Adelaide Zoo

The meerkat shot that every. one. has.

Visited the Adelaide Zoo last week, and they were having the new Panda exhibit going along pretty well. Slated for delivery late this year, so perhaps I'll be able to check it out when if I visit Adelaide again.

Otter!

The otters were very reclusive this time. I walked past their enclosure like 3-4 times, and only once was once of them out eating something, and only managed to take a few shots before one of the other patrons moved too close and it ran into its log.

Persian Leopard

The lion's enclosure was very packed during lunch time, and it was fortunate that everyone was interested in the lions so I was able to grab a very good spot to shoot the Persian Leopard. Only managed 2 keepers, but they were sufficient.


Emu!

A lovely emu, less about subject, just about the bokeh. 300mm at F4 is sweet indeed.

American Crocodile

The crocs were being crocs as usual. Not. Moving. An. Inch. Bwa. All the better for me, with nothing moving.

I leave thee today with a contemplative relative:

Work sucks :(

More accurately, leaving work sucks :( Today marks the last day of my time on Terminator 4: Salvation. My second project at Rising Sun Pictures, I've had a fantastic time there. Sure, all of us had to pull some a few long days here and there, but overall I loved the team and project.

Will also miss my time at Cleland :(

So damned depressed. I'm going to go pixel peep and enjoy some jazz for a while.

MOOD: DEPRESSED

I was at Cleland last week too :P

A dingo. DIIINGGO. (can't decide to print this at A3 canvas, or A2 satin.... hmmm...)

Been very busy the last two weeks in the final push to complete the show. In most every day, but I still got my time to go to Cleland. And back to office after :P Processed some pictures but had no time to blog about them. So there. Last week was relatively meh. Weather was quite warm, and my cuddly Rock Wallabies were hiding amongst the rocks again. Took quite a few shots but most went into the trash bin. Still got one in a reasonably environment-kinda pose.

Andu / Yellow Footed Rock Wallaby

I've also decided that the Andu are much cuter than the Swamp Wallabies. So there.

No, they don't have red eyes, that's the flash causing it. And no, I don't have photoshop. It's quite freaky when you actually see it through the viewfinder when the pre-flash goes off...

Cattle Heron

The Cattle Heron reside in a fair sized aviary, and they don't seem to like me, the last few times I visited their home. Perhaps my new hairstyle gets them confused them this time, so I managed to get closer and get a shot of one of 'em.

Baby Wombat peaking outta pouch!

Ok. I present to you a wombat rear, with a tiny joey sticking its head out of the rearward facing pouch. It's pretty ingenious evolution; if the pouch faced the front, the little pup would be swimming in dirt if the mom started to dig. It's times like this I wish I owned the legendary 200-400mm/4. Being legendary, these are owned by... legends. I'm not. So.... (plz ignore the horrible bokeh... thanks....)

EMU!

Emus aren't very cuddly, so if you do want to hug one my advice is don't bother. This one (nearly 6 feet tall) was in a fairly curious mood, pecking away at my lens. Thank goodness it's my damaged 55mm 2.8, so I didn't bother to much.

100% crop

Optically it is my best lens in my meagre stable. Damn, I love the old stuff :) Cheap and good :) Pain in the rear to focus though. Today, I leave thee with a final picture of the iconic Koala! (They are NOT bears!!!!)

Koala.

OMG, Cleland yet again? What?

Andu, Yellow Footed Rock Wallaby

Everytime I step onto the bus to Cleland, a thought goes off in my mind... are you insane? Surely everything there to be shot at has had eaten too many shots! In addition, dark clouds were looming, even though it was *hot* in Adelaide.

Indeed, when I first stepped into the Dingo enclosure, I was greeted with really awesome shutter speeds that remind me of shooting indoors. Yes, it was a real dreary day :(

Fortunately, this minor weather altercation results in a wonderful opportunity - the furballs were reacting in ways very much different from weeks before. The top picture is a Yellow Footed Rock Wallaby. Hidden amongst the huge man-made-but-naturally-feeling rock structure, these little buggers are not only tough to spot, but also hiding in concrete caves to fend off the warm weather. Translated, using a 8x binoculars, you're only going to see a tiny bit of fur, if you can pick them out of the surface clutter.

Today's clouds brought them out enmasse on the rocks, but unlike the Red Roos, they have an aversion to people (or maybe it's my dress code.), and won't snuggle up for food. Thankfully though, they were pretty close, and my 300mm was able to fill the frame easily.

Tawny Frogmouth, awake!

Similarly, in the avairies that dot the park, the birds seemed more active than usual. Or perhaps I'm paying more attention to them today, take your pick. My usual tawny was very obliging today, to look me in the lens a for one very nice shot.

Female Superb Fairy Wren

Bothered to actually try to catch a shot of the Wrens that are flittering all over the place. An act of frustration, I tell you. Especially with a long lens. By the time you get the focus point there.... they're... gone! GAH! I was especially lucky to catch this female trotting up to me, and I fired off a rapid barrage of shots, only of which a few were good and sharp. I'm getting more enamoured by our feathered friends, the more I learn about their names and habits.

Eurasian Coot

I was also testing the theory that VR actually kills sharpness. I took it to try a whole sequence of exposures using the 70-300VR @ 300mm. I won't post pictures here, so take my experiment what you will. At low shutter speeds, in the region of 60-100, VR definitely shows up, so long as the subject is still. 120-300+ is kind of a grey area. VR enabled shots were definitely on the ball, but a good percentage of VR disabled shots were up to speed. Now the interesting part was a sequence I shot at 1/400. I did quick bursts of 4 shots with and without VR, and it's quite obvious that the non-vr shots are actually sharper (I did a test on a very nice, still Masked Lapwing). Interesting times.....


I gave in and spent time in the Roo enclosure today. I can't decide which is more fun, feeding the roos here in Cleland, or the Wallabies in Gorge. For one thing, I don't remember the wallabies being as scratchy. I went head on using the 55mm manual focus lens, and oh man, it's so frustrating trying to get anything in focus! Props to the MF photogs that were able to nail shots in the days of olde. I was only able to get anything usable when I happened upon some calmer specimens. I miss auto focus in this case :) Stopping down to 5.6 seems like a very good compromise; good depth of field, yet still leaving a smooth background. F8 royally sucks, by bringing too much detail into the background, super super sharp as it is.

Flash was used the whole day together with the flash extender, or off the camera in wireless mode. Definitely getting a hang on dialing in the exposure compensation; -2.7EV for close up critters, to abouot -2EV for further shots.

Of course, I went there primarily for dingo hunting, and here's a few pictures to tie up this long and non-vfx related blog post.

My First Giclée :)

Collected a whole stack of prints today, and also my first Giclée prints from Atkins Technicolor. I've already quizzed them if they'd sent overseas, so if I can't find a good printer wherever I'm going next, I can still get 'em to send it to me. Wooot!

What can I say. Printing big kicks ass! Can't wait to get these home, frame 'em up and stick 'm on my wall. Printed them at A3 size, you can see a 5x7.5in print (5R) for comparison. Now THIS is the cumilation of working on technique and spending time in the field. Don't see why one needs a 20 megapixel camera for posting a teeny 640x480 image on _____ (pick your favourite photo upload site). Bleh. Sharpness only matters here in the bigger prints; I can see the insane detail up close, the tiny food particles on the edge of the potoroo. Its a crap image, but its a good memory of how I got it.

This also concludes my color management/calibration setup. At least with Atkins. It's almost a perfect match on my new screen. Mostly inspired by Peter Maystrenko's portfolio. Peter specializes in portraiture and motor sports. He does his own wet prints, I wonder what how one does those!

I leave thee with an image I captured on the way to pick up the prints; a golden bush frond. Annoyingly, I took tons of shots, only 1 came out with acceptable sharpness (hate wind when doing macro......)

D200, 55mm AIS Micro-Nikkor @ 1:2 magnification

More Cleland Wildlife Park

Dingoes at feeding time

My previous run at Cleland was with the SB600 flash. Lots of fun with a new way of shooting, but this week I went back with the SB600 equipped with a FX4 Better Beamer. Previously, I had the flash doing perfectly fine for fill flash on my 70-300VR, but it did not have the reach required for further subjects. This week with the flash extender attached, the reach was magically extended, easily twice! Downside with the flash extender of course, was the uneven flash illumination on focal lengths less than 300mm.

As close as I can get @ 300mm to fill the frame.

Overall, the experience with the flash extender was very positive.

In between using the long lens on the park's denizens, I pulled out the 55mm for normal use as well as macro use.

Relaxing Roo

It's pretty sharp, and after using it over two weekends, manual focusing on static furballs wasn't too difficult. At least in good light. For close up use is another whole ball game.

Fungi! Sb600 providing the light on camera right.

The 55mm focuses only to 1:2 on its own, and with the PK13 extension tube, down to 1:1. The problem with using tubes is that the lens loses the ability to focus at infinity. The modern AF nikkors focus straight down to 1:!, perhaps one day when I get into macro photography I'd get one of the newer ones. But till then, this old baby (made since 1979, evidently) more than suffices.





I bid thee, the reader, my thanks for reading. I leave thee then with a few dingo shots :)

Sb-600 Off shoe wireless at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens

Played around with the SB-600 today in wireless mode, it's really awesome. As mentioned before, its a tad annoying to enter a custom menu in order to enable wireless, but in use, I've rarely had to switch back and forth. The off shoe flash gives several possibilities like such:

Flash is placed to the right of the camera, +1 flash exposure.
Without flash, deep, dark shadows reign supreme.
It also works very well for macro; this is with my new toy, a 55mm 2.8 AIS Micro. Flash was put on camera left, and gives nice subtle fill.

Black Hill Conservation Park | South Australia

Black Hill Conservation Park is a quick half hour ride on the Adelaide Metro (Bus 178 or 179), easily caught off the North Terrace. It's located just north of Morialta. This beast of a hike is probably less strenuous than the Water Fall Gully hike up to the Mount Lofty summit, but it does have its own challanges.

You do get spectacular views of the built up areas when you get high up the hike. The peak is about 450 meters high (!!!!) and it totally drained me. Thankfully, the return hike was nearly 100% downhill.

We were leary of snakes, but most we saw were these little critters. If you look closely, you may notice that it recently got injured :(

Random tree really, I just thought it'd look good in B&W.

You can see the city again in the background, and how high we can get up. Probably a bad example as this was on the way home, and had already walked downhill for quite a bit.

I'm throughly enjoying my new flash; apart from adding the beautiful catchlight, I didn't realize that most of my shots were at low iso (in this case... iso 100!); the flash was really doing a wonderfull job.

New Toy: A BibblePro Plugin :)

Sean Puckett is an independant developer of Bibble plugins. He makes a whole range of lovely plugins that really enhance Bibble's already considerable capabilities by a whole new level. I've collected a small bunch of them over the time I've used Bibble, and at 10 or 20 dollars each, they don't cost too much if you get one or two every few months. Hot favourites are his awesome black and white plugins, but I love his other plugins such as Ansel that gives the capability to adjust contrast by zone (hence the name, Ansel :))

I'm probably going to shoot the Volleyball SA finals competition soon, and the way I usually grade my images are NOT good for human skin tones. (It's good for Dingoes, but I digress). Gina is one plugin that will sort me out. The free version (Yes, lots of Sean's plugins are free... and work very, very well) already fixes up the images the way I want very quickly - especially since I'm NOT into portraiture. But I thought getting the pro version would be cool to support independant developers, plus, there's probably some nifty extra features.

Example one: Provia curve applied, and saturation *immensely* boosted. Gives loads of punch, but for people. Hmm. Kinda sunburnt.


Gina is able to magically target skin tones and perform some tweaks to them.



It's not always perfect, especially if if the background has similar tones to the skin you want to fix up. But it does an awesome job, easily for people like me who rarely take people photos.

One thing about Sean's awesomeness is that he has a point system for plugins you purchase. I've clocked up a bit of points, and have since got 2 pay plugins, for free! The two images above have been run through Matty Pro, my latest plugin that I got using the point redemption system. It has quite a few functions such as watermarking, frame creation what I enjoy using currently, putting a custom .png image with alpha channel as a frame. Less time spent in GIMP the better :)

Buses on the opposite track zoom by.

The control wheels attached to the main wheels.

View from a passenger's seat.

Ok took awhile but I've been spending the last few nights doing some photo related stuff. BAD! Anyways, as mentioned here's a few pictures of Adelaid's O-bahn system. It's a very new experience to get off a normal road, and hop onto a high speed track. The bus runs automatically thanks to the small guide wheels attached to the main wheel at a pretty fast clip. For more information, may I guide you to its wiki page.

Why SideFX rocks

http://www.cgenie.com/cgenie-content/104-cg-community-survey-upgrades-09.html

Basically, if you read through it you'll see that SideFX has really good customer relationships with their customers. And it's no surprise.

Just about 4 hours ago, I was in a teleconference with them (adelaide people together with my other colleagues in Sydney). Speaking to us weren't the sales or marketing team, but the developers themselves. They were presenting to us the new stuff coming out in the next houdini revision - which I dare say is huge, something on the scale of Houdini 8-9 kind of changes. I'm pretty certain this will give many, many people pause when it's released.

What's more, they were also going through a list of stuff that my supervisors sent in; improvements, changes, suggestions by us that we want in Houdini. They really spent time looking into our suggests, and implementing many suggestions. I'm sure based on the link above, some other companies may do this, but this is the reason why I'm so supportive of SESI.

Plus, think about it. Rising Sun probably does not compare in size to the big players in London or USA that uses Houdini (Imageworks, Framestore for example). And yet, they are willing to spend time to support us. Is that service or what? :) Add in very responsive bug fixes and daily builds, I'm certain 2009/10 will be a very interesting time to be a Houdini user.

Nikon SB 600 | First day usage!

Got my SB600 yesterday, tested it out today at Gorge Wildlife Park, and here's a mini-review/notes on the new flash!

The flash
My first nikon flash; I've only owned two TTL flash guns prior to this, a Metz 32 (works, with my D200 in auto mode.) and the Minolta 3600HS on my Dynax 5. It's fairly sized, and the head swivels up 90 degrees with detents, and also swivels all the way back left, and 90 to the right. There is a flip down diffuser to allow the flash to spread the light for lenses up to 14mm.

The flash uses 4 AA batteries, and has several buttons to control the flash on the back panel. The package includes the usual assortment of manuals, plus a nylon carry pouch and a bracket to allow the flash to stand on its own.

Things I like about the flash
Worked out of the box.
Wireless flash!

Thing I don't like about the flash
Occupies a physical volume in space.
Uses batteries (I prefer photosynthesis).
Doesn't make tea.
Ok seriously, the main issue I don't like about it, is that to enable wireless flash, I need to go into a custom function menu that needs an annoying two button hold down sequence. In a perfect world, so long as my flash is off the shoe, it should just automatically go into wireless mode, and back to normal when the camera is mounted. I think this is how the 3600HS and Dynax 5 worked, however, it's a few thousand kms north of me right now so.... (in the field today though, that didn't bug me)
Also, I'm not sure how water resistant this flash is... I'm really not going to try it out!

Bottom Line
Good general purpose flash, very nice for using the Nikon CLS.

In use at a wildlife park
Gorge Wildlife Park is located fairly near Adelaide, but for someone taking public transport its about an hour on the transit system. I took the J1 bus along Grenfell Street, and after a very quick ride along the O-Bahn (will blog about that soon), stopped at Tea Tree Plaza interchange and switched over to Bus 800 by Affordable Coachlines. The 800 takes a windy path into the Adelaide Hills, arriving about a half hour later at Cudlee Creek.

Gorge is very similar to Cleland Wildlife Park, however, it contains a lot of furballs more commonly found in Zoos, such as Panthers, Cassowaries, monkeys of all sorts, and a *huge* array of birds. The main attraction of Koalas for are available several times a day, and there are huge mobs of wallabies and kangaroos roaming free in two large open areas.

This is one of the first few shots I took, something I would have never taken without a flash: a fully backlit scene.



Usually in such cases, if I really needed to take the shot, I'd have to increase my exposure compensation by at least 2 stops or more in order to get the subject properly exposed, but blowing out the background. In this case, the camera seems to be able to keep the background's exposure in check, as well as keep the subjects well exposed.



It works very well when dealing with up-close subjects, filling in the shadows as well as adding a very nice catchlight in the eye.

I use two main lenses today, the 70-300VR and the 16-85VR; both were being changed around quite often due to the variety of subjects. The wallabies in general were very tolerant of the camera being pushed into their face, and did not seem to be affected by the flash at all. (They do seem to be affected by people moving fast/standing up quickly around them, as well as loud noises)

The 16-85 was generally used for up close shots, and the flash recycled very fast - probably at up to my max frame rate - but at extended flashing, it was unable to keep up with the shutter, and later frames would be non-filled.



The 70-300VR in use was another beast, as with the 16-85, I could pull off a burst with flash, but it'd die out slightly quicker. I think it's time to look into a flash extender to complete my kit.



Now, exposure with the flash was throwing me off the whole day. Several times, the shutter speed was in the 1000+ range, in the shade, and at low iso! What I could gather, these exposure values were due to the meter exposing for the background, and leaving the flash to fill in the foreground. Unfortunately, especially for far away targets that are backlit, this often fails as firing off a flash at high sync speed decreases the range, and the flash will be leaving me with a nice underexposure warning on the lcd screen.

One advantage I've noticed, is that I'm now able to shoot at low iso *very much more often*, and that is something I would like to continue to do. Another thing I noticed is that more of what I want to be in my image is now better exposed, so even if I shoot at high iso on my state-of-the-old ccd d200, more of the image is now better lit and hence, less noise. This however does slightly affect the usual way I go about processing my raws in bibble.

I'm going to end this with an example of how the Balanced Fill mode works:



Above with Balanced Fill mode on. (Huntsman spider, it's HUGE.... the head is probably 2cm across... supposedly these can grow up larger than your hand!)



This is with balanced fill off, so while it is fill flash, the camera expects the flash to be the main source of light.....



Just ambient.

Going to shoot a beach volley ball event tomorrow, we'll see how the flash works :)

Must. Get. Flash.

Just got my first set of aussie prints from Atkins Technicolor, and they are _awesome_. There something about the Kodak Enduro paper they use versus the Fuji's I print on back home. Although they are a bit more expensive vs the run of the mill 1 hour quick prints, they _are_ a pro shop. (Note I'm a n00b not a pro, but they rock, see?)

There is something about examining prints vs examining them on a monitor you don't pick up. Perhaps its because I tend to pixel peep the low iso shots, but it's kinda tough to do it on a 5x12 print :P

I am noticing that alot of my wildlife shots have overly dark shadows, something that definitely can be solved if I had a flash. Must admit I do think back to the good times with my Dynax 5 and its most awesome flash system. High speed sync + wireless for less than half the price of a Nikon SB600.

Gah.

Eve Online Video Review

Knowing that I used to play Eve Online, my fx lead sent me this link.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/208-Eve-Online

Hilarious! And seriously, the last 3 or 4 months before I quit, I was basically quite busy at work and was just enjoying myself watching my XP go up.... then I decided. There are better things to spend time on... that said, the lure of space ship combat can get strong, even if it's just boot kicking :)

GW