the HDR Anyway, it took on a life of it’s own once loaded into PS.

Last Sunday we went for a wander around Star Swamp and took this shot of Amelie wandering a head. I quite like the contrast in colours and the shallow depth of field.

105mm Macro, f/2.8, 1/640, ISO200

The next picture is just for some fun. I liked the detail in the bark and the contrast of the ridges. Anyway… gotta have some fun.

105mm Macro, f/3.5, 1/640, ISO200

I was looking though some older pictures and came across some pictures from the Maldives which I thought I would post. The first makes it all look a bit miserable, but even when it’s raining, the place is still lovely. The second picture is the jetty leading to the spa treatments at the Hilton. If you haven’t visited the Maldives, best to get in quick whilst they are still here.

Here’s an image I took a few years back whilst sailing around the Whitsunday’s on a 54 foot timber Schooner, called the Schooner Friendship. I thought I would use the original image as a test image to try out some post-processing based on a technique from Christian Fletcher.

What a lovely day in Perth! This morning the family and I headed to Star Swamp… doesn’t sound too attractive, which is probably why it has taken us 5 years to get around to going there, even though I drive past it twice a day! But what a pleasant surprise it was. It’s like a little National Park in the suburbs! I took the camera along and took some snaps. I had my father in-laws macro with me (thanks Brian), and decided to have a go at shooting some flowers… but the bees kept getting in the way

A little snap of a Lucky Bamboo to create some fine art Shot against a window in the kitchen with some grease proof paper as the backdrop, a very quick and easy way to create an effective silhouette.

Well, I was doing some more reading on HDR techniques and I think I have learnt some new tricks. So I thought I would post an imaging that I was playing with tonight. One of the tips I learnt tonight was that if you use Photomatrix the main controls to “play” with are Strength, Light Smoothing (keeping the radio button selected as far to the left you can go, whilst mainting a high Strength setting, gives a great effect), also the Microcontrast helps a lot too. The other useful tip I picked up tonight is to open images up in Adobe Bridge, and then from there you can open an image in Camera Raw, which is great.

I was out the back playing with Amelie this evening, and there was quite a nice sunset happening and some nice warm light, so I fired off a few shots of Amelie playing the in garden on the swings. So, since I haven’t had an opportunity to pop out and do some photo’s, I thought I would post this.