Nitza

This is Nitza (Greek for Helen) and this little cutie lives down Woollamia on the property next to Ryan's farm. Unfortunately her owner passed away and no one has come to claim her, therefore Ryan and his family along with the neighbours have taken on the job of feeding her. Although no one can get close enough to give her abit of a groom though, as she is terrified of people touching her. After I sat with her for hours on end she will now come up to people and take food out of your hand but thats abit it.

You can see some more photos of Nitza here.

Chinese Garden of Friendship

On one of Ryan's weeks back from working in the mines we had abit of a city day in Darling Harbour. After having some delicious Thai we went to the Darling Harbour Chinese Gardens of Friendship. I must say I was so impressed and did not expect something so beautiful to be in the middle of the city. For a mere $6 each we got to wonder around the gardens for as long as we liked, although we only spent an hour or so there. After playing with the giant Carp fish and taking way too many photos we had some yummy Chinese tea.

www.darlingharbour.com

Wollomia

These are some photos I took when I first got my Canon 550D at Ryan's family property down the coast.

Sydney Night Photography Course

For Christmas my lovely Ryan brought me a Red Ballon voucher for a night photography workshop. I actually did this course a week before the Shooting Sunrise at Manly workshop but the two courses were completely different.
Apart from adjusting the shutter speed and the cameras apertures settings I learnt a variety of creative techniques (which mostly involve using slow shutters speeds) to get some of the following shots.

• By using slower shutter speeds you are able to capture the movements of people walking through the camera frame during that time , resulting in a blurred effect. This also works when standing on the side of the road and capturing the movements of the traffic.
• Light Painting (so much fun!) - using a slow shutter speed, a tripod and a torch you can draw shapes and jump around in front of the camera to make shapes and 'light paint'. This would be alot better to do in pairs and have one person taking the photo and another being the 'model'/'painter'.
• When taking a photo try using a slow shutter speed and zoom in and out whilst taking the photo to blur the lights and the image.

Shooting Sunrise at Manly

January 15th this year my lovely best friend Alanna and myself did a sunrise photography course through Photo WorkShop Australia. We were both new to SLR cameras back then and needed to venture away from using the automatic settings on our cameras. We are still beginners but we are slowly improving our skills and are having lots of fun with them. Alanna uses her camera alot more frequently than I do as she has a nail polish blog that she is quiet dedicate to and is constantly taking photos of her new polishes. I advise you to check it out www.prettypurplepolish.com

The course started at 5:00am so we needed to leave home at 3:30am as it was abit of a drive for us but was defiantly worth it.

We started off taking photos using slow shutters speeds and capturing the movements of waves over rocks near the shore line. This technique created a fogging effect. I wasn't entirely happy with my photos of this technique as once I downloaded them on the computer they looked rather dull! So I adjusted the brightness and contrast and also converted it to greyscale which defiantly was an improvement. I can't wait to try this technique again and get some better results!

By this time the sun was beginning to rise so we set up our tripods and began shooting away at the sunrise whilst adjusting and experimenting with our cameras aperture, shutter speed and white balance settings, We also tried different ISO settings but I didn't really get the whole ISO thing so I will need to look into this more later one : )

 

Scuba Diving

Last Saturday I went diving with Ryan. It was one of the best dives I have done in awhile, as we were lucky to have around 20m visibility and perfect water temperature.

The main highlight was seeing my first sea dragon! It was amazing to swim along side this gentle creature who was happy to swim through my hands and come extremely close to my face. Lucky enough there was a man in our dive group who had a underwater camera that sent me one of his shots of the sea dragon! I also got to pat and watch a giant Blue Groper feed on a sea urchin that the diving instructor cut away from the rocks. Ryan was lucky enough to see a sea turtle but unfortunately he couldn't get my attention in time so I could see it too.

 

Also saw a few of these little guys which were all different colours, I cant remember the name of them though!

 

Whilst we are on the topic of underwater photos I was able to capture these shots with a hired camera whilst diving in Phuket! The camera wasn't that great but was still alot of fun and I was able to edit the photos in Photoshop to get some great shots : )

Underwater Dogs

Whilst eating homemade banana pancakes and watching Channel 10 news on Sunday morning I came across the Photographer Seth Casteel. I'm not a huge fan of the news (even though I probably should be) but this interview immediately got my attention.

Seth Casteel is known as one of the world's most published pet photographers and also spends alot of his time volunteering in local animal shelters by taking pictures of cats and dogs to try and save the animals through the use of his unqiue photography skills.

To learn about Seth's dedication in helping pets through photography check this link out SecondChancePhotos.

Anyways, I absolutely loved these photos they are unique and also made me laugh. Some of the dogs facial expressions are hysterical!! Was a great start to a Sunday : )

Some can look abit scary though. I think it may-be because you can see so much teeth!!