Graham Leggate

To all the other bloggers out there, Merry Christmas and all the best for the New Year, I’m looking forward to having a break to get a chance to catchup on the 1000+ posts out there I haven’t seen (I think Mark of TrueNorth might be responsible for at least half of that number )

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.

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.

It has been a rather wet day, and it is pretty hard to enjoy our place in the wet at the moment. Both areas in our backyard are building sites! I thought I would do some portraits of the kids whilst they were playing. A quick edit in Aperture, and I’m happy All these images are taken using the Nikon D90 and Nikon 50mm f/1.8D lens.

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

This is for the family. The image below is of Amelie doing an Easter egg hunt in the backyard. She had lots of fun over the weekend and has been a little angel.