Graham Leggate

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

Not sure why I did this… but I did. Done as a bit of a laugh for my own amusement, but I’m sharing it. Easy shot; camera set on a tripod, fire off 3 frames, and for each frame move the model, then overlay the three images in CS and apply a mask to rub in/rub out the bits you want.

Multiplicity

I thought I would share with the rest of the blogging community some of the photography podcasts I listen too. I like listening to the podcasts as it gives you some different business ideas and technique tips and tricks. All of these podcasts are available from itunes, I typically listen to the podcasts in the car when I’m out and about.

So, my favourites are:

1. GoingPro
2. Photofocus
3. This Week in Photography (TWIP)
4. For Wedding Photographers
5. Pro Photography Show
6. Photography Monthly
7. Nik Radio
8. Nikonians Podcasts
9. The Digital Photo Experience
10. The Typical Shutterbug
11. Lastolite School of Photography (Video Podcast)

For anybody starting a photography business, there used to be a pretty good podcast called, “The Pro Business Forum”. Aric Hoek, who is the guy who produced them, stopped after 8 episodes, however they are still worth listening too.

I also subscibe to some others, including; Chase Jarvis, LensFlare35, Lightsource Studios, Photo Couch, PAPA – A Wedding & Portrait Podcast, Meet the Masters, Martin Bailey Photography, etc. But to be honest I’m not in the car long enough to listen to them all

Anyway, if anybody else has any recommendations, leave a comment.

Thanks.

It's a buzz

I was hunting around my Aperture library looking for something and I came across this image, which was taken a few weeks back in Araluen. It stood out because of the flower being alone in the Sun. I quite like the image, nice clean and simple

It’s been yet another long gap between posts. Life, again, has been really busy. We have had guests for 6 or so weeks, and James has started walking. Our little man is keeping us all on our toes now Last week I took the day off work and we went to the zoo. I was a little disappointed on this visit to the zoo. Either the animals were off hiding to sleep, or the stock of animals appeared to be a little low. However, the orangatang enclosure was bursting with life. There was a baby orangatang which was so cute, however I couldn’t stay and hangout to get a good picture, as our babies were getting hungry. As they say, it was feeding time at the zoo However I did get a picture of mum and a baby chilling. I wonder if mum was thinking, get off me, stop climbing all over me!

I have been mucking about with trying to take some pictures of water drops. Well, I can see many hours disappearing into this art, or more so science. Here are some pictures from my latest and only second attempt of capturing water drops. All the images below were taken using a Nikon D90, Sigma 105 f/2.8 Macro, Nikon SB-900 Flash and various coloured cards. General setup was:

• Camera set to manual focus
• Aperture varied from f/5.6-f/22
• Off camera flash, set to manual. Power varied from 1/32-1/128
• Shutter varied from 200/sec-2000/sec using high speed flash sync

I found out on the second night of doing this, that it is much easier to also shoot tethered to a computer so you can see the results on a bigger screen and make the necessary changes. Anyway, for my second attempt I’m pretty happy.

Thanks godaddy… both mysql database instances failed and they lost my last post. So, here it is again. So much for redundant services! We got a nice little message saying:

“We are sorry to report a portion of your data base may have been impacted by the failure of a primary and secondary MySql database server.
Our server support teams worked quickly to minimize any customer impact and there were no interruptions in hosting uptime.”

Great… except they broke the cardinal rule, which is maintaining data integrity!  Never mind. Anyway, here is the picture again.

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.