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/

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.

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!

This week I feel that I should share my account of the dust storms.

Here is the view from my backyard.

Down at the end of Payne road

At the mount coo-tha lookout.

The sun turned an interesting blue, though this turned out white.

A comparison of the same place.

The Channel 9 Tower

The Channel Ten Tower (I think)

The ABQ Tower

A big post for today, river fire was on the weekend. I got there early (thanks James!) and secured a nice spot to do a panorama of the whole show, however the police requested that I move away from the “Island” of sorts due to public health and safety concerns, because evidently having been there for 2 hours I was doomed to suffer the fate of falling off the edge into the 2feet of water and drown. Anyway, I met a nice photographer that gave me some tips on firework photography, shame he used cannon though, and well yes that’s about it, Enjoy.

All of the fireworks from riverfire, 35 images merged into one.

The view from kangroo point during riverfire with the F111,s flying above.

Kangaroo point at dusk just before riverfire.

The planes from riverfire coming in from the city.

Some people sitting near me (before we were removed for public safety) were blowing bubbles.

The planes in formation above the city

The planes from riverfire doing their thing.

The view from up at Mount Coo-tha in Brisbane, taken at about 2am, long story don’t ask.

A shot from the outside of the The Abandoned Wacol Mental Asylum. The kangaroos around me seemed a little edgy, maybe they were jealous. Image is slightly crooked on purpose, see if you can work out why.