Graham Leggate

A little snap of a Lucky Bamboo to create some fine art Shot against a window in the kitchen with some grease proof paper as the backdrop, a very quick and easy way to create an effective silhouette.

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 out the back playing with Amelie this evening, and there was quite a nice sunset happening and some nice warm light, so I fired off a few shots of Amelie playing the in garden on the swings. So, since I haven’t had an opportunity to pop out and do some photo’s, I thought I would post this.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to take any new pictures in the past week or two. I have been too busy with work and house renovations. However, I found some energy one evening to fix a couple of little annoyances I had in the picture of Hillary’s Marina and send it off to get a 104x30cm canvas print made of it. Hopefully the print turns out. I am using Brilliant Prints to do the canvas. I will post some feedback on the print once I have it. Anyway, here is my final image I’m getting printed, except I’m not having any border on the canvas print.

I’m still sorting out my library of pictures in Aperture, so from time to time I come across pictures which I think worth showing, The image below was taken down in Esperence a few of years ago, and I had bracketed many of the shots. So I thought I would attempt another HDR. So here it is.

Kheng, Matt and I headed down to Point Walter to grab some sunset pics. To be honest, this was the first time for me to visit Point Walter, and I was quite impressed. The sunset wasn’t too bad, however I didn’t appear to capture it very well, I don’t think I took enough pics, after the sun set below the horizon. Never mind.. down as a lesson learnt. Anyway, we made a pack to post one or two pictures, so here’s mine.

The jetty at Point Walter:

The sunset… hmmm, they were that bad I resorted to creating something which could have been done using a milo tin with a whole in it!

Below is another stitch, which only consists of 5 images. Different colour cast, not sure which one I like more.

I wasn’t going to go out and do any pictures tonight, however Kheng rang me to see if I was going to do any photo’s as it looked as if it might be a nice sunset. So I grabbed my bag and tripod and headed down to Hillaries Marina. I sort of had an idea for a pano I wanted to try, so I thought tonight is as good as any to give it a whirl. Anyway, below is a 7 vertical image stitch, taken at 50mm, f18, 4 second exposures at ISO 200, and the white balance set to shade, which provided that nice warm colour. The levels and saturation where tweaked in CS4, and a mask was needed on the left side of the image to tweak the levels, as that was a slightly darker exposure, due to less ambient light being present. Anyway, I’m pretty please with the image. I hope you like it too.

The clouds looked a bit dark and menacing tonight, however the sun had quite a warm colour, so I thought I would head out for half an hour and see if anything came of it. I shot a few pictures, most of them were pretty boring, and found their way to the trash bin. I think I need to find a new scene, I need something to lead the eye to something or somewhere. Anyway, below is a picture from tonight. This is shot with the D90 with a 18-105mm, a polariser filter fitted, .9 ND, and a ND Grad, ISO 200, 1/5sec @ f10.

I announced earlier that I didn’t win the competition, however my picture would still be on exhibition in Sydney and Melbourne. A friend in Sydney (thanks Mark), hunted down the elusive caravan of black vespas to capture these photo’s of my photo on the mobile exhibition.