Last night i headed out towards a well decorated house down the street, 26 Pindari st to be precise.

Out the front of a house near mine. It takes them ~3 months to set it all up (in their spare time)

The wonderful thing about christmas lights is the bokeh they create

I closed the 50mm up to 3.5 for that nice hexagon bokeh

This one is the same as the other photo except that I opened up the f stop to the full 1.8 which gave me the nice round bokeh.

Santa in the garden

Some times unfocused lights make a great photo

Deer in the garden

Again I couldn’t choose between the two photos, this time i changed the focus to the second deer.

A full wide of the garden

A lonely deer?

So it’s been a while since my last post, so basically in the last month I have sat my IB exams, finished school, gone to schoolies, gone to rainbow beach and the finally yeppoon.

Yeppoon

An aerial photo of yeppoon take from a light aircraft.

The Sunset reflected off the Plane.

A cloud/sunburst just over the runway at the Airfield

The plane slightly after landing

Rainbow Beach

Out on the ‘blow’ at rainbow beach

After a mamoth hike down the dunes I arrived here where I was greated by the ‘rainbow’ cliffs.

The other side of the cliffs

It may not seem that steep but it sure was especially with all my camera gear.

Gold Coast

Unfortuantly I couldn’t open this window to get the camera out, though to be fair I was 45 floors up, and hence the smudges and generally unsharp image.

Dusk again from the window, though this time it’s alot less noticable.

Q1 is the Highest Residental building on the Gold Coast, though it was nothing compared to Burj Dubai (~880m)

Sheraton Mirage

The Pool early one morning at the Sheraton mirage.

The bar in the evening at the Sheraton Mirage

The Walkway at night

The storm about to come in

The Main pool at the Sheraton Mirage.

The Walkway during the day.

These last few weeks have been a bit of a busy period, but alas I have almost finished school now so a little time to post has come up.

As you may or may not know I live in the Gap and there was recently a storm  and from it some interesting clouds formed, which coupled with a setting sun gave some interesting  results.

The general view the day after.

Secondly I was on set with the great J. Carroza filming a film late at night under the old museum in Brisbane. Here’s a little documentation, take not upon the taped up Mics on the ceiling.

In other news, as many of you may know this week ubuntu 9.10 is being released. But you may not know that one of the default backgrounds is one of mine!

Here’s the selection window!

And here it is in action.

You can view the actual image itself here http://www.flickr.com/photos/roomurdock/3294531381/

Priority Modes

You know those letters you have on your scene selection dial? Do you know what they do or do you just ignore it like I used to? Well there’s 4 letters, on Nikon they’re M, A, S, P and Cannon its M, Av, Tv, P. Because I use a nikon I’ll use MASP for the explaination. So M is manual, where you set everything such as your aperture, shutter speed and ISO. S is shutter priority which means you set the shutter speed and the camera sets the aperture for you, useful for things like cars at night (just watch your ISO isn’t to high). A is aperture priority where upon you set the aperture or f stop, this is commonly used to set the depth of field and with HDR. The final one is P which is where the camera selects a balance between your shutter speed and your aperture, on the D90 you can change the values that it sets, kind of like a more advanced auto. Go and have a play with all the different settings and experiment.

RAW

Shoot in RAW, Always! By shooting in raw you can manually adjust the white balance in Post Production and much much more. It may take up a little bit more space, but with 16gb SDHC cards going for $50 AU and 1TB Hard drives for $100 AU what’s your’ excuse?

ISO

Shoot on the lowest ISO possible, maybe this is just me but I have the D90 on ISO 100-250 nearly all the time. I’m a big hater of noise but if i must have an high ISO i wouldn’t take it above 2000. You can reduce noise using Noise Ninja or Topaz DeNoise (Photoshop Plugins) which generally work quite well, but be prepared to loose some detail.

Management

So you’ve been taking photos for a while now, you have upwards of 2000 of them, how do you manage them all? Just a folder, or two? You’re doing it wrong! Here are a few of your options

• iPhoto – Mac
• Aperture – Mac
• Lightroom – Mac & PC
• Picasa -Mac & PC

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This is  a time lapse of clouds over a few hours, the colours of the clouds is just light refracting from the raindrops in the clouds.

Click here for the lo-fi version post (Smaller Images, Faster to load)
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Last Night was the 2009 QACI Semi formal, here are the results. Click here for the hi-fi version post (Bigger Images, Slower to load)
It was my first time doing a social event, but overall I think it came out quite well. Everyone had a great night so what more could you ask for?

Hi-res prints & images are avalible upon request.

Click (continue reading…) to get the rest of the photos, and don’t forget to check out the rest of my site!

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A HDR Tilt shift taken from up on Mount Coo-tha of Brisbane. It was shown in my recent exhibition and was favoured by several people of significance to me. Unfortunately right now I am about to “Exam Block” and thus posting will most likely be delayed for a month. But after that however I will be free and may even go back to a daily blog, but I guess we’ll see about that. This photo looks way better larger so do it!