Bon Appetit!

I love food and I love taking photos. Yes, what a bold statement that was…Since I have neglected my camera for a while now, (as with my blog!) I’ve decided to take my camera out with me to all the different restaurants in Perth. I had lunch with my girlfriend, Karen, at Siena’s then coffee at a cafe called Francois Patisserie. FYI – Siena’s have half price on their pizza/pasta during certain times of the week! Love love specials Great food too of course. Yes – I won’t take a picture of something if it wasn’t apetitising hehe.. Food snob I am!

At Francois Patisserie, I ordered a hot chocolate as usual, Karen had a soy mocha and we shared a chocolate truffle. The chocolate truffle is SIMPLY DIVINE! *drools* A must have! You can also get this at Tarts in North Perth.

And not to forget, a pic of my lovely girlfriend enjoying the afternoon warmth (:

Portraits

I love taking portraits! Provided that there is a good location! I hate to admit, but Perth…Perth is a bit of a hole when it comes to finding a good location for portrait photos. When doing wedding photos, its almost the same each time, King St, King’s Park, St George’s Tce, East Perth, South Perth, Freo, Swan Valley, UWA….etc etc…

So out of the above, my favourite would have to be Fremantle. I love the old architecture there. Taller buildings make good hallway like shots. Benches, large windows for reflections, the jetty..so many things to choose from!

About a month ago, friends of mine – Amanda and Kav asked me to take a few portrait photos for their anniversary together. We had a great time…despite the dramatic ending of me dropping my ONE MONTH OLD D700 from a 1m height on a CONCRETE FLOOR! :O *Gasp*….Thankfully Nikon is awesome so my camera still works (:

Activ Dragonfly Ball

Yet another entry I should have posted a while back. The Activ Dragonfly Ball took place on 10 March this year at the Perth Convention Center. This annual event fundraises for the Activ Foundation, which is an organisation providing services to people with disabilities. More information can be found here about the Activ Foundation.

I managed to scoop this opportunity through Tenille from Fashionate Events. Plenty of glamour, thumping music and interesting items that were up for auction. The highlight of the night was of course the dragonfly broach made from who knows how many diamonds!

Here are a few images from the evening, but as usual..the rest can be found here

Walk for Values Day 2009

It’s been AGES since I’ve updated this blog haha! But since I now have a little bit more time up my sleeve, thought I’d throw in a couple of blogs while I have the motivation too!

Walk for Values is an annual event that takes place in the streets of our major cities around Australia…and the rest of the world! This year it fell on the 28 March ’09, starting at the Perth Esplanade, up Barrack St, around the Hay/Murray St Malls and finally ending in Forrest Chase.

The event is to promote important human values in our society (Truth, Love, Peace, Right Conduct and Non-Violence). I’m sure everyone has realised the exponential growing number of events happening around the world, 90% bad news, 10% good! (Yes I made up those figures but that’s how I’m seeing the world change!) So the Walk for Values is to remind and relive the importance of human existence and raise awareness of positive human values. Anyway, over with the bits n pieces, I was asked again, for the second time for this event by the organisers, to photograph the event. The full album can be viewed by clicking here

Perth at Night

I’ve got this pano kit from nodal ninja a while back but haven’t really used it properly. So Madan and me set out one night to nail a proper panorama of the Perth skyline. I know it’s been done before, but it’s just one of those things where you just have to give it a shot yourself. I was fairly happy with the results but it involved HEAPS of editing as my 50mm f1.8D, which I used for my panos has a hot spot apparently and so there was a lot of cloning etc that had to be done.

We also shot the all-time-famous ferris wheel at the north side of the Perth foreshore. I’m sure you’d all agree what a waste of tax-payer’s money it was to put this wheel up. It’s not any bigger than the bell tower!! Well, it was fun to shoot anyhow I guess that’s all that mattered then. Wish I had a wider lens for this but after finishing with the editing I was quite happy with a tighter crop anyway. Shot with my Nikkor 17-55mm f2.8, here it is..

I must credit Madan as he suggested the idea of layering 2 of the same images – one still and one in motion. After getting what I wanted, I HDR’d the image using curves and Photomatix.

My camera and me

Till this day, I don’t think I could say that I’m 100% sure of what my forte is in photography. I guess most of my photography has been more portrait orientated. I’ve shot a few weddings with Diane and Amber from DeRay Simcoe Photography (check them out here). Recently they’ve hired me as an assistant photographer after tagging along to a couple of weddings earlier on.

Wedding photography is certainly a lot of fun, but I can see how stressful it can really get! 2 weeks ago was when I shot my first wedding by myself, well just at the groom’s place – t’was one hell of an experience. I had been so used to shooting along side either Di or Amber and so driving to the groom’s house that day I was thinking, no worries, Amber will be there, will be a chilled out and fun day. Then as I arrived I didn’t see her car and then it occurred to me…OMG…I forgot I’m shooting on my own this time! Quickly planned what I needed to shoot as I got out of the car then headed to the house. I remember Amber saying that I’ve got 1 hour to shoot everything at groom’s house. As it turned out, the groom said they were going to the church earlier than planned which gave me just under 20mins to find a nice spot around the house and shoot several things!

Well my shots in the beginning of the day were totally garbage but as the wedding progressed I was back to my happy place (: So, back to it…here is a small handful of images from a while back…

Ah…got lazy…will put more pics up later…these are way too old lol

Love our natural light!

For those that don’t know I am a huge natural light fan! I really try to avoid flash and use the awesomeness of our sunlight. Whilst on our Singapore and KL trip, my girlfriend Karen was lazing around in the hotel room and I saw this awesome warm light come through the window. For those who haven’t met Karen yet, she’s quite camera shy, well most of the time anyway…but I convinced her to sit on a chair and told her she doesn’t have to look at the camera and she was happy with that! This is the result…made it on flickr explore too!

Hello world!

Well this is it…I tried to blog before but I guess that failed. Was way too complicated with the htmling/CSS coding whatever so I’ve been recommended WP and so far its not too bad as it is. Would really like to change a few things but they want me to pay to edit the CSS! All I can say is…PFFTT. Although I can probably see myself later down the track throwing some money out =\

So to break the ice of this blog, I went back through my Flickr photos and remembered my Araluen Park pics…

Click here for a few more…