Australian & New Zealand photography

I won this fortnight’s Canberra Flickr theme comp “Winter”

Nathanael Boehm — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 23:56:45 +0000

I won this fortnight’s Canberra Flickr group competition where members had to post their best three photos associated with “winter”. My entry that won was this photo taken at Kosciusko National Park in 2008:

Don’t worry about all this processing

Nathanael Boehm — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 22:54:25 +0000

My photostream on Flickr has become a bit of a mess of highly post-processed images in the last week. It’s just a temporary phase, playing around with channel mixing in CMYK mode, and applying my grain filter to images that otherwise weren’t sharp enough or interesting enough to upload from Hawaii and elsewhere.

In general I’m not a big fan of such processing – I like photos to look real and believable, to put the viewer in that place, to feel what I felt as a photographer both physically and emotionally … the icy winds blowing off snowfields, the cheery warm glow of a sunset on a tropical island or the gloominess of a ghost town.

Over-processing tends to make scenes look alien or fake and can disconnect the viewer. That’s contrary to what I want to achieve with my photos so I’m usually quite subtle in my processing and very light touch with HDR. Of course that means that I very rarely get a photo featured on Explore but I can live with that.

Experimenting with Photoshop Actions

Nathanael Boehm — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 12:07:29 +0000

Most of the time when processing my photos I’ll tweak and fiddle around with various settings, filters and effects. I also have a few actions for sharpening and applying vignette that a friend gave me. But I wanted to experiment with developing my own effect, to develop my own unique feel to my photos that some photographers have in their processing.

I don’t want all my photos to look heavily cross-processed or desaturated in a way that makes all my photo look uniformly bleak, cold or alien. I think the latest action I recorded today is over the top but I like it. I created it using Channel Mixer in CMYK mode to shuffle around the channel source ratios for the output channels (which I think works better in CMYK than RGB), plus Curves in RGB mode to alter the contrast in each channel.

I’ve also created a grain action that I’ve used in this pics of my friend Rachel Greaves that reduces a copy of the image to 20%, applies grain, then sizes it back up and superimposes it at 70% over the original:

These ones have a variation on the grain effect that applies it only to midtones, keeping the whites and blacks relatively clean by making a new channel and applying Curves to drop the highlights down to black and bring up the midtones to white then making it a selection for the noise filter.

This photo has natural grain from high ISO:

My trip to Sydney, June 2010

Nathanael Boehm — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 12:03:52 +0000

I’ve been in Sydney the last couple of days catching up with friends, following up a few work opportunities and of course taking photos.

View the full set of photos from my trip to Sydney on Flickr.

First up was the Sydney Harbour Bridge:

… including under the Bridge and around The Rocks:

I tried my hand at candid street photography but was too chickenshit to get close enough to anyone to do anything decent:

… and went out for yum cha with some friends at the East Ocean Restaurant for brunch:

I think this graffiti I found on some steps sums up my trip beautifully:

My shopping list, June 2010

Nathanael Boehm — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:14:31 +0000

From Lensbaby to use with my Composer:

General photographic supplies, which I’ll probably get from D D Photographics in Sydney.

… and then later this year, hopefully, a Canon EOS 7D and a Canon EF 200mm f/2.8 L II USM (not the massive white zoom lens with image stabiliser).

Experimenting with flash

Nathanael Boehm — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 07:19:23 +0000

I was dead against flash photography until a year ago before our trip to Hawaii when I decided I really should give it a go otherwise I would risk missing out on some great photo opportunities on our holiday. So I invested in a Canon Speedlite 430ex II and a Cactus V4 remote trigger kit.

A year later and I’ve taken some great photos using flash that otherwise would have been impossible due to low light or tricky ambient lighting even with my f/1.4 50mm … but I still don’t understand it. It’s like cooking – following a recipe and knowing how to cook are two different things. Flash photography to me is a bit of a mystery. Pointing it at the ceiling (if there is one) usually works but I just don’t know enough.

So this afternoon in order to better understand flash lighting I took a series of test shots using one of Jenny’s studio props.

All shots taken at ISO100 at at 46mm zoom with my Canon EF 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 USM lens, with the camera tripod-mounted and the flash on camera. All shots also exposure, white point and colour balance corrected. This is mainly a study in lighting directionality.

First up was a long 0.6″ exposure at f/4.0 using just ambient ceiling lighting:

Next was taken with ceiling-bounced flash, 1/200 at f/5.6 with the flash on 1/4 power at 80mm zoom setting:

Then direct flash at 1/16 power with a shutter speed of 1/200 at f/11:

Direct flash again but with a diffuser box:

And finally, ceiling-bounced flash again using the flip-out reflector on the flash head perpendicular to the flash head, supposedly bouncing some of the upwards light forward onto the subject. I don’t know if this is right – but I read it in a wedding photography book yesterday so I thought I’d give it a go, even though the reflector feels like it’s meant to come out all the way and cover the flash head rather than stick out alongside it:

Of all five shots, I think I prefer the last one. The reflector does appear to fill in some of the subject that is in the shadow of the ceiling-bounced flash, even if I’m not convinced I deployed the reflector slide properly.

Of course, the direct on-camera flash with no diffuser or reflector is just nasty even with a fur toy let alone with human subjects and the terrible things on-camera direct flash does to eyes and skin.

If you have more knowledge on the subject, please share!

Cold weekend at the coast

Nathanael Boehm — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 10:53:16 +0000

So we wait until the long weekend to go down the coast, but only go down for one night … which means we could go any weekend and not wait until a 3-day weekend. Anyway, we have things we need to get down around the house tomorrow on the public holiday so it was all we could manage; a quick run down to Moruya and then stay the night in Bateman’s Bay and come back via Farringdon and Captain’s Flat.

View more photos of our trip to the coast on Flickr.

Jenny was hoping to meet up with someone in Moruya but that didn’t happen so we found ourselves down by the water for a beautiful sunset:

And just to cement our reputation as sunset addicts, some nice photos we took on the way back near Tallaganda State Forest:

Food photography

Nathanael Boehm — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 12:52:58 +0000

I love to cook and I think well-made dishes make great photography subjects. In fact one of the reasons I put in the effort to prepare a nice-looking dish and to take care to plate it well is so I can take a good photo of it.

I’m a big fan of home-made pizzas, much to the disappointment of my friends who can only salivate from miles away:

I also quite like fish and cook with it at least once a week, usually on Saturday after going to the markets:

I mostly do main meals but occasionally a fancy lunch, biscuits, sushi, prawn dumplings, even bread:

And of course I can’t forget pasta. I’ve always loved pasta, perhaps because I’m half Italian and my mother used to cook pasta a lot. Since getting a pasta machine for Christmas it’s taken my love of pasta to the next level. I have not yet mastered ravioli, but I did make a delicious lasagne the other week with home-made lasagne sheets:

Most of these photos except the shot taken inside the oven used ceiling-bounced flash.

Photographing music gear

Nathanael Boehm — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:37:02 +0000

I love taking photos of musical instruments and I’m quite fortunate to own a bit of gear including a Nord Stage EX keyboard, Pearl ELX drumkit and Fender S1 Jazz bass guitar. Unfortunately I had to sell my Michael Kelly Dragonfly acoustic bass pictured below and my Yamaha TRB1005 quilted maple finish fretless bass guitar.

I’m not in a band at the moment – my last band disbanded at the end of last year – so I’m looking around but also hoping to make time to do some solo recording. Just too hard whilst I have a full-time job and involved in a million projects.

I did have the privilege to perform in Townsville and the Solomon Islands in 2005 as drummer with the Australian Federal Police rock band Short Notice alongside the Royal Australian Navy band and Yothu Yindi. Amazing experience!

Hawaii 2009

Nathanael Boehm — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 09:10:15 +0000

In July-August last year Jenny and I visited Hawaii. What a place! After we got through the heatwave of the first few days the weather was great although getting back into our air-conditioned Dodge after a walk was a welcome relief. Wasn’t warm everywhere though – got down to 17 degrees in Waimea on the Big Island and was pretty chilly up the top of the 10,000 foot Haleakala and the 14,000 foot Mauna Kea volcanoes.

Waipio Valley on the Big Island:

Tunnels Beach on Kaua’i:

Anole near Hanalei on Kaua’i:

Sunset from the top of Haleakala on Maui:

Volcanic fog “vog” near Kilauea on the Big Island:

Kualoa Valley on O’ahu: