• Abandoned
    An abandoned British research station on Stonington Island in Antarctica
  • Harbour Dusk
    The daily buzz on Sydney Harbour is always a joy to experience.
  • Mona Vale
    View from the headland to Mona Vale Pool.
  • Antarctic Night
    Midnight in Antarctica and mirror-like reflections.
  • Neko Harbour
    Sunrise over Neko Harbour in Antarctica.

Archive for June, 2009

LX3 vs. G10

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

lx3vsg10

It was time again for a point and shoot camera. Which one? I was going forth and back between the Canon G10 and the Panasonic Lumix LX3.
They are similar in many ways and I would consider them both top of their class.
Here are my reasons for choosing the Panasonic LX3 over the G10. The most important feature to me was the capability to shoot raw as well as a full manual mode. Both can do that, same with video, however the LX3 offers a few additional features that – to me – mattered a lot:

  • The LX3 can shoot HD Video – important to me for this blog
  • a max. exposure time of 60 seconds – the G10 just offers 15 secs. Not enough for long exposure nocturnal photography, such as city shots at night
  • a full stop faster lens (f/2) which is amazing for such a little camera – in low light situations it will make the difference between shooting ISO 200 and ISO 400 for example (and noise is a big problem with those little sensors)
  • 24mm wide angle. Does not sound much different to a 28mm lens. But in the world of a landscape or architecture photographer this is a huge difference
  • High quality Leica lens – as good as it gets

Initially I was really missing a viewfinder. However it seems the the viewfinder of the G10 is pretty much unusable.
So there you have it. On a trip to Italy I will test this little camera extensively and I am quite happy to leave my big guns at home for a change.

Will write about my experiences once I am back.

Posted in Gear | 1 Comment »

Sunrise shoot at Whale Beach

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Brent and I went out early in the morning to shoot a wonderful place, that Brent named “Devils Cauldron”…and devilish it is!
We had a very lovely sunrise, and I was overdue for a nice one after so many crappy ones in a row :)
This is going to be my last shoot here in Sydney before venturing overseas and creating a different body of work. I will keep you posted.

For now please enjoy the video, I took this morning. I also describe what gear I use and you can see it up close in the video. I hope you enjoy it.

And here is the resulting shot:

Sunrise shoot at Whale Beach

Posted in Locations | 6 Comments »

Turimetta the 2nd

Friday, June 19th, 2009

As promised, here is the 2nd shot of that morning in Turimetta.

Lets take a look first and I will then explain again, how I tried to line up the elements for the final composition.

3631947942 8707d6fbe6 Turimetta the 2nd

- Exposure time about 1.5 mins
- Aperture f/11 (was just enough DOF – although if you see the cliff edge in the b/g at 100% you would notice it is OOF.)
Foreground is more important as this is where the eye goes around, checking out the textures in the rocks.
I decided to rather shoot the lens at it’s sweet spot with the down side of having the b/g slightly out of focus rather than having an overall slightly less sharp image.


First take a close lookt at it, think about what I tought you yesterday about leading lines and convergence of them. See if you can find them yourself.

Ok, lets take a look at the 2nd image

t2 Turimetta the 2nd

This was an easy one, right? Now go and practice it yourself, it is not that hard and take your photography to the next level.

It also needs to be noted, that I wanted to include the reflection on the rock at the bottom as well as the beautiful colors of the other rocks. I wanted to make sure that they frame the shot nicely. If you play around with your composition long enough, eventually all the elements will fall into place.

A tripod really helps you to achieve that, not only does it make your images sharper, but more importantly, it slows you down and makes you think more about your composition. Thus a a tripod is a really valuable compangnion.

Posted in Locations | 1 Comment »

Sunrise shoot at Turimetta

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

I would like to share some of my thoughts about how I take photos and what made me compose them the way I did.
Lets take a look at the first one – it was shot at Sydney’s Northern Beaches in Turimetta.

3627586668 918d34caff Sunrise shoot at Turimetta

Geometrical Greens – by Kajo Merkert

I was obviously drawn to those beautiful geometrical lines of those wonderful rocks, as well as the fluroescent greens just before sunrise when the first light hits them. There are several rocks that form lines that seem to almost meet in one point at the horizon. This is an old artist’s trick, called vanishing point.

It gives a lot of depth to the image and makes it look more 3-dimensional.

Can you find the leading lines?

Take a look at the below photo:

test1 Sunrise shoot at Turimetta

See how they all converge and almost meet in one point at the horizon?

It really helps to previsualize this and then just drop your camera (and tripod) in the right spot where it all lines up nicely.

Try to train your eye to see things like that before you take the shot, it simply takes some training.

I will post the next shot of that morning tomorrow, so check back then.

Posted in Locations | 2 Comments »

Color Space: Part 1 – a simple approach

Monday, June 15th, 2009

horseshoe Color Space: Part 1 a simple approachI have been asked this question on many occasions and realized that color space and color management are two difficult subjects to get your head around. So I will try to answer many of those hot questions in a Q&A-style format. We will focus mainly on color spaces in this blog post.

The following assumes that you know what a color space is therefore so we will dive right into it:

Q: Which color space should I use?
A: If you are serious about your photography, convert your files into either AdobeRGB or even better ProPhoto RGB (it is the widest color space available. I religiously convert my raw files into ProPhoto RGB. No exceptions.

Q: Which color space should my camera be set to?
A: If you have a high end model, there are two choices: sRGB or Adobe RGB. The simple answer is: If you shoot RAW, it does not matter.
Set it to either one, a RAW file receives its color space after it has been exported and been converted into the destination file format (tif, psd,…). In case you shoot jpg (which I hope you don’t – more on this another time) please choose Adobe RGB. It is the wider color space of the two.

Q: Which color space does LR or Bridge use?
A: None. LR and BR are RAW converters, they assign color spaces upon exporting the RAW files, therefore they don’t work in a particular color space themselves.

Q: Which color space do I need to use for the web?
A: Many people do not know that; you need to convert into sRGB for web presentation. If you work in photoshop you do not need to convert to sRGB right before you save the file, if you use “save for web”, it converts the photo to sRGB for you automatically.

Q: Which color space should I set up in photoshop?
A: Check which colour space you currently work in PS under Edit > Colour Settings and assign the one you decide to work in from now on and save it.

Say for print you want to use one of the ICC profiles of the printer/paper combination that you chose as your output color space.
Or if you export it into photoshop you set your color space in the export section of LR. Make sure your color space in photoshop is set to the same color space that you assign to the photo, so that you do not get mismatches. It makes things unnecessarily more complicated.

Q: Which color space do I use for printing?
A: The colour space you will work in is wider than what your printer can print. You assign an ICC profile (downloadable on the respective website of the paper manufacturer) when you softproof (that term will have to be content of a future blog post) your image straight before you print and on the print screen of your printer dialog box. You will also have to choose between relative and perceptual (forget the other two) rendering intend. Relative and Perceptual redering intent are two different ways to compress the wider colour space of your monitor (the one that you assigned in photoshop for example) into the smaller colour space of your printer, just see which one you like better – it is depending on the photo, so you need to make this choice on a per print basis, just try both and see which one makes you more happy.
So now you know that the colour space that you print in is sort of out of your hands, it depends on the paper and should be selected in regards to which paper you use. No other one. You select the ICC profile in the printer dialog.
The mismatch only happens when you have setup PS with a different colour space than the file that you are trying to import.

Posted in Geek Talk | 6 Comments »