Graham Leggate

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.

We had a great time in Bali. Probably needed a few more days to unwind. But it served its purpose to have an Easter break and test flying with James and Amelie. We are now that little bit more prepared for the Dubia -> Venice -> London -> Prague trip. I did’t get the DSLR out as much as I would have hoped. I ended up taking more videos and snaps on the iPhone then I would have initially thought I ever would. I think 2 things really kept the SLR back at the hotel:

1. Size & weight of carrying it around. Call me slack! But when its so humid you really feel like travelling as light as possible, especially with two kids.
2. Humidity. Every time you take it out of the A/C’d room it would take around 1 hour for the lens to clear up.

Not to say I didn’t use it, because I did. But not as often. Anyway, I was feeling artistic, so I did an alternative edit to the previous image. I was curious to see how editable iPhone photo’s are. I guess my conclusion is… they are as good as a normal jpeg, nothing great, and noise is really apparent, which is no surprise. I think the image cleaned up OK with the help of Noise Ninja.

What a great view, just a shame it’s not from our hotel this was taken from The Westin.

It has been another long break between posts. Oh well, you get that when life is busy. Hopefully there should be some new contant over the next few months as we have booked a couple of holidays. In the mean time, here are some shots of the kids for the family taken over the weekend. All shot using a Nikon D90 and 50mm f/1.8.  A gold/white reflector was used to help with filling some shadows with all of the shots, they were all taken indoors with an aperture of f/1.8 – f/4 with ISO 800.

Last Sunday we were at a 3 year olds birthday party in a park. I was helping our daughter in the toilet, when I had my biggest camera accident to date. I bent over and the camera strap slipped off my shoulder sending my Nikon D90 and Nikon 24-70 f/2.8 lens first in to the tiled concrete floor! It felt as if the camera travelled in slow motion, yet there was nothing I could do to stop it. The sound of the lens hitting the ground was defining. I felt sick as I looked down to see bits of broken plastic on the floor Ami looked at me and looked at the bits of plastic on the floor and said to me, “daddy, your camera broke, don’t worry you can use mummy’s”. Thankfully I had the lens hood on, and it took most of the damaging force. Anyway, lesson learnt… get a new camera strap. So with out further ado, I would like to introduce the Black Rapid R-Strap, RS-7. What a great feeling strap, I’m looking forward to many long hours of shooting with it. My gear feels safe, light and comfortable. Check out blackrapid.com to see the range of straps.

A blog post for the family in the U.K. Some pictures of Amelie and James. The first two images were shot at the weekend around a friends place. Amelie was having fun jumping on the trampoline whilst James was keeping us busy exploring anything he could reach. Both were taken on the Nikon D90 with the lovely Nikon 24-70 f/2.8.

Amelie Jumping

James - 18 Months, trying to keep out of trouble

Environmental Portrait of James, if he was homeless

This picture of James was floating around in my Aperture library. Taken using the Nikon D90 and a Nikon 50mm f/1.8.  When I saw James with dirty finger nails, I thought there is only one treatment for this image. So I did some work on it to give him a grubby homeless appearance. Love him heaps, look at that face, how could you not