I added my WordPress blog to my authorised blogs in Flickr today, and thought I needed to just test the linkage to make sure it was working fine.

By the way, this shot was taken with the last few frames of the day at Harbord on the way home from a pre-dawn shoot at Whale Beach. I’ve accumulated a few splash shots, and will almost certainly continue to shoot them a bit as the years roll on, so I thought I’d start a “Splash” set on Flickr. This image was the start of that (still rather small) set.

The northern headland at Whale Beach has some really interesting rocks.  I’ll definitely have to go shoot it again sometime.  Here’s a small sample of what I mean:

Given that I still planned to bring my regular gear to work with me (notebook, novel, wallet, keys, iPod, earphones, etc.), I wanted to travel light in terms of my camera bag, especially since I was going to be carrying it around the CBD with me.  So I limited myself to 2 fairly light lenses.  I also thought I’d aim wide (I usually only shoot really wide doing landscapes) and go for that photojournalist street photography look.  If you know me then you know I’m no street photographer, so I was challenging myself to shoot outside of my confort zone.  Anyway, so I brought my Tokina 12-24mm f/4 zoom and my Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 prime.  As it turns out I could have left the 50mm at home as it never came out of the camera bag that day.

When I leave home at 5:30am each morning it’s usually pitch black, so I had no idea what the day would look like.  As it turned out the weather wasn’t very amenable to a photowalk and it started teaming within about 5 minutes of me getting the camera out of the bag.  So, I decided to cut the walk short.  But stuck outside with a digital SLR, that wasn’t weather-sealed, in the teaming rain, what was I supposed to do?  I had to wait it out a bit for a lull otherwise my camera would probably drown.  May as well take a few shots of fellow CBDers stuck in the rain too…

And, my shot of the day…

On World Youth Day last year I had a rare evening off so, with no time to prep or scout a location, I grabbed the camera bag, jumped in the car and headed to the nearest water (alright I already knew I’d be around the Greenwich area).

It’s just coincidence that it was World Youth Day.  There were hundreds, probably thousands, of people at the docks (off to the right out of frame).  I had a long lens (80-400mm) with me but the shots of the docks area were boring.  However, as I waited for some better light (the sun was starting to go down behind me) I noticed the moon was rising in the east.  This was great timing because the sky was starting to turn a terrific magenta colour with the setting sun, and after a couple more minutes the sun had set, it was now “blue hour”, the moon was now behind the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and was still low enough that it looked quite large.

I did bring out the colour a little more in post and added a little local contrast to the clouds.  But this is how the scene looked to me at the time.  There’s nothing in this frame that wasn’t there in real life.

So, to kick it off, how about a relatively recent image…

I may have to revisit the image and process it for WordPress (sans borders, etc.). but for now this will do.  Hope you enjoy.