Project 52 – Week 6

Phew, this should bring me up to date. Last night I was treated dinner at Yamato Kaiten, a new sushi-train restaurant which has opened in Claremont Quarter. I won’t go into any details of the food; I’ll leave that to Chipinthesky as she was also present. But I will say, go try it out, its good grub!

Onto the photo, its the endpiece of a soft-shell crab sushi plate. Lightly coated in chilli flakes, it was awesome stuff.

35mm, f5.6, ISO 800, 1/30s, no flash. Cropped a bit in Adobe Lightroom. Focus and dof could’ve been better but had to make do between stuffing my face.

Project 52 – Week 5

For week 5 I was really running out of time, I actually took this picture on the Sunday morning but I’m cheating and saying it counts as week 5. Anyway, the neighbours almond tree is blooming again so I snapped this shot after the rains, using the top of the neighbours fence as a tripod thingy.

100mm, f11, ISO 100, 1/100s, no flash.

Project 52 – Week 4

Oops, so behind on updates. For week four I ventured into the wild front yard to see what I could find. Apart from the weeds I found this baby fly; probably the uglist baby creature I’ve ever seen. Luckily being 2-3mm long its ugliness would probably go unnoticed.

100mm, f5.6, ISO 500, 1/125s, built-in flash fired.

Project 52 – Week 3

Today, I purchased my first red ringer, a Canon 16-35L Mk.II. Thus endeth a year of drooling and wishing for the wallet eating UWA. I can’t say I’ve been overly excited though, because with exams coming up I have no time to play with it. But I had to at least grab a photo for this week, so I rushed down to the beach with the tripod to try and see if magic hour would come around this sunset.

It wasn’t to be, but here’s what I ended up with anyway. I think the mass of clouds on the horizon ate the light I was looking for.

I stacked a B+W GND and B+W CPL for the shot. CPL probably wasn’t neccessary but I wanted to throw it on given I had bought the filters weeks ahead of the lens (from B&H Photography in NYC). Did I mention the exchange rate at the moment is awesome?

Conclusion: Looking forward to having more play time with the lens. Depending on how other landscape shots go I might need to pinch another GND and a ND filter.

Project 52 – Week 2

This week I decided to give water drops a crack for the first time. So I totted outside with my three legged friend and a couple bowls of water. While shopping for the dreaded groceries, I picked up some blue food dye to colour the water. Of course, me being me I somehow ended up with lots of dye on myself and the courtyard floor. How long does it take to get dye out of your skin? If I strip down and run around with a stick I could pass for the dude off Avatar, sweet! (or not).

I started off with a 100mm macro but immediately ran into problems. Although I went outside (because I have no studio lighting in the house) into the sunlight, I needed a fast shutter to freeze the water. But I also needed enough depth of field to capture a decent amount of ripples and to compensate for my inaccurate water dropping hand skills. Cranking up (or down rather) the aperture to f/11.0 meant I could capture more, but then the results were mostly black at a shutter speed of 1/2000. So I heaved a sigh and turned the ISO up to 1600. Grain city here we come.

Still needing more depth, I thought about moving the camera back. But then with my shutter remote out of action, it would be a stretch to depress the shutter and drop the water at the same time. So I mounted ole faithful, the 17-85mm lens I got with the camera. Dropping that extra 15mm was just what I needed. Here’s what I ended up with (attempt 1,675/2,489… well it felt like it!):

Image cleaned a little and cropped in Adobe Lightroom.

I didn’t have time to pursue it further this week, but will definitely revisit it later down the track. In each corner you can see the sides of the bowls creeping in as well as the reflections off the bottom of the bowl. Next time I’ll either use a much bigger bowl or a rounder one; either way I also need a deeper one!

Volkswagen Advanced Driver Training

Today Mr. Lee and I had the opportunity to attend a free advanced driver training day, hosted at the RAC training facility out at the Perth International Airport. All cars courtesy of Volkswagen. Free you say? Yes, free. Of course, being free I expected it to be a few skidpan laps and a toddle around the area with reps from Volkswagen. Not quite.

The group was split into two groups, alternating between the skidpan and the racetrack. Instructing and supervising the session were a plethora of V8 Supercar and Formula Ford drivers, including James Brock; not a Volkswagen rep in sight. The skidpan was set up into two excercises; weaving amongst the cones followed by a sudden swerve. In both cases we were encouraged to gun it and actually try to step the back end out. Cars on offer here were the Jetta, Passat and Tiguan. While I didn’t get to try the Jetta, I was mildly surprised by the other two. The Passat was quite aggresive and the Tiguan nimble despite it’s size and appearance. The new Passat is also surprisingly sleek, as opposed to the slightly older, boxy versions.

On to the track section and the real fun began. On offer were two Golf GTi and two Golf GTD (D for diesel) ripe for a turbocharged flogging. Helmets on, I approached the first corner with some trepidation, having not driven any sort of performance car around a track before. But with a supercar driver in the passenger seat egging me on and telling me to floor it out of the exits (and subsequently going very hard on the brakes at the entries) I soon got into the swing of things. The Golfs were brilliant, sections where I was sure I would go for a slide, the car gripped and gripped some more, even when I didn’t go hard enough on the brakes (oh the noise from the tyres!).

Once the track session was over, we piled into two Golf R cars which were driven by the instructors. The hot laps were great, with our driver giving a running commentary on what he was doing through the laps. All in all, an awesome day out, and a bag of Volkswagen free stuff to boot. Will definitely keep an eye out for the next session on offer…

So what were the cars like inside I hear you ask? I guess they were nice, but I really don’t remember much at all since I was so intent on seeing how fast I could go! Probably why I don’t review cars for a living..

Random Thoughts

New things abound this month. Starcraft 2 was released last night at midnight, sending nerds, Koreans and the unwashed masses into a frenzy across the globe. The original Starcraft was first released by Blizzard in 1998; to this day it is still an insanely popular game despite its age, considering most games are lucky to hang around for half that time.

While the net floods with initial reviews and posts about much changing of pants, I will patiently sit by the mail box waiting for my copy to arrive. Not physically of course, its raining outside. Probably a good thing I have to wait for it, since I have my post-graduate exams in the coming weeks anyway. I like passing my units.

The man [sized brain] some of us know as Jbro reckons Dick Smith is flogging copies of SC2 for $69 (as opposed to $98 at EB), so grab a copy quick!

Last week Ducati announced their 2011 update to the 848. The 848 EVO. That’s EVO as in, 848 to the power of EVO. Whatever that means, Ducati has bumped up the power whilst maintaining a decent weight, so I certainly won’t complain. In any case, I can only dream of riding one, then wipe up the drool when I wake up since it’ll be some time before I can get my mitts on one…

2011 will also be an interesting MotoGP season, with Valentino Rossi signing a €15m contract with Ducati and Stoner’s move to HRC. Now its the Italians who will need to change their pants.

Project 52 – Week 1

Ok, we’re already well into week 2 so just catching up here for week 1. But first a bit of background. Over the last three years, my enemies friends and I have gotten into the whole photography thing and splashed out on fancy DSLRs and trick lenses. Maybe I’m speaking for myself here, but while they do get some use, maybe 70-80% of the time they’re doing jobs that your garden variety $200 digital camera can do.

Our task, therefore, is to produce one photo per week each which will be uploaded into a Flickr group so we can pat each other on the back and feel good for about 5 minutes (and maybe help each other improve!).  But I want to take the opportunity to try out new techniques and produce more keepers, not just happy snaps of that bird crap that I can’t be bothered wiping off my car windshield (Disclaimer: I don’t actually take pictures of bird crap, at least not on a regular basis..).

I have a macro lens. Therefore I had decided I should do a macro for my week 1 entry. Logical yeh? One sunny afternoon, around about siesta time (I do like a good nap), I spied a bee doing the rounds in a friend’s backyard. So I did what a lot of new macro photographers would do; chase it around the yard with what looks like a bazooka and generally look quite peculiar.

Unfortunately the sun was hiding behind some pesky house, so I was trying to catch this bee in the shade. Without my trusty tripod or ownership of a ringflash (or flash of any sort) getting a sharp photo was a royal pain. I ended up bumping the ISO up to 800 at f/5.0 to at least get some sort of DoF. I used Adobe Lightroom to clean a little noise and crop the image. The end result is this:

On the macro wish list: Extension tubes, tripod slide rail and a ringflash (or regular flash with flash bracket). Anyone want to donate? Ha.

Oh, Uhh.. Hi!

Chances are, if you’re reading this blog you’re either very bored or (heaven forbid) you might actually want to read what I have to say. I once said to myself I’d never start a blog in a million years, what a waste of time. Well… You know that crazy coach woman from Glee? I’d probably look like her right about now, with a nice big L on my forehead.

Moving right along, I plan to use this as a bit of a dumping ground for creativity and generally things that you might I find interesting, such as motorsport and photography. In doing this I also hope to document my Project 52, which I’m doing alongside a handful of friends in order to get out (or in, as the case may be) and get creative with our cameras. One picture a week, how hard could it be?