Polarising Filters_Don’t Leave Home Without One

 
Here’s an interesting image made at The Beeches, prior to the recent horrific bushfires, near Marysville in Victoria. I found this lovely little grove on a walk with my photographer friend, David. The backlighting passed through some of the leaves and illuminated patches of ferns throughout the scene. This provided a great contrast with the [...]

Singer, Backstage

 

This image was part of a series I shot as stills photographer for an Australian singer’s video. The image was shot at Melbourne’s historic Athenaeum Theatre, a beautifully atmospheric building in the centre of town. This particular shot tells the story of our heroin’s discovery that her lover is in fact a two timing cad. [...]

Pic of the Week – Dingy, Queenscliff, Victoria, Australia

 
 
This image was made on a bleak, overcast morning in the seaside tourist town of Queenscliff in Victoria, Australia. Ironically I was in the area for a series of photographic workshops run by the Australian Institute of Professional Photography (AIPP). Queenscliff is a lovely town and, wanting to come home with at least one great image, [...]

Texture – A Key Design Element

 
 
A key design element, particularly in black and white photography, texture describes the relative roughness or smoothness of a surface. While a rough surface has a more highly textured appearance than a smooth one, it is the correct application of light that enables the viewer to perceive surface details.
Maximum texture can be achieved with a relatively hard light, [...]

Color Contrast

The purpose of this article is to define color contrast in a way that’s relevant to photographers. To better understand color we can break it down into 3 separate components: Hue, Saturation and Luminance.
Hue names the color. So a red rose has a red hue, while a yellow shirt has a yellow hue.
Saturation defines the purity [...]

First Shoot with new Canon 5D Mark II camera

Just before Christmas 2008 I acquired the new Canon 5D Mark II camera together with the Canon 24-105mm f 4 L series USM lens. I’d been using the original Canon 5D for the previous 3 years and felt it was time for the upgrade. I believe the new Canon 5D Mark II is a fantastic [...]

Shooting for Color or Other Design Elements

Despite our own, personal preferences what is it that determines whether a particular image is better suited to reproduction as a black and white or color photograph.
A good indication is what attracted you to the subject in the first place? Where you drawn in by the color or by other design elements such as tone, [...]

The Original is Not Always Right – The Camera/Film

When having your print film developed and printed by a lab it’s important to be able to look as objectively as possible at the quality of the prints produced, albeit by a machine with little or no human intervention. Little Johnny’s smiling face will actually look better when properly printed and processed.
The colour of the [...]

Pic of the Week – Rhapsody in Blue

The landscape itself was the inspiration for the image Rhapsody in Blue. The location, Squeaky Beach, situated on the southerly most part of the Australian mainland is a popular tourist site within Wilson’s Promontory National Park. While the beauty of the location is clearly evident, the concept that I’m exploring in this image is that [...]