For Australian residents only: Olympus is having a “Test Drive” competition for their newly announced Pen E-PL1. Closing date for the first part of the competition is in four (4) days time!

From the submissions, 30 people will be selected to test drive the camera, and upload 5 images per week for critiquing. After six weeks, an overall winner and a “people’s choice” winner will be selected to keep the camera.

At the moment, I’ve entered a couple of photos. Amazingly, there have only been 80 or so entries; and many of the entries so far have been mum and dad family snapshots. Having said that, what’s the bet I won’t get selected as a final contestant?

Quick post for those not aware of the news – Aperture 3 is now available. Woohoo! I just ordered mine.

Looks like this version finally gets the geolocation and face detection of iPhoto. What I’m really excited about though is the new “brushes” feature enabling non-destructive adjustments. There is also the ability to save these adjustments as presets.

Apple states that there are over 200 new features. I just hope that all these new features don’t make the program a bore to use like Lightroom.

The other day I went to see my accountant to finalise some business before I left Adelaide. This was the view from his office. Wow.

The panoramic stitch was done totally within the iPhone – I used the camera to take the photos, and an app called Autostitch Panorama.

Victoria Square

As you will no doubt have noticed, the photoblog section of the blog is now live!

This section has been kindly executed by Andy Bell of AB Media Solutions. It was based on the Pixel Post theme “The World in 35mm” by Joe Roback, and runs on Wordpress and PhotoQ.

We’re still working on minor changes, but if you see something that is wrong please do email me.

To celebrate the imminent release of a new design for this site, the previous iteration is being released into the wild, free of charge. I thought this would be better than letting the time and effort spent on the design go to waste.

Eight63 is a white, single column, fixed minimalist theme with the photographer in mind. I commissioned Rodrigo Galindez to implement the design after I saw one of his works featured on Smashing Magazine.

It will fit images up to 690px wide, but I suggest you post images 863px wide – hence the name! Scaling this back to 80% and using LightBox 2.8 in conjunction with the theme will achieve the effect seen on the demo site.

Some highlights:

• Valid Markup. Design validates to XHTML 1.0 Strict via the WC3 Validation Service.
• 404 Template. Is included if you turn on 404 redirects on your server.
• Archives Template. Similar to the footer but also includes listing of all Tags.
• Contacts Template. Formatted when used in conjunction with Contact Form 7.
• Auto Updating Footer. For the latest posts, categories, and links.
• Wide Compatibility. Is compatible with all browsers, including IE 6, 7, and 8. Image captions do not display in Internet Explorer, otherwise layout and design should look the same on all browsers.

See the demo here. Download it from here.

Please leave the attribution link – you are getting a professional theme for free!

Okay, I always used to think that jumping in photos was weird, but there are whole communities out there! Of course, there was Philippe Halsman and Jumpology….

Wendy and I tend to do the jumping photos when we go traveling, especially at desolate destinations…

Jumping at the Devils Marbles

If you don’t know where the Devil’s Marbles are, zoom out after you’ve taken a look around… In the middle of absolutely nowhere!

Although not actually complete yet (but very darn near it), I took some time out of the furious PhD write up to go internet shopping for a self congratulatory present. In a few hours of what must’ve been delirious financial insanity, I ordered the:

- Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8
- Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8
- Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 VRII

Yes, the Holy Trinity of Nikon zoom lenses. I’ll post some pictures of the Nikon lens porn when they all arrive.

My wallet is really light now….

LuvBug

Spotted along Henley Beach Road, Adelaide, whilst driving to a cousin’s wedding. I think the driver saw us taking the photo – he made the car hop up and down a few times!

Processed using Nik Color Efex Plugin for Aperture: “Bleach Bypass”. This photo shows off the capabilities of the iPhone much better than the ones from the Britney concert.

My wife and I went to the Britney Spears concert today, and it was surprisingly good. I thought it was going to be boring, but it turned out much better than the reviews on the internet. Maybe it was because we were sitting so far back we couldn’t tell if she was miming anyway.

Don’t know why I bothered trying to get photos with my iPhone; I knew they were going to turn out blurry…

Avedon's instructions to his printer

Friends are always asking me if I photoshop my photos, with the implication that it is somehow wrong or cheating.

Above is an image that I came across whilst reading Chase Jarvis’ blog. It is the set of instructions (presumably how long to expose the film) from Avedon to his printers. I love it.

I’ve recently changed from Lightroom to Aperture for most of my photography workflow (I rarely use Photoshop nowdays).

The main reason for the change was the difference between the two programs’ layout – I thought that Lightroom’s was a bit clumsy, and forced me to working how Adobe envisioned I should work. There was also a lot of wasted real estate. I hoped that this was going to change in Lightroom 3 and downloaded the beta with bated anticipation, but alas was bitterly disappointed.

Below are three images – the original, one I processed last year in Photoshop, and one done recently using Aperture. The Photoshop image seems to have a yellow cast for some reason. I like the Aperture one the best, but it is probably a reflection of my improved post-processing skills and differing taste rather than any intrinsic problem with Photoshop.

Although I still think that Photoshop is the best, I think the images show that a lot can be achieved with other, less powerful packages.

Original

Photoshop

Aperture

Recently I was contacted by a publisher asking if they could use one of my images for a magazine… of course they could! If you look down the bottom of the page and click on the copyright notice, you’ll note that it links to a Creative Commons page. I’m a firm supporter of what Creative Commons represents.

What I really hate though is when someone just takes my images without attribution – like the real estate agents that use my images of Henley Beach to sell their houses. This publisher actually had the courtesy to ask me, so I sent them the RAW file. I hope the image turns out great.

Guess which one of these three they chose?

Wendy + Hedge

Yesterday was one of our friend’s wedding up at Carrick Hill. They didn’t have a professional photographer, but there were lots of willing friends – so much so that I ended up just mainly taking photos of Wendy. This one was my favourite.

Recently a friend went to visit Coober Pedy, which reminded me of these pictures. We stayed in this odd town for a night on our big road trip from Adelaide to Darwin – a 3,000km trip which we managed to stretch to over 4,000km!

Apart from the underground homes (for which Coober Pedy is most famous), eccentric characters, and multiple mine shafts, the town also boasts a magnificent golf course. Apparently it has reciprocal rights with St Andrew’s in the UK.

Coober Pedy Opal Fields Golf Club

"Keep Off Grass"

The design of the website is almost done, with only a change to the logo and a few more minor tweaks left to be finalised. If you come across any problems, please let me know. If you have any comments about the design, I’d be interested to hear.

In a related subject, I recently stumbled across this collection of “Under Construction” gifs from the dying Geocities. Like many, Geocities was my introduction to web-publishing, especially the cheesy “Hello, welcome to my corner of the web!” variety…