Late last year I went on a whirlwind tour through China, some 5000 photos later, 10-15km of walking a day and over 24,000km in the air I made it back home in time for the mad rush of school holidays and Christmas. I have finally had a chance to sit down and sort some of the photos. Now I get to take you there through my captures. Hope you enjoy. – First stop Beijing. Continue reading
This project was another challenge in reworking images to black and white. For the most part my preference and style leans towards bright bold colours. I took this challenge to improve my skills in creating something striking in black and white.
In this post rather than sharing images just from one photo shoot I have collected photos of New Zealand Birds that I have taken, mostly in the last year. We have an incredible variety of birdlife in New Zealand, with many unique to our shores and a number of the ones featured here are also on the endangered list.
Feeding lambs and exploring the farm
In the last several years living in Auckland I have never gone to Western Springs Park. During the kids school holidays I took the kids there to explore and was surprised at the abundance of bird life that was there. Here are just a few of the local residents that I captured while wandering with the kids. I plan to get back there more often and try and capture some of the more elusive birds when I have a chance.
During the last holidays we went on a family holiday near my family in Northland at Te Ngaere Bay. I packed my camera and snuck early a few mornings and dragged the kids out for a drive some afternoons to give me a chance to do something I enjoy. As always I when I am around home I was not disappointed.
Growing up in the Bay of Islands I was very spoilt it is sometimes easy to forget how stunning it is… Here is a compilation of some of my favourite images I have taken over the years. I hope to find some time during my family visits to pop out and capture some more of the stunning places it has to offer.
One of the most important things to consider in the digital age is your digital workflow with your images from shooting, to editing to back-ups and storing your images. Everybody has a different system that works for them, and I am not exception – this is what works for me.
Download images to computer – I put these into an “Ingest” Folder that is in my dropbox, this means it will then be available on both my desktop and laptop computers as well as stored off-site. I have found the most effective way for me to do this is using Photo Mechanic – it is fast and quick to give previews (my desktop computer also has an external drive for back ups)
Sort Images – At this stage I go through and delete the obviously unusable images – (blurry, out of focus, bad composition etc). I do this in photo mechanic as well.
Edit Images – Then to the exciting part, making the images shine. I import the remaining images into Lightroom by syncing my ingest folder, renaming, keywording and editing the images before exporting the completed images to the appropriate folder (also in dropbox). If further edits are needed in Photoshop I go on to do that after the export.
Archive Images – Once I have finished with my raw files I archive them. I never really got into working with the date system for finding images later, so I like to archive them in categories. I have folders, some with sub folders, for things like food, places, family, events and jobs. My archives are on my desktop computer, backed up on the external hard drive as well as linked in dropbox.
I have found this the easiest system for me, everything is automated and I do not have to remember to do any backups and I have backups of all my main photos accessible online from any location. The only downside of this system is if you travel a lot. But for someone who is based in one location this system works for me.
