Graham Leggate

I have a few images of a forest opposite Cradle Mountain Lodge which I have never been happy with. The photo’s I have don’t appear to represent how the forest looked the day I photographed it… actually I have the same problem with a few images from St. Helens in Washington too. Anyway, I thought I would try re-processing one of the images from Tasmania. I think one of the main problems is the white balance settings. So with a little bit of processing I feel this looks a little closer to how it looked the day I took it.

I still haven’t tried any arty-farty pictures, but now we are able to get James milk drunk I should be able too So in the mean-time I thought I would post a couple of snaps of Amelie and James.

I didn’t get as much time as I hoped to try my hand at some arty-farty pictures of James. I got a short time on Sunday afternoon to give something a go. I spent a little bit of time making a small backdrop which I can hopefully re-use again. This was quite a difficult shot to take, as he is a real wigglier! Also my remote is infrared and I had it in my mouth whilst holding my hands in front of me and pointing my mouth back to the camera… now I’m writing this, I am thinking “Why didn’t I just use the self timer and set up a 10 shot batch?” Oh well… live and learn. Hopefully I will get some time to try some more over the next few weeks, if not, expect to see pictures of fruit and other junk around the house

This has been one week I never want to repeat ever again! The week started on a high with the birth of our son, James Graham, born last Saturday, but on Monday our world was turned upside down with Amelie needing to be admitted to Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH). I had taken Amelie to see the GP because she had a high temperature and a cough which didn’t seem to be getting any better, as it turned out, she had a bronchiole infection caused a virus. Amelie was in hospital for 3 days and so was I. Amelie was released yesterday to come home, however she is still under the care of PMH and is on oxygen all day, everyday. Each day we have 2 visits from a nurse to check on her healing progress and adjust her oxygen levels. Hopefully, if everything goes to plan she fill be fully discharged on Saturday and will be back to normal with the bottled O2.

On Friday Sue and James will be heading home from hospital. I’m really looking forward to the weekend to get our family back together again.

Anyway the picture below is of Amelie in PMH, taken on my Nokia 6110. Hopefully I might get a chance to try my hand at some arty-farty baby portraits like these by Kelly Ryden over the coming weeks.

Today marks the arrival of our son, who is nameless at the moment (I’m sure we will figure something out tomorrow). Our baby boy was born at 10:21am on Saturday 13th June 2009, weighing in at 3.49kg. We are very happy and excited, however neither of us are looking forward to the sleepless nights ahead of us  Here’s a quick happy snap taken 40 minutes after he was born.

Well, between renovations and the family getting the flu, I haven’t had much of an incling to get out to do some new photo’s. So I thought I would take a gander at some the video taken on the D90, and put together a little video, which is mainly around Amelie. I haven’t tried to seriously shoot any video on the D90, and most of the video shot is usually in really poor lighting conditions. But any way I scraped something togeth in iMovie on the Mac.

Amelie – The Year So Far – June 2009

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 tinkering around in Photoshop, and having a look at a few of the images from a couple of nights ago and thought I would post a quick trio of pics of Amelie.

I’m very excited that one of my pictures has been accepted into Australia Stock Photo’s. Now the pressure is on to see if any of my other images make the high grade, and hopefully some of them sell! Bring on a passive income

Well the renovations have been occupying much of my spare time, along with work and sleeping, so there hasn’t been much of an opportunity to do any interesting photo’s. I have been busy taking snaps of the renovations in progress, and will post a page showing the before and after shots sometime soon. So breaking the usual type of posts I’m posting a family moment! On Wednesday my wife became an Australian citizen at the Joondalup Council Chambers. It was a really good event, I was really proud to be an Australian as the ceremony was very patriotic  and well organised. Anyway, the picture below is of my wife, Amelie and the Mayor of Joondalup. There is also a YouTube video of my wife taking the oath. Worth a watch, as Amelie was quite funny near the end when she realised that everybody was standing with their right hand raised.