On the Beach
1 June 2019
Taken back in March, this is the most spectacular light I’ve ever photographed, and sadly I had to rush to catch it, so the technical aspects of the picture are a bit lacking.
The setting sun out of shot to the right lit the clouds and created a luminous ball in shades of salmon pink above the rain. It looked like a classic atomic mushroom cloud. The title is not a reference to Neil Young, Cliff Richard or Chris Rea but to the post-apocalyptic novel by Nevil Shute (and the Gregory Peck movie) in which Australians are the only humans left alive after World War 3.
Light at the End...
27 May 2019
Here’s a picture I took recently, just because I liked the look of the location. The railway bridge I shot this from is in Maud Street, Waratah. As a car passenger travelling over the bridge, I’d noticed how the railway lines ‘swapped sides’ using the tunnel. I guess that this allows coal from the Hunter Valley to get to the docks without interfering with commuter traffic in and out of Newcastle. In the late afternoon the sun penetrates the tunnel and glints off the lines as they go into the far distance.
Colour Management
21 May 2019
When I began posting pictures online, I was annoyed to discover that the colours I spent time on tweaking in photo editing software to get them as I wanted were looking distinctly different when the pictures were seen in the Firefox web browser.
I was already aware that there are several different ‘color spaces’ that control how a picture looks on screen or when printed, and that the key to colour consistency on the web was to use the sRGB space when saving an edited photo… More
Consequences
15 May 2019
If I can use this site to hold myself to account for quality control of my photos, and I carry on chasing improvement, in a short time I should look back on the stuff I’m posting now and find it unsatisfactory. Will that mean I feel the need to delete old posts? I hope not. I can’t magically reinvent myself as a better photographer. There are no shortcuts, only learning and practice. Since I’ve made the investment in publishing this stuff for you to see, I hope that you also see me improving.
9th May 2019
For me, photography is just a hobby and a study topic. I am not upset by the notion that ‘nobody cares about the pictures I take apart from me’. In fact, I have embraced the idea that nobody cares about anything I do to the extent that I’ve never had a Facebook account, or a Twitter account, or an Instagram account. I guess that also shows that I’m not very interested in what other people are doing either. My working assumption is – it’s mutual.
So why have I just spent time creating a portfolio website? After all, if I have no expectation that the world will want to look, why put it out there?.. More
