February.

Hasn't been too exciting this week, nothing new has happened that I can think of which is super news worthy. The floods around Queensland (un)fortunately are not in Gladstone. Would be nice if they were as the fella who won the APN photo of the year awards last year was in some town where the water levels were stupidly high and the town just inundated in water.. like they say, their suffering is our reward.


Anyway, I have none of that stuff, but what I do have is. 

Kids jumping in the water.. Everyone at work and centro (headquarters?) seems to like this photo.. I personally don't know why, I just had to shoot 15+ kids who were going to the swim champs and I wanted an interesting way to shoot them all. haha. Took about 3 or 4 goes to get EVERYONE in the air or somewhat in sync with each other. 

There's a big boxing match coming to Gladstone pretty soon, and these dudes are promoting it, or behind it really. Long story short. We were in the Entertainment centre and all the lights were off so i needed to light them up somehow in an interesting manner. I had one of the lights (left) and shot it out towards the seats @ 50mm spread to light everything up, and another light (right) on a tripod shooting at the people. 

In hindsight I would have reversed it and had the left light on tripod and right light on the floor as the left side is way too hot and adds a bit of distraction to the bottom left corner, A bit of underlighting would've created a nice effect on them anyway, so i'm a bit annoyed about that. SO... this image is probably 75% there.. also I think the back is about 1/2 - 3/4 over exposed and the front 1/2 a stop under.. 

Just fyi, here's a quick 2min touch up in Lightroom. It's definitely not perfect but you can see it's just  little more balanced. If we shot RAW, no probs.. but we shoot jpeg and this is what happens.. or user error.. 

Me and My Ride at the Ambulance station was meant to be about.. you guessed it, an Ambulance truck, car, thing. Somehow we (I) ended up shooting this girl and her Mini Cooper. Not complaining I reckon it looks really nice. No user error this time.. 2 lights in a tripod camera right, to light her face and body so we got an even light all over. 

Sometimes we get pretty sad stories, and this is one of them. The girl on the right is dying from cancer/disease, I can't remember off the top of my head, but she basically has a few months to live. Young mate on the left proposed to her and are due to be married in March. Really sad. I felt pretty shit after I left. The both of them really love each other which is really nice to see. Bittersweet. He has a tattoo on his neck with her name on it. Very sad. Shot it with the 50mm at 1.4 cos i knew I wanted a dreamy look. Very soft and intimate. Little kid in the background ruins it but I didn't have the heart to tell him to sod off. Natural light, no flash. 

Happier times now. Soccer. This time it's a different perspective and shot to the usual soccer type shots. Well for me anyways. This was taken behind the goals as this guy pelted a free kick. I prefocussed as I knew the camera would struggle to track him and I really REALLY wanted the shot. his face is a little off, but the feeling is there. I like how you see him follow through his kick, the ball is in a good spot and those guys dodging the ball really adds to it. My favourite soccer shot so far. shoulda shot at f4 and up but I was already on 12800 or 25600 ISO, didn't want to push it too far.

I really like this photo too. Made the back page yesterday for sport which i'm happy about. Trial bike riding. not TRAIL bike riding so i'm told. Umm... natural light, 16-35 @ f5.6 and 16mm. got down nice and low and tracked her coming down and snapped away, panning with her to make sure she was sharp. very happy with this photo. Nothing more to really say about it.. haha. There were lots of other photos but this one all falls together quite nice. =]

Now like i've mentioned a few times, i'm doing a little project for myself, which is essentially photographing Gladstone and keeping memories of this town. This is the latest photo i've take in this series. It's the NRG plant, and like its name sake, it produced energy for the town and is one if the biggest in Queensland i'm told. Slow shutter speed to make the water milky and clouds blend. I have done a bit of post work to it, but 95% of it is colour correcting. The plant has very orange ugly lights to it and I really didn't like how it sat against the blue sky/background, so I essentially dropped the orange channel down to a bare minimum and left it with a very cold, eerie sombre colour scheme to it. I think it makes a huge difference and I quite like it. 


There's a photo competition on town which is to show off Gladstone. I will be entering this photo as well as the one I took last post with the transmission towers.


Anyway, that is all for this post.. short and sweet. There may be another post soon that is not photo related.. wait and see... excite excite! 


Ciao.