Graham Leggate

Love the museums in London. Below is a HDR taken by balancing the camera on some stair railings. For this type of shot a wide angel lens would have been great. In any case here is my effort with a 24-70 (Nikon f/2.8) on a cropped sensor body (Nikon D90).

I eventually got around to editing a HDR Panoramic version of the National Centre for the Performing Arts. What a fantastic building!

Below is one of the images taken of the “egg” in Beijing. Also known as the National Centre for the Performing Arts, or the Opera House.  The Centre, is a dome of titanium and glass surrounded by an artificial lake. The building seats 5,452 people in three halls and is almost 12,000 m² in size, I was really surprised on how big the building is. Shooting on a cropped sensor with a 24-70 you can’t actually get the entire building in a single frame. I ended up shooting a bunch of images to stitch together, which I will do when I get some time. Below is a HDR of 3 images taken at 2 stops apart.

A couple of weekends ago I had a milestone birthday. I wasn’t going to blog about it, but the cake that a friend of ours made was so awesome that I decided to post some pictures of the cake and give her business a plug. If anybody is needing a custom designed cake which doesn’t just look fantastic and tastes fantastic, then contact Michelle from For Goodness Cake. Thanks Michelle for such a great cake! Also, a big thanks to all of my friends who helped celebrate the evening. I hope everybody enjoyed the pizzas from Cicciobllo Gourmt Pizza’s.

I have started slowly processing some images from our recent holiday, which now feels like it was ages ago (thanks to work!).The image below is taken along the Riviera Santa Maria Elisabetta. The building with the green dome is called Parrocchia Santa Maria Elisabetta, which is a Catholic church.

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

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.

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