Don’t Call Me “Tog”

I don’t know why, but I have an irrational hatred of the the nickname “tog”.  Maybe because it made me feel like an idiot – the first time I saw it used, I had no idea what it meant and it took me a while to suss it out.  Tog = Photographer.  Better than a “phot” or a “graph” or heaven forbid, a “her”, I suppose, but something about the sound of the word just jars with me.

I like being a photographer, or at least aiming to be one.  To my ear it sounds elegant, masterful, the science of technology combined with the art of the eye.  I’ve always been interested in technology – indeed currently I work in IT – but have always had an artistic side.  When I was younger, it was dance.  In the background was always writing, which never amounted to much beyond private diaries and a few travel blog posts, and in the background to all of that was photography.  It’s only been in the last few years that I realised that photography is the expression of my artistic side that I revel in the most (well, and that my body can still do!).

Having spent years just taking photos however I felt like whenever I felt like it, with no thought to the technical side, I’m now catching up.  Learning to use a DSLR has meant quite a lot of missed or ruined photos, but when I get it right… wow now that’s fun.  The technical side of photography isn’t just the camera though, it’s everything around you.  Choosing the light, considering the angles, determining the depth of focus, framing the world.  Suddenly taking a photo of that neat looking tree takes on a whole universe of options.  Practice practice practice will make this second nature, but for now I’m constantly evaluating and re-evaulating everything I do.  Sometimes I suspect I get caught up too much in the details and lose my image.  Other times I try so so hard but still miss one little thing that later I realised has ruined the shot.  Sure, with digital there’s “no cost” in taking hundreds or thousands of images that are no good, but it’s still a blow when that I can’t translate what’s in my minds eye to the screen, and of course plenty of wasted time.

Recently my husband and I went to the Bunya Mountains for a long weekend getaway.  I was determined to make the most of all the technical advice I’ve been soaking up recently.  I searched google images for inspiration and learnt about the local famous flora, the distinctive Bunya Pine, and resolved to capture one.  Sunsets were also supposed to be spectacular.

I didn’t get a good Bunya Pine photo, and the day I was ready for sunset disappointed me with an almost perfectly clear sky and not much of interest, so I came away feeling like I hadn’t really made full use of my time there, photographically speaking.  Practice, practice, practice, so that’s what I’ve put that weekend down to.

Bunya Mountains themselves are a sliver of ancient bush surrounded by ploughed fields and tamed land, topped with mobile phone and tv towers.  I’ve never been to a national park with better mobile coverage.  We walked by day (over 13kms one day) and shivered by night, never quite getting the hang of lighting the fire on our cottage.  There was phenomenal clear air at night when the clouds parted, but the impending super moon and the bitter cold kept me indoors.  I wussed out, basically.

Still, here is a collection of images that despite my despondence on returning home, I’m actually fairly happy with.  I may not have captured the images I was hoping for, but these aren’t a bad surprise (Mouse over for captions and in some cases, the story behind the image).

We pulled up to our cabin, I looked up and the sky had turned this amazing dappled pink and purple through a huge thin blanket of cotton wool clouds. The area around our cabin was simply not up to the task. “I need to see the sky!” I declared to my husband, “I’m going for a drive!”. He kindly chose to accompany me. We hadn’t had a chance to scope out the area and I had no idea where would be best to drive to capture this amazing light. We went back up the road to a lookout we’d passed on the way in, and found there was a great big ruddy mountain in the way of the shot I wanted, but I did manage some mist rising from the folds of the foothills.

Frost-bitten Stinging Nettles

Beautiful Bunya Mountains mobile masts

View over the cultivated land beyond the Bunya Mountains. Bunya is marked by many unusual and ancient fauna, like these grasstrees, some estimated to be several hundred years old.

Grasstree at sunset

Missed the moonrise, but had some luck with a few breaks in the cloud

Clear sky sunset. BORING. I took a tonne of photos anyway, since we’d gone to the effort of walking with tripod and waited ages to do this. This is the only one I felt I could inject some interest in by using an unusual crop.

Red-Browed Finch. A juvenile, so no actual red brow yet. There were tonnes of these beautiful lil birds flitting about the bush, our quiet steps disturbing them before we could reach them, and they’d flit up the path away from us. This one was quite the poser though, perhaps too young yet to be afraid.

Taken from the car while driving down the Bruce Highway. I was taking these out of desperation since I wouldn’t be home in time to capture it rising from the bay near my home. Many thanks to Canon 7Ds fast shutter speeds for this one decent shot.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Happy

So WordPress are showing off a new feature, and with the theme being “Happy” the challenge for me was limiting the new photo gallery to only nine photos. Missing from the gallery are all the people who make me happy, but here’s several things from around the world that will always bring a smile to my face:  Bright coloured flowers and the sunny days they grow in; spotting wildlife right on my front door (or in this case, my front fence); sharing the beautiful world around me through photography; relaxing in beautiful locations (a glass of wine can add to with happiness too!); living near the sea, and seeing the full moon bright on a clear night.  Fireworks!  Being high up; being in love, loving, and feeling loved; and I can’t go past a kitten for instant happiness, so here’s two!

 

Partial Lunar Eclipse

I love astronomy.  There’s nothing to give you a sense of perspective than staring up at the stars and realising just how old the light that’s reaching your eye right that second is.   The vast distance in both time and space.  The gigantic sizes involved.  Then remembering that all matter in the universe, including you and me and the cat and our mobiles and the garbage bag and the works of Picasso and of course Picasso himself and everything in between, was all born from stars.  We’re made of stars.  Out there is what our nursery looked like.  And our moon is some of the debris, just like us.

The Full Moon in all its glory

Tonight, on my upside-down side of the world, we were treated to a partial eclipse of the moon.  A partial eclipse is where just a little bit of the earth gets between the sun and the moon, so the earth’s shadow falls across the moon.  This is relatively rare because the sun is big and the earth is not and the universe moves in three dimensions.  It differs from the dark new moon as at those times, the moon is between us and the sun.

The faintest shadow dims the lower right

Something wicked this way comes

Chomp!

Nomnomnom

The fullest extent of the eclipse. Did anyone make shadow puppets?

Fade to grey

Leaving

Say goodbye

Some thoughts of photographing the moon:

– the moon is surprisingly bright.  Use spot metering function on your camera to correctly expose your image, otherwise you’ll have a blown-out white circle

– a tripod really, really helps

– if your lens has image stabilisation or vibration reduction, turn it off.  The slight motion of the motors adjusting your focus will mean you lose precious lunar detail

The best photos of the moon are usually silhouetting something of interest.  I haven’t found something appropriate near me yet, but I haven’t stopped looking either.  I’d also like to try exposing for the red shadow, but I totally forgot about that at the time.

Oh, and I got a great big bite on my bum.  The local mozzies clearly aren’t very appreciative of moderately rare astral phenomenon.

Super Moon: The Results

I can’t say last night was a fun night of photography.  My new shoes gave me a blister within five minutes of wearing them, that was bleeding within ten.  Then the ties that ruche up the long skirt I was wearing broke, so that the hem dropped and I was constantly stepping on it.  Then I struggled to find anywhere that didn’t have the airport in the background.  Then my little finger was bitten by some bug and started itching like crazy.  I didn’t ever capture the size of the moon the way I would have liked, as there wasn’t anything to silhouette against it effectively, but as the moon rose into twilight, the sea went a glorious pink which provided some nice colours.

My lesson today was to clean my lens!  Much of my post-processing was just removing dust spots, and I realised I can’t remember the last time I cleaned this lens.  Talk about a newbie error.  I also learnt that even with a tripod, I simply cannot take a photo with a straight horizon.  The water in my brain must be wonky.

Anyway, I’m not stunned with these, but I thought they might be interesting to see.  I couldn’t pick a favourite, each has a different feel.  They’re all looking east out over Bramble Bay, Brisbane.  Brisbane Airport and Brisbane Port is just to the south, so there are some lights and industrial buildings I can’t do much about.  Clearly I need to explore the local area for a better vantage point. Presented in order they were taken.

The moon finally rises above the clouds on the horizon.  Shame I couldn’t capture with the mountain in silhouette, but there was just too much cloud.  Somehow I couldn’t get this image to be really sharp.

I was tempted to flip this one horizontally, somehow the composition feels like it works better that way.  But I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do as the moon will then be back to front!

To me, this one looks like the moon is so heavy it might just drop out of the sky.

In the absence of an interesting foreground for the moon itself, I started playing with the moonshine trail instead.  Here I learnt that I really need to keep everything in focus for this to work; I have some similar images where my depth of field was way too short so the rocks are really out of focus, and it just doesn’t work.

This scene caught my eye as I was limping home.  I like the simplicity of the silver moonshine.

The Terrors of Night… Photography

Depending on where you are in the world, tonight or tomorrow night, weather permitting, you’ll see the largest full moon of 2012.  For me, I plan to head to the coast, a strenuous 5 minutes walk away, to try to capture the low and yellow moon rising out of Bramble Bay.  I’ve tried to take this photo before, but was once scuppered by low clouds on the horizon, and another time by my own stupidity; in general, the coast here faces east, but the spur I’d chosen that night faced much further north than I realised.  The really stupid thing, as I stood waiting and watching the hands on my watch move long past the expected moonrise time, is that I have the Google Sky app on my phone, and when all that was rising around me was my confusion, I didn’t think to check it.

It’s all practice though in the end, isn’t it.

Tomorrow night moonrise coincides with twilight, so that’s when I’ll take my trusty 70-300mm and my tripod down to the shore.  I love night-time photography, but night photography doesn’t love me.  Night photography is mercilessly unforgiving.  If you’re not technically perfect with your camera, if you miss getting a setting just so, night sky photography will show that error right up.  I first found that when trying to photography the super moon of March 2011.

I was in a chalet in Morzine, France.  The sky was dark with few street lights to mar the view, and the air clear.  I spent ages messing with the shutter speed to capture the full moon that had risen over the mountains, but every time the moon blew out too white and bright.  Fortunately for me, I was with friends, and one of those friends is a far more experienced photographer than myself.  He pointed out what several of you will already know; my exposure was right off.  By using the camera’s evaluative mode for exposure, so reliable in the bright light of day, the camera was calculating all that black sky with the tiny bit of white in the middle and exposing accordingly, aiming, as it always does, for grey.  My friend showed me the spot metering option, and suddenly my full moon picture had details I never imagined capturing.

Super Moon of March 2011

It’s quite cropped, so I think I’d need a longer lens to really capture the detail best, but I’ve always loved the night sky, so I still sometimes stare at the detail in awe and think of those fortunate few who’ve walked there.

Late last year I was in one of the best accessible areas in the world for night sky photography; the National Parks of Utah, USA.  Dry desert air, high elevations of 7000 feet or more, clear cloudless skies, it doesn’t get much better.  In both The Arches and Bryce Canyon, I braved the freezing cold, and my totally completely and utterly rational fear of mountain lions, to take long exposures of the beautiful red rock under the star-studded night sky.  In camera I thought I’d captured some beauties, but night sky photography is a strict judge, and in the light of day on a large monitor, noise, poor focus, the slightest movement, every tiny mistake, was laid bare.  One of my regrets about these images is that I didn’t take the time while still in the area to really assess my photos at full size.  I relied on my judgement made from viewing the images in camera.  Still, here’s the best of the lot, but the most valuable thing I took away from these shots was that I need to understand and practice the technical side of photography a whole lot more.  And that reviewing in camera is never enough.

Bryce Canyon at Night