This post is a little late but it’s better late than never. Vivid was a great opportunity for some good night time photography practice…well that’s what I thought at first anyway. This year chibi and I went to check out both Darling Harbour and Circular Quay locations after work and boy were we tired afterwards! Vivid was at least twice as popular as last years. You couldn’t even walk in a straight line. It was quite a task to find the perfect spot and wait for the perfect moment to take a snap as there were constantly a steady stream of people walking past.

Anyway, I can’t say I’m happy with the shots but I think compared to last year’s taken with my Nikon P7100, it was a big improvement =). Here’s a pic from last year.

This year we saw the introduction of some pretty spectacular water displays at Darling Harbour. Too bad we arrived a little late and I wasn’t able to grab a good spot. Here’re the pics anyway.

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Chibi and I spent Anzac day down at Mount Annan Botanic Gardens for a nice relaxing photo shoot session. I love to read up on photography techniques and try them out each time, I think that’s how we get better at it. So this time I paid extra attention to the shutter speed and used the rule of thumb of keeping the shutter speed at least 3 times the focal length for sharpness. By doing so I have noticed that a higher percentage of my shots were alot sharper, particularly the shots above 70mm.

I’m quite happy with the way these turned out.

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I’ve been testing out my Canon 70-300 lens again and this time I chose pretty much the furthest possible visible object – The moon. When I saw this image I was just amazed by what this lens is capable of! I’ve seen lots and lots of pictures of the moon before but there’s just something really special about taking your own pics as I’ve never done this before. We see the moon with our naked eyes on most nights but all we see is a ball with a few shades of grey. It’s just fascinating that all this detail is there, just that we can’t see it.

For this picture, I had pushed my equipment to the absolute limit, taken in the full 300mm 18MP raw on my 60D. However, what you see here is already the 100% magnification. But I’m really happy with the result =)

Also here’s another HDR I took down at Lane Cove National Park during sunset

It’s photo shoot time again! This time I got to experiment with some really exciting new gear and techniques. Originally we planned to goto Milk beach, a beach hidden by cliffs and bushes but due to the distance and heat, we ended up going to Shark Bay which was packed! It’s Aussie day after all so it wasn’t really the best time for a photo shoot. We had to move locations once more and ended up on Vaucluse beach which was nothing short of…well..plain. Despite that we had a great time with the whole beach to ourselves.

A new gear was introduced to this session! It is the Canon 70-300 f/4-5.6 IS USM tele zoom. This lens was really fun and produces some really sharp images. (Also very useful at the beaches as well…if you know what I mean). Today was forecast to rain but thankfully most of the day was a steady bright overcast sky which was perfect for portraits =). The IS is absolutely fantastic, I can’t imagine a tele lens without this feature. You can clearly see the shake reduction through the view finder, it’s like magic. Like other reviews I’ve read, extending it all way to 300mm does result in a softer image, but still pretty sharp and good enough for my needs. I won’t hesitate to zoom all the way if I need to.

So here are some of the pics of the day, all taken with the 70-300.

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It was a nice sunny afternoon so I decided to take go for a short practice shoot at my backyard. You never know what you may find even though you’ve been to the place more times than you could imagine. To my surprise, I found these pegs lined up in a nice straight line. Shallow depth of field sure is a nice thing, though I think I could’ve increased it just a touch.

You may have noticed that the blog theme has changed also. I’m just experimenting with a new layout as I got bored of the old theme lol. Also my lens should be arriving anytime now! can’t wait to try it out so I can post some more variety of shots ;P

I’m trying to get a better understanding of flash photography. Before my 430EX II arrives, I wanted to first get a bit of practise. I just went and grabbed some fruit (yeah we always have lots of fruit lying around..) and placed them on a well lit table next to the window. Now the typical problem will be that the table surface and the background will tend to be properly exposed, leaving the back of the orange and parts of the banana under exposed. Applying a bit of flash as a fill light could solve that problem. So I did the test only by using the built-in flash on my 60D and the result was quite satisfying. It brought out the details and brightened up the shadows. Except the problem is you could see some specular highlights on the orange and clearly a 2nd light source is present as you can see 2 areas of light on the orange. The 430EX II could solve this problem with it’s larger and more powerful surface light area to create a softer fill light. Will find out Wednesday!