Yancey in TO

A good friend of mine is friends with the well known author Philip Yancey.  Mr Yancey is known for his inquisitiveness to the tough questions of life, and finding out where meaning truly lays.  A couple weekends ago my friend organised a couple speaking engagements for Mr Yancey and so I went along with NEX in hand.   

I took the stage shots with the Leica Summarit 50mm f1.5, which is OK, but not that wonderful wide open.  However 75mm equivalent focal length is good for stage shots on DX cameras and f1.5 is nice and fast.  It also gives that Leica ‘glow’ too.  The rest of the shots were done with the more clinical Voigtlander 35mm f1.4.

Camera Macro of Camera

There are a lot of groups on Flickr dedicated to Macro photography, and quite a few to pictures of cameras; but never Macro Photography of Cameras.  So I started my own group -  “Camera Macro of Camera”, for people who want to shoot close ups of cameras.  Old cameras in particular have such lovely details that a close up shot reveals this in all their glory.   My favourite is screw mount Leica ‘Barnack’ cameras as the workmanship is really something to see, and I love shooting with extra shallow depth of field to highlight details.

Old Reg

Just as I was starting high school my parents got a kitten, which remarkably managed to have 2 litters of kittens herself just months after we got her.  Unfortunately we could keep 10 cats, so we choose 2 kittens and gave the rest away.    

Reg and Mini were around the farm and my parents house in Mt Gambier for the next 17 years.   Both were great cats.  Mini was a little shy but very placid – a lap cat; while Reg was more boisterous, but would follow you around like a dog.

Here is in Reg in his final years, right around the time my wife and I were married.

Flower Ultra Macro

Using a reversed wide angle lens with lots of attached extension tubes allows you to get extreme macro results.  I use a reversed Nikon 24mm f2 Ai-S lens, and an M2 and PK-13 extension tubes.  This allows you to get right into the centre of the flower and snap the stamens.  It’s fascinating the details that are revealed, but the exceptionally narrow depth of field means it is hard to get right.

Eye on Safety

This photo is of my left eye, with a ton of brightness and contrast added, and the colour removed.  Interestingly, if you look closely you can see my wife taking the picture and an outline of our apartment in Sydney.

A little while after I had taken this photo my work was asking employees to enter a contest to design a poster for a safety campaign.  I used MS Word, opened up a blank A3 page, added the company logo and this picture with the caption “SAFETY: Is your eye on it?”; and then sent it in.  A total of 2 minutes of work .

Remarkably I placed in the top 5 entrants and won two tickets to the Melbourne Formula 1 Grand Prix, with a couple of signed shirts, a flag and various other bits of swag.  Probably the most profitable two minutes of work I’ve ever done.