…but first, an explanation for that previous post:

I have WordPress for my iPhone so I can update my blog anywhere (which ironically I never use). It logs in automatically to my account without asking for a password. The rest is pretty much self-explanatory. Aaron, in his not-so-infinite wisdom, decided it would be funny to post something while I left my phone on his table…bad move.

So, moving on, let’s start with a background on what “Serious Fun” is (taken from the City Women website).

Serious Fun is an exciting program designed to connect with women in our community. It evolved to meet a need that was shown through the Girls’ Getaway and Shine programs. Serious Fun give mums a similar experience of being touched by God’s love and being encouraged by members of City Women.

These two ladies have had a rough time these past couple of years (I won’t go into details) but Friday Online and City Women thought it would be nice to treat them to make them feel a little bit special. The real props go to Kady Berry from the Petite Parlour and Hayley Balingall from The Do hair salon located at 4 Russell Street, Toowoomba. They took the time out of their Monday (which is their closing day) to treat these ladies to a beautiful makeover for FREE!

Meet the ladies:

Jennie:

Leanne:

These are the shots after the makeover:

Yes, I do have some close-ups…

Jennie BEFORE:

Jennie AFTER:

Cut: Hayley
Blowdry: Hayley
Colour: Chloe
Makeup: Kady

_________________________________

Leanne BEFORE:

Leanne AFTER:

Cut: Reneé
Blowdry: Reneé
Colour: Reneé
Makeup: Kady

_________________________________

Kady and Hayley will be doing another makeover for two other ladies in November so stay tuned for that. What a great thing to do for a couple of strangers, eh? There is still hope for humanity, haha…

This is the first time I’m uploading my shots taken with film online…I use a beautiful Nikon FM2n + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 AI lens that is the best camera I’ve ever shot with and a tank of a camera at that. Built to take the abuse and is rock solid. Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of my camera…but someone else does.

I hope Jody doesn’t mind me stealing her picture (Shoutout to Jody Siong)

You can read her blog by clicking HERE.

I shoot film exclusively for B&W…Today, my friend Shane taught me how to develop film. You can check out his work by clicking HERE. He taught me by helping me develop my first roll of B&W film, a roll of Ilford Delta 3200. After I get a job I’m definitely gonna develop my own film. Its being dried at the moment so he’ll help me scan in into digital files and I’ll go see ‘em tomorrow. THATS WHY I’M EXCITED!!! Looking at the developed roll though there seems to be a streak that runs across the entire roll which will probably be quite obvious in the photos. Regardless, I’m looking forward to seeing the finished result and if they’re good I’ll make a post about it. I took the film about half a year ago and then realised that traditional B&W film NEEDS to be hand developed…so I stuffed it in my drawer as I couldn’t do anything about it…until today.

In the meantime, I’m shooting with Kodak BW400CN which is a C-41 process film (which means I can bring it into any photography shop and they can develop it for me. I just recently developed 2 rolls of this film at the shop. I wasn’t planning on digitizing them in any way but Shane was kind enough to do me the favour. (Shoutout to Kao Wen Sheng)

These rolls were taken around last September to November but I didn’t have enough money to waste on developing them so I resisted as long as I could. The pictures you are about to see are from November ’09 when my sister, Linzhi, came to Australia to visit.

Most of you know her as this:

or this:

The happy, weird, smiley, smartie pants with selective hearing. However, don’t be fooled. I’ve known this one for 23 years and it wears many…many faces. You can be sure because:

1. Film doesn’t lie
2. All these pictures are taken from 2 rolls of film so you know they were taken over a short period of time.
3. You’re reading it here. Your one source of definite, undisputable truth.

If you know the both of us and know us well, you’ll notice she’ll regularly look at me with this face:

It means that I’ve either done something wrong, am about to something wrong, or am thinking of doing something wrong. When you’re as in tune with her as I am you see her in a different light.

Where others see this:

I see this:

Where others see this:

I see this:

Where others see this:

I see this:

Then, if you’re observant enough you’ll notice that she has her own little mood swings where she does random things at random times.

“Yeah right, Jiaren. You’re SO making this stuff up!”

“No way, this is your one source of definite, undisputable truth!”

“Prove it then!”

“Fine. I will.” Presenting…

…Weird random self-happy mode:

…Weird random self-sad mode:

…Weird random self-standoff “first-one-blinks-loses” mode?:

I think I’m made my case.

Can’t live with her, can’t live without her!

All in all I love her and miss her already… She’s great fun to photograph and fun to hang around with. She’s also single and available. If you’re reading this and still find yourself liking her give me a shout and I’ll hook you up.

Cheers and God bless!

OK so a little update before I start never hurt anybody. I am now officially unemployed as I have finally graduated with my Master’s in Business Administration. I have no idea what I’m going to find a job as although I’m pretty sure I’ll be looking for something that falls in my bachelor degree qualification which is I.T. I’ve also lodged my application for an Australian Permenant Residency and have a few more bits and pieces which I need to get sorted before all I need to do is wait until they process it.

If someone wants to give me a helping hand in deciding what to do next that would be great…otherwise I’ll just see where God brings me and in the meantime I shall do some hardcore blogging!

…………………………………………………..so we’re posting about the Hillsong Conference today. We’re back in Sydney. We’re exhausted. We’re psyched!

The Hillsong Conference is held in the Acer Arena which is one of the stadiums in the Olympic Park located in Sydney Australia. Yes, thats the one where the Sydney Olympics were held at…duh! I only took one snap of the Olympic Park which is below. I took some pics of the Acer Arena from the outside with the intention of stitching them together in PS to create a nice pano but I’m too lazy so screw that plan.

Yup, way to start off writing a blog post after 2 months of nothingness and the first picture you post is a happy snap?! …apart from the heavily cropped pic right on top which I try to inject into every post I write…The first thing that happens as we arrived were the massive screens showing the latest #Hillsong tweets…it was there to keep everyone occupied because it was BO-RING for the first half hour we were there. We wanted to get there early the first night so we had epic seats! Guess which one was the one posted by Aaron Lim?

Yes there were actually hot chicks in front of us…and no I didn’t hit on them, puh-leez…they actually asked us to post that! We also got a bunch of leaflets/brochures on our seats which I knew I would never see again after that night so I happily took a picture of them:

When they finally started we were greeted with the famous Hillsong Conference Opening Ceremony…sort of like a not-so-grand Olympic opening ceremony…check the vids out on youtube if you really wanna see the whole thing…I only got a couple of shots:

Gotta love the laser light show they put on! Since the Conference was so long ago now there’s really no point in doing all three days. I’m just going to focus on the main service in the stadium. I made sure I sat at places of the stadium everyday so I got a shot of all the stuff I wanted (which is harder than it sounds!). Compressed into four pictures you can really see the atmosphere that was going on in this place:

I can’t remember exactly but on one of the nights there was a guest worship team from the US. I think it was from Jentzen Franklin’s church or something like that but I’m not sure. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Whats cool is the way they had the lyrics displayed…it was like playing flash instead of the normal camera panning the audience/singers/musicians with the yellow words on the bottom of the screen. It was more like this:

Okay.

If all you wanted to see was my fave Hillsong pics they’re all above or on my Flickr page. I’m not going to post anymore. I’m sure there are plenty of shots of the pastors/speakers/singers close up everywhere else on the web. What no one else has was what we did during the times of the day we weren’t actually attending the conrefence but goofing off somewhere else!

One of the afternoons we spent close to a whole hour trying to get four people to balance together on a metal stump which was about 25cm in diameter. We failed miserably laughing til our we cried while onlookers gave us that look-at-those-whimpy-asian-loosers look as they walked by…We finally made it which was confirmed by counting to “3″ very moderately after which we fell off again. Luckily for us, Steph was around to witness this glorious occasion and froze the moment of triumph in this picture below that oozes awesomeness.

As you can see there were many other stumps which were higher and we couldnt do this on those. You can see in the background on the right an “At/At” sign which I think were all the athletes that took place in the Sydney Olympics back in 2000. It went all the way from Aa to Zwateva.

…then there was this weird one:

Yes, it was a pig on the stump! I took a pic from the other side but I was against the Sun so it was all dark…On one of the nights after taking the train back to Parramatta station we were so hungry and had dinner at the Nandos restaurant there. The owner was really nice and gave us some freebies! We actually had a photo competition of who could make the ugliest face without using your hands. The owner of the restaurant was the judge and the loser (which was chosen by the judge and later agreed by all) had to run up and down the train station shouting “I love Britney Spears!” at the top of their lungs! Guess who won (or should I say lost)?

Neo

Will

Sabrina

Wilson

Steph

Sudakar

Pei Ling

Patrick

Edna

Yes, I did a face too but this is my blog so you don’t get to see it. I didn’t win or lose so my inclusion doesn’t really matter The winner was granted one immunity to forfeit a dare on the “Truth or Dare” game we were going to play when we got back but never got around to doing so…but go ahead and guess who won or lost. Let me know in the comments and I’ll let you know if you’re right or wrong when theres enough comments, hehe…speaking of winning, one of my pictures in my previous post, the Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk competition won my local Photowalk…can you guess which one?

On the afternoon of the third day of the conference we really goofed off big time. Everyone else had electives…I was too lazy to go to mine so Steph, Patrick, and I went back to the poles and took some portraits!

Less talk More pictures!

Right, got it!

I’ll shuddap and let the pictures speak for themselves so enjoy the rest of the shots. This is me signing off!

You know in retrospect, this would be a great place to take some wedding shots!

Its when I’m free from obligations that I actually push myself. Why I don’t know. I guess its because when I’m shootin’ for myself, I’m shooting against myself…and myself is very competitive…geddit? Also, I don’t feel confined to do what I know works and works well…instead I do things that others don’t think about…what others don’t see…and most importantly, what others couldn’t be bothered turn a second glance at.

Its when I can look at something simple. Something everyday. Something “normal”. For example, a calculator:

Ok, nothing really special about that…just wanted an excuse to show off the tiny DOF of an f/1.2! Thats right! 50mm f/1.2 right there…at 50cm the DOF is a mere 6mm!!! SHWEEEEET!!! Here are a couple of shots taken at f/1.2…

Notice how sharp the web in focus is? I don’t know why everyone keeps complaining about the f/1.2s?! They’re tack sharp wide open!

Someone founds this little bead on the floor at church so I took a picture of it…(after the service of course…)

Toowoomba’s own shopping mall – Grand Central.

This, my friends, is where the f/1.2 REALLY shines! The picture is taken handheld at 1/60 with nothing more than a dim street lamp!

After that,…well…actually it was before that coz I just recently got the f/1.2…We were testing the shoot through umbrella for strobing…

No comment.

Needless to say this post will contain excessive Steph.

Poor guinea pig Steph has to become my model for all my weird shooting needs…

After some fun indoor portraits we went outside to shoot some more portraits…real strobist stuff! This next picture is definitely my fave of this set! Check them out!

By the way, thie series of outdoor portraits were taken at the University of Southern Queensland’s Japanese Garden…

I also really like this above picture…

Thanks Steph!

Thats about it for today…I also took some pictures of the Brisbane Floating Boardwalk which I’ve already uploaded on Flickr…will post about it tomorrow…I still have a lot of these sort of shots lying aroung the HDD but I needed to get some of it out to make space for next week. If you didn’t know I’m going to the Hillsong Conference in Sydney next week. We’re leaving this Sunday morning so I’ll try to keep the blog updated as the conference is held…Its gonna be LEGENDARY!

]]> http://www.blog.jiarenlau.com/2009/07/04/strobing-and-misc/feed/ 6 http://www.blog.jiarenlau.com/2009/06/16/tcc-cultural-night-2009-31st-may-2009/ http://www.blog.jiarenlau.com/2009/06/16/tcc-cultural-night-2009-31st-may-2009/#comments Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:57:36 +0000 Jiaren http://www.blog.jiarenlau.com/?p=520 My church, Toowoomba City Church (TCC) held a Cultural Night at the end of May to celebrate the different cultures, nationalities, and sample some food from all corners of the world.

It was a fun day, there were many performances such as dances from very exotic parts of the world…

…to a solo by a Chinese Michael Jackson…

…all the way to a marching drummer from the USA!

Besides that, there an authentic chinese opera singer (our very own Robert) as well as some other group song presentations.

Performances aside, a big part of the night was the awesome demonstrations that were done on stage! There was a tea ceremony demo…

Our Chinese brother, Kevin, together with his wife, went up on stage to show the Aussies how chinese dumplings are made…

Their English isn’t that good so auntie sister Elena went up to translate…

Of course I can’t forget our very own pastor and host of the evening, Ps. Yew Meng:

He patiently announced the various country reps present…can you guess where they’re from? Nationalities under the pics…

Will from China.

Korea.

India.

Finland.

Phillipines.

Thailand.

Willy from Indonesia.

Denmark.

…and finally,last but not certainly not least…

Australia!

…and the team that made it all possible…none other than…

ANS! (All Nations Service)!

From left: Ps. Yew Meng, Jun, Will, Wilson, Yvonne, Min, Neo, Ben, Steph, Seng Yee, Jason, Andrix, Roger, and me(behind the lens).

]]> http://www.blog.jiarenlau.com/2009/06/16/tcc-cultural-night-2009-31st-may-2009/feed/ 0 http://www.blog.jiarenlau.com/2009/02/13/singapore/ http://www.blog.jiarenlau.com/2009/02/13/singapore/#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:08:14 +0000 Jiaren http://www.blog.jiarenlau.com/?p=294

Captains Log

Day 10: 22nd December 2008.

Still in Kuala Lumpur. Just arrived back from Cambo in one piece. This is where we split. Stephanie left to Kelantan, Pastor Yew Meng + family stayed in Kuala Lumpur for a while. Aaron came to the airport and we had the best 15 mins ever! Jason, Will, Patrick, Seng Yee and Andrea stayed in KL a couple days too. Ben, Edna, and myself continued onto Singapore. In the airport we met a lovely lady, Mrs Kate Cheah.

Credit Ben for taking the picture

We later found out that Mrs. Cheah was the owner of Polar Puffs and Cakes, Singapore. She also does missionaries to prisons in Thailand. She details this in her book Sweet Memories Sweet Success.

I sat across the aisle from her as she was flying back to Singapore after her attending her son’s wedding in Malaysia. We arrived in Singapore at night and Edna had plans to meet up with her friends for their annual new year party. Just a couple of them who are best friends. I only took one photo the whole night. This is it.

As you can probably tell it was a costume party. You can see Edna in the pink shirt...she didnt dress up coz we just got out of the plane and came straight.

No, this is NOT how they normally dress. They changed back into “normal” clothes almost right after the shot. I did enjoy myself though…particularly the bed…as we’d been sleeping on hard mattresses in Cambodia…and this particular place was a 5 star service apartment.

Day 11: 23rd December 2008

We spent the day roaming around Singapore, visiting the Merlion among other things.

I like the lines in this shot.

Me and the Merlion. Credit to Ben for taking the picture.

Got these ideas from Anderson

Ben loves Singapore.

this guy looked funny as he was trying to take a picture...I wonder how many of these there are of me?

Ok ok, heres a proper picture of the Merlion.

from the Merlion, you can see bunches of these spherical bouy-like things floating in the water...any idea what they are?

There were many cranes right opposite the lake/big pond thingie which faces the Merlion.

Eye of Singapore...? thats what they call it in every other city!

That night, we decided to go to the Singapore Night Safari. Its basically an extension of the Singapore Zoo thats only open at dusk til midnight. Its an amazing experience viewing all the nocturnal animals. By the way, it really pushes your camera (whatever you have) to the limits. I was shooting at HI 1.0 (ISO3200 equiv.) on my Nikon D80 wide open on my 50mm f/1.8.

The Night Safari, Singapore.

The otters demonstrate the importance of recycling garbage as these items can suffocate such animals and kill them.

Big snake

Tribal dance

They also breath fire...

Of course there were animals too...lions...

A babirusa. (direct translation means Pig Deer)

cant remember the name but its the largest rodents on earth.

Perhaps the coolest thing is in fact the toilets. At first glance its just a normal looking toilet...beautifully designed, elegant, and posh.

...but upon further inspection, you'll notice the outer wall is missing! Its actually really cool! without the flash you wouldn't notice the wall outside. This is the less packed one. At the main entrance theres a better one with fake perpetual rain that really enhances the ambience.

Even the table surfaces match the theme...

After roaming around the entire park we decided to relax by soaking our feet in fish infested waters. Its called Nibbles and basically you stick your feet into the water and the fishes eat away the dirt…perhaps the pictures will tell a better story…

Nibbles, Once bitten, Twice Shine.

Tickles!

Finally after an awesome but exhausting day we were waiting for the last bus...look at Bens black shoes...so gay right? who agrees?

Day 12: 24th December 2008

New Years Eve.

-and what am I doing? …travelling…travelling half way round the world to London to be exact.

Good news is I got to sit on the A380 and it is DEFINITELY WORTH THE HYPE!

Singapore Airlines SQ318 Airbus A380 Cabin.

This is my seat. I started off with a single pillow and blanket. There were so few people on the plane that by the time I arrived I had easily 12+ pillows. This is about half way through.

I love it that they actually decorate the cabin…you can see the chrismas deco hanging on the cabin walls.

BY THE WAY!!! I noticed my pictures in all the previous post were all soft and blurry…I thought it was because of my theme but I realised I was just resizing them too small and WordPress had to stretch the pictures…heres an example:

Before.

After.

…and another example…

Before.

After.

If you look closely the difference is actually quite obvious…another thing, I realize a photographers blog is supposed to be where they upload their “GOOD” shots where as I’m using it to upload my “CRAP SHOTS” and happy snaps with flickr still being the main showcase on the internet…so after I finish this series of posts from my summer vacation I’ll change it around and use my blog onto for good pictures. I will probably change the theme as well to suit the motive…until then, please don’t judge my skills from this blog…cheers!

In case some of you don’t know, an ambigram is a graphical figure that spells out one or more words not only in its form as presented, but also in another direction or orientation (definition from Wikipedia). In other words, you can turn the word upside down and it will still spell the same thing…like the ones you’ll see in that new movie “Angels and Demons”.

I tried to create an ambigram logo of my name. I got the basic design before church finished but the hard part came when it came to digitizing it. Here is the original draft:

Mr. blurrycam strikes again. Apologies for the crap picture. Its straight from the iPhones crappy camera.

Anyway, as I was saying, the hard part is digitizing it. You see I’ve been trying to figure out how to use the pen tool found in Adobe’s Photoshop for several months…about 6 months to be exact. The beauty of the pen tool is that it exists in a vector scale format. That means that unlike pictures which you zoom in the the picture gets pixelated and becomes worse and worse, a vector formatted image can be blow up as big a possible while retaining the original clarity and sharpness.

…and now a word to all the graphic designers out there: I know what you’re thinking. Screw Illustrator. If I wanted to learnt illustrator I would…but I’m a photographer. I loooooooooooove photoshop!

So for the past few months I’ve been trying to use the pen tool but end up not going anywhere. This “project” really helped jump start me in learning the basics of the pen tool…so I can now draw custom shapes that look pretty and are vector formatted.

After 2 days (yes – 2 days!) of working on my logo I finally completed one that mildly satisfies. By 2 days I actually mean 2 nights as I was only on it from like midnight to the wee hours of morning which is sleepy time for mua. The first day I completed it and that was version 1. The next day I made it less “edgy” and more “curvy” which took about the same amount of time to make the whole thing in the first place. That was version 2. The curves no longer went with the underline and so I played around with it and I noew present to you version 2.1 of my ambigram logo:

It reads "Jiaren" this way as well as upside-down.

…and now for the dissapointing part:

Later on I was googling ambigram and came across an ambigram creator. This intrigued me and so I threw in my name to see what would come out…much to my surprise the created ambigram which only took a couple of seconds to recreate looked SO MUCH BETTER THAN MINE!!! I was a little bit annoyed but the experience taught me a lot.

Comments and/or critique anyone? (besides the obvious need to refine it).

I’m late again (whats new eh?) and have decided to stop apologizing everytime it takes me so long to update…coz its only gonna make it worse, lol..

I’ve been busy and have been extremely enjoying this holiday…unfortunately, my brother went back to school today and my sister went back to Scotland so I’ve got plenty of time now…btw, this is going to be a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong post.

“why?”

“…well, because I have to update on everything that happened in December so I can hurry up and start on this new year…this post is playing catch up.”

The Queen Mary Falls will be the main thingie but I’ll also throw in some pictures of our pre-christmas party (long overdue) and whatever I find in my December folder.

Queen Mary Falls

Ok, so Queen Mary Falls is located in South East Queensland – very very close to the border between QLD and NSW. The story goes something like this:

Queen Mary of England herself rode a horse through the waterfalls and loved the place. This was long ago when she was still a child. Well…either it was her or Queen Elizabeth but its called Queen Mary Falls so I guess the former would be correct. I’m about 10% sure.

I actually went twice. The first was to scout the place out as all good photogs do. The second was to pinpoint the good spots. (By first I meant my friendship parent took me there and by second, I meant I told my friends about it ad ended up planning another trip there!

Didn’t take many pics the first time as there were just the three of us: Me, Steph, and Mark (friednship parent). The upside is that I can some good pictures with steph!

Yes, I’ve cut my hair since then…

Oh, one thing cool about the first trip was that I got to test out my ND and ND grad filters…but me being me I forgot to bring my tripod AND filter holder that day!. Darn. For those of you who don’t know (which I’m guessing are most of you) an ND is a Neutral Density filter. Basically its like sunglasses for your camera so you can take slower shots in broad daylight. A graduated ND filter is the same thing but only the top half is darkened…anyway, you get this sort of effect:

You can see my finger holding the filter on the bottom right hand corner there! Anyway, the second time around the clouds weren’t as beautiful but I brought my tripod so got some nice shots.

Now I’m gonna stop blabbering and throw a bunch of photos so I can get to the next topic. The following pictures were taken on the second trip:

Perhaps this is a good time to explain that the Queen Mary Falls National Park is a nature reserve that consists of three main waterfalls and small streams. The main one is of course Queen Mary Falls followed by Brown Falls and the smallest one being Daggs Falls.

The walk to Daggs falls is amazing. Stop and appreciate Gods work.

…and its 1am…forget it, I’m done for the night…Will continue later…below is a gallery of the shots above and more. 91 pics altogether. Click for a 640×480 picture and feel free to request the pics u want forwarded to you. See ya soon!

Anyway, here are the 6 which are my favourite…(not including the one right at the bottom of the previous post which I love!)

had to do a bit to get that background under control...this was one of the first shots and I was still adjusting my exposure accordingly...

was trying to do the miniature model thingie but not high up enough so just went with it to get this semi-lomo effect...

I have a lot more but I need to get this subject out of the way for the next series:

BIG HEAD DAY!

Big head day is when someone decides we’re gonna give a friend a birthday card with all our pictures on it…so I suggested that we use the distortion from the wide angle lens to make big heads! …so here they are!

Kodomo

Will

Patrick

Steph

Sabrina

Wilson

Ben

Jiaren

Edna

Elsey

Ok! I’m glad I got that off my chest…theres a Christmas party but nothing “photography” about it…except the fact that people are wearing funky hats…it was a hybrid  pre-christmas party / Edna’s birthday…(we seem to celebrate things extremely early…remember this is late November…Christmas is end of December and Edna’s bday is 15th December…other than that I have some pretty waterfall pictures I’d like to share…so I say we skip the christmas party…

what say you?

However, first things first – family priority requires that I respond to my sister’s blog post in which she posted this picture:

According to some absurd cult ritual in the Scottard part of uncivilized UK, November is the month of Movember where you wear a moustache for charity…(I think my dad should be their spokesperson)…anyway, the point is that they wanna see what we ALL look like with moustaches…so…after countless seconds…

VOILA!

@Linzhi, sorry your moustache looks retarded – who ask u not to pose properly…

having said that…lets move on to the next thing on the agenda – Flying.

Before I begin I hope you (whoever reads this) understands that this blog is more of a Plog (word created by yours truly – remember you saw it here first!). This means its a picture-log. What THAT means is that I don’t really care what I write and don’t expect you to read it…its just a way to fill in gaps in between pictures.

Pictures themselves come in two flavours:-

• watermarked
• unsigned

Watermarked ones are those that are worthy of flickr and I actually bothered to put them into photoshop even if I don’t do anything except for adding the watermark, saving a backup of the original and uploading reduced file size version.

Unsigned ones are crap shots/ happy snaps that people in them should enjoy but aren’t something that I’d put up on flickr (eg. group photos).

…glad we got that sorted out.

so where were we…ah! who attended:

• Jiaren
• Aaron
• Yew Meng
• Elena
• Wilson
• Sabrina

From closest to furthest: front row: Wilson, Yew Meng. back row: Sabrina, Elena

can see the guys heads getting distorted from the wide angle…heres a better shot:

heres one with less distortion...

Sabrina surprised this on Wilson as a belated birthday present…apparently his dream is to become a pilot…hes achieving that somehow by studying multimedia at USQ…ironic huh?

If you look closely you can see Aaron being a moron in the background

Aaron and I waited this one out…they went first and we went up for the next flight…

In the meantime we just chit chatted and took photos of random things, and various parts of the plane such as this:

Aaron told me but I cant remember what this is for...all I remember is that its something like a dipstick thingie and theres some liquid inside...

shutter speed: 1/1250 (plane wasn't on full throttle though)

of course we also took them about to take off...

...before returing to taking pictures of various components...behold - the Engine!

Lycoming - best aviation engine manufacturer?

no idea what this is...

instrument for calculating altitude, speed, etc...so don't forgetto take it off before flight!

nostrils?

Aaron.

This is a Piper. A piper is different from a Cessena in that its wing is under the body instead of on top.

When they landed it was our turn and because we were paying by the hour we couldn’t afford to waste time so I didn’t take any snaps during this transition…

up up and away!

Ps. Yew Meng; ex-Singapore air force - from cockpit to pulpit.

ooh...many buttons...must...resist...temptation...

view from the heavens!

You can see the runway in the above picture…wind was really strong that day and we barely used a quarter for both take off and landing!

click on the image to see where I live!

This was the second time I’ve been up here but the first time I had my dSLR with me…so a quick tip for wannabe aerial photogs with no experience:

1. First time enjoy the view. Forget the camera because you’ll get air sick and feel like vomitting. Looking through a viewfinder doesn’t make it better.
2. Second time up stick to the telephoto lens. In this case it was a clear day so aperture wasn’t a problem. I used a 70-300mm VR lens which is very flexible.
3. forget the lens hood. It’ll just make it harder to shoot.
4. Hold the lens at its furthest point with a finger extended against the glass to suppress vibration.
5. A monopod may come in handy but I didn’t have one.
6. At that distance everything is infinity. Use manual focus with shutter priority or manual. Most shots taken at 1/4000 so ISO had to be bumped up.
7. Take a picture. Check histogram levels. Adjust accordingly. then take another hundred or so pictures before checking again. DONT waste your time reviewing pictures on the plane. Plenty of time on the ground for that later on.
8. most importantly, HAVE FUN!

First try at doing a tilt-shift miniature fake

Being in an elavated position I figured it was an ideal time to try out some shots for making tilt-shift miniature fakes. Basically what this does is it makes large images appear smaller so that the images produced appear to be a model instead of a real life scene. What do you think? Any comments?

Here’s another one of my university:

University of Southern Queensland as a miniature model.

The university was probably too big to look good as a miniature but it looked better like this than a regular aerial photography shot so I left it as it is.

After we landed Uncle Yew Meng wanted some pictures and since the sky was so beautiful I took advantage of the wide angle lens:

...and my favourite one to finish it off...also printed one of these on A3 for them.

Done. Next I’ll be blogging about a recent mother son photoshoot I did…I’ll admit its not my best work but I was crap tired that day and it had been a while since my last portraiture session. Either way, they loved the pics and I got to brush up on my photoshoot techniques. Ultimately, it was huge fun both for them and myself – and thats whats important!

sneak preview:

Auntie Ivy and Gabriel.

till then…chao!