March-ing along...

Sooooo..... My March post is a little late - I'm blaming my uni work for that, which I'm slowly getting on top of. It's a nice change from last year! Plus the water polo season continues... But being in the thick of assignments right now I will keep my normal ramble short. March was fun, the highlight probably being mushrooming with Jacqueline out around Oberon. So many photos from that excusrion made my initial shortlist, but didn't quite make the final six. There were a lot of good photos this month - either involving incredibly scenery or interesting subject matter, but when it came to the crunch the photos weren't technically as good as the six I have chosen. Anyway, here they are:

Location: State forests around Oberon
(f6.3, 1/50, ISO 400, 70mm focal length)

The only mushroom photo that made it to the final six - a saffron milk cap. The poisonous ones (i.e., the ones with red with white spots, that look like they're straight out of Mario Kart!) are much more photogenic, but I love how the saffron milk caps push their way up through the roughage. At first when I looked back at this photo, I wished I had moved the pine needle from the front of the mushroom. But after looking closely it added a nice little touch, in particular the little bug sitting on the end of it!




Location: Somewhere along the M4?!
(f3.5, 30sec, ISO 400, 8mm focal length)


An extended exposure while hurtling down the M4. No, I wasn't driving at the time - that would be irresponsible... I tried a few photos while coming down the mountains with varying degrees of success, but when we hit the straight and narrow the movement of the car didn't really matter. I think this might be my first extended exposure with my fisheye.....

Location: Easton Oval, Rozelle
(f10, 3.5sec, ISO 400, 38mm focal length)

Taken next to the oval on Liliyfield Rd, there was a soccer training game on at the time, which I thought would make for some good movement photos. As it turns out, those photos just sucked. But while I was there, started to play with the shadows from the trees, underexposing and deliberately 'blowing out' the blacks. After spending a while framing it, I post-produced in photoshop (decreased saturation and vibrance), and this is what I got :)



Location: Rozelle
(f8, 15sec, ISO 400, 17mm focal length)



This one kind of caught me off guard, and was lucky to catch it as the clouds were moving quite fast. I used an otto bin as a tripod and overexposed by a stop. This was the first photo I took - the second came out blurry (I guess otto bins are far from ideal when it comes to using them as tripods), and by the time I reframed and took the third one, the clounds had almost completely moved out of frame. It all happened within the space of a couple of minutes, and while this photo wasn't exactly what I was after, in retrospect I think it came out better than what I was aiming for!



Location: ANZAC Bridge
(f11, 5sec, ISO 400, 31mm focal length)



This was the result of a few trial and error attempts at capturing movement during extended exposures. One thing I've learned - while it's obvious that the longer the camera exposes for the longer the trail of movement, but I had never really thought about how a longer trail of movement results in lower visibility of the trail. This was exposed for 5 seconds, I think that's about the longest exposure I'd use. Long enough to get a nice trail of movement, short enough that it is still quite visible...

My first panorama that has made it to my 6 images blog! Ever since I read how to do them properly (i.e., shooting on full manual so that the balance is the same in each photo, zooming in and not shooting at a wide angle, and taking each photo vertically instead of horizontally), I have taken them at every opportunity. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. This one definitely worked! Post production in photoshop include stitching it together (obviously!), increased vibrance, and I also saturated the blue hues a little to bring out the difference between the sky and the rays of light.

Well, that's me for another month! Hopefully I'll find some time between assignments to go out and take more this month... Surely being on school holidays should help that cause! Now to stop procrastinating and start writing!!!!!