Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Canon Photo Five Competition

Canon held this fantastic competition last year, and are holding it again this year. The idea is that you register for the competition, get a box full of goodies and take photos using the items you get in your box. Each item has to be in a separate photo (you can't take one photo using all the items) and you can only enter one photo per category. This years objects were:

- tealight candle
- crayon
- cocktail umbrella
- bubble mix and
- a red ribbon.

Unfortunately, this year's registration is shut so if you want to give it a spin you'll have to wait for next year, but here are my entries in the competition:





If you want to check out more of the entries, you can see them in the gallery here. I probably don't have a chance of making the finals considering I'm just a noob with a camera, but I have really enjoyed the challenge of coming up with ideas for specific objects. As you can see, I went with a murder and mayhem theme. I wish they would hold this more often.

Is anyone else in this competition? Want to show off your stuff? Leave a link in the comments below!

Friday, September 26, 2008

Night Floriade Photos

Last night I went to Floriade, a Canberra flower festival. Shooting at night without a tripod is really hard! Because the exposure is longer every time your hand wobbles so does the picture. I keep meaning to buy a tripod, but until then I'm stuck just using whatever is around. These are some shots I took using my babies pram as a tripod.



Sunday, September 7, 2008

Telemarketers are People Too!

If you've come to this site by accident looking for ways to piss off telemarketers, go here.

I worked for ages as a telemarketer. People can be such jerks and it seems like telemarketers are the sanctioned punching bags of a highly stressed population. My friend Raven is one of the most imaginative telemarketer haters I know. He has it down to a fine art and can keep the poor saps on the other end of the phone hanging on for up to an hour, certain he's going to buy something as soon as he answers the door, gets the other phone, takes the burning dinner out of the oven or talks to the policeman about that horrible murder next door.

I hate that. Can't he just say "Sorry, not interested" and hang up? Yes, he's annoyed but if it didn't work as a strategy the companies wouldn't hire people to do it. Don't take it out on the employee. Telemarketers are people too.

This design comes on shirts, clocks, buttons, a mousepad - all the essential office supplies
. If your friend just got a job as a telemarketer, the cards on the inside say "Congratulations on Your New Job!".

Is your profession hated? Want a shirt that tells people to get off your back? Leave a comment and I'll work something up!

Thursday, September 4, 2008

I like taking photos of things up close

One of the functions I have always loved on my cameras is the macro mode. I've always had this fascination with taking pictures up close of really small things. When we got back from the park the other day I had bits of dried grass all down my top from where I'd been lying down trying to get the right angle on some tiny flowers.

I especially like taking photos of insects. Here are some of my up-close shots:






The beetle in the third photo down was actually in my sleeping bag crawling up my leg. That was a very eerie feeling.

One day I want one of those lenses that lets you take photos of really tiny things like individual ants and so forth. My ant shots haven't worked out well so far, but I haven't tried yet with my new camera. That will be my next excursion - shooting ants :-)

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Changing eye colour in Paint Shop Pro X2

Today I had the luck to find this very quick guide to changing eye colors. It's so easy that even I had no trouble with it.



Way to go Torqque! I've been having so much fun playing around with this. Here are some examples using my (usually blue-eyed) baby Marcus as a model:





I just love that I learned so many useful concepts so quickly. I'd already been playing around with hues, but now I know how to select different areas to play with. The only thing that confused me was why I couldn't see the eyes in the preview screen like he can in the video, and that was because I was too closely zoomed in.

This is so much fun. I'm off to go give people I don't like Demon Eyes.

Monday, September 1, 2008

My New Camera - The Olympus SP-570UZ

For a while now I've been mucking about photographically with a little point and click digital. It was a great beginner camera that I loved. It worked underwater, in sandy conditions, after I dropped it that time...

But the camera store near me just had a special on new cameras and I really wanted an SLR camera with a higher megapixel count. I convinced the love of my life Matt that what we really needed wasn't a sofa (pft, what's wrong with the floor I ask you?) but a shiny new Olympus SP-570 Ultra Zoom. Weirdly enough, he agreed. There's a good run down of it's features here but the things I love about it are:

- 10 megapixels!!! (That's 10 reaally big pixels, right?)
- 20x Optical Zoom
- to use the zoom you have to physically turn the lens, not just press buttons. It's a nice feeling, like you're an old times photographer in one of those awesome films about how fun it was being a star reporter back in the 40s.

Yesterday Matt, Greg and I went on a picnic with the baby and I took so many photos! Of course the image sizes are larger on my new camera but I still managed to fill my 2 gig memory card, mostly just by saying "ooh, what does this setting do?". We tried out the fast capture mode by pushing the pram around really fast but we decided that was a bad idea with the baby actually in the pram. Here are some pics from the day:


Friday, April 4, 2008

Getting all arty in the lead up to Mother's Day :-)

So I've got the demo version of Paint Shop Pro X and I'm absolutely loving it. I've been drawing more and then playing around with all the things I've been drawing. I feel like a kid at Disneyland again, there's just so many things you can do! I've been playing around with this one image for a couple of days now and it should soon be ready to be put up on the site.

This is one that is already up there. I will also be putting up a version of the image without the text at the request of my sister who liked the picture but not the quote. The quote, by the way, is from Elizabeth Stone and reads - 'The decision to have a child is momentus. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body'. With my first baby due in a couple of weeks now, and with all the wonderful and absolutely terrifying aspects surrounding becoming a parent, it felt appropriate. Especially with Mother's Day coming up.

Elizabeth Stone, for the interested, was a writer in the 1800s who was put into a mental hospital by her family after she had a religous conversion. There is an interesting piece of her autobiographical writing to be found here.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Rockin' Set of Stairs

Just put up a new photo on the shop - this wonderful set of stairs from Petra. Petra was so beautiful - the pictures hardly do it justice. It's this ancient city in the middle of nowhere carved into all this amazing red, pink and golden rock. For the film buffs out there, it was the place where they shot that scene from Indiana Jones - you know the one.

The new journal there is particularly good, if I do say so myself :-) I've been waiting for a good journal image.

But hey, don't just take my word for it! Check it out for yourself.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Go Camel Photography Opens!

Everyone has a dream.

Mine was to see fantastic photos lovingly placed on mugs, t-shirts, posters and framed tiles in order that such items could be purchased online and then distributed to the people through a series of interlinked tubes.

And now my dream is a reality. Mostly.

Go Camel Photography provides great photos from around the world. Mugs for the workplace, gifts for your friends, clothes to dress your dog in, handy bags that look very flash as well as proving great carrying space.

We're still working on the tubes.