Rob's Mostly Digital Image blog

Give me a mouse, a tablet and pen, and Photoshop, and I shall rule the world...or at least create an entirely new world of my own!

posted by gtveloce  # 2:49 PM 0 Comments

Up close and personal with a daily visitor.

posted by gtveloce  # 9:40 AM 0 Comments

Nothing like a flock of lorikeets descending upon one, demanding food. Very bright, very feisty.

posted by gtveloce  # 3:48 PM 0 Comments

I took a few shots of these King parrots as they fed. The free feed lured them in, then I slowly crept closer as they grew more confident in my presence. Being a shy bird they don't hang around if there's excessive noise or other threatening activity nearby - so stealthiness is important.

posted by gtveloce  # 1:51 PM 0 Comments

It started life as a 35mm transparency, then scanned and modified in Photoshop... until it became this moody, woozy sort of half-inked, half-blurred look. It could be good, I can't judge. I like it!

posted by gtveloce  # 8:57 AM 0 Comments

Get close - first rule of photography. I guess it should be 'as close as you can, safely'. In the case of a King parrot there is little danger to you, no matter how close you get. It's more a case of how close you can get before the bird senses danger and flies away...

posted by gtveloce  # 6:02 PM 0 Comments

Well, it works for me. It started as a simple photo of a wire mesh, then it was tortured to death by layers and filters in PS until it became... something quite different.

posted by gtveloce  # 9:34 AM 0 Comments

I simply played with Photoshop until I was relatively happy. It's an inorganic digital sculpture, if you like.

posted by gtveloce  # 12:31 PM 0 Comments

A combination of mixed media, including pencil, digitised, worked over on a tablet, Photoshopped.... it took a while.

posted by gtveloce  # 12:29 PM 0 Comments

This is one confident native Australian bird. Not afraid of a human carrying a Nikon, anyway.

posted by gtveloce  # 9:39 PM 0 Comments

A Butcher bird in action. I was wondering where the dead birds were coming from - but it had remained a weird, somewhat gruesome mystery, at least until the penny dropped and the local Butcher bird began demonstrating exactly why it is called a 'butcher' bird.

They may have a beautiful, melodic song, but they also possess a fearsome hooked bill and a liking for fresh meat. This one had killed a young bird, dragged it out of its nest and onto the ground; whereupon it set about spending several hours cutting up the body. It took short breaks to clean its beak and to (I presume) feed its own young; but was always back for the next session, full of enthusiasm. It didn't seem to mind me watching, but it did cast a rueful eye over me at times as I snapped away.

posted by gtveloce  # 9:37 PM 0 Comments

Shot at night on my D50, this pic has a moody, almost painterly feel to it. I used flash and a bit of angle on a pane of glass to "dirty" the image. Shot square to the glass also looks good but in a stark, high-contrast way.

posted by gtveloce  # 3:09 PM 0 Comments

A shot of the timid local King Parrots. One false step and they are out of there - pronto. The male is the brighter-coloured one on the right.

posted by gtveloce  # 3:07 PM 0 Comments

It's a King Parrot that was chased into a tree by a... crested pigeon. We have tough crested pigeons around here, and rather wimpy King Parrots. It was a minor skirmish, though. The Lorikeets and Corellas fight it out for "top dog", although a Yellow-crested Cockatoo intent on standing its ground will usually rule the roost.

posted by gtveloce  # 3:04 PM 0 Comments

Not sure why, but purple mug_0418a is getting some hits on Flickr. It's a purple plastic mug, folks, with a spoon. I took it with the Nikon and flash, then contrasted it up a bit. Not that great a shot but it's out there doing good work. Like temporarily holding coffee...

posted by gtveloce  # 11:45 AM 0 Comments

I've always liked photographing glass, especially with a flash on my camera. (The imperfections - bubbles of trapped air and stuff - really show up, and unexpectedly so. Try it on a mirror.)

And now I have Photoshop and the GIMP, life - and glass - is even better.

posted by gtveloce  # 4:23 PM 0 Comments

OTOH this famous tourist attraction looks like this in the afternoon light... have to be careful with the shadows that inevitably fall... but I do like the glow of the sandstone....

posted by gtveloce  # 5:15 PM 0 Comments

A shot that has been taken by a million people before me, but in any case my 9-year old daughter Emma took this one ;-)

posted by gtveloce  # 5:11 PM 0 Comments

It helps to have a coal mine next door... not so good for global warming but in small doses, why not?

posted by gtveloce  # 5:09 PM 0 Comments

The Zig Zag Railway is a section of preserved track that was the main line west over the Blue Mountains until 1910. It zigs and zags up the slope on viaducts, through tunnels and in cuttings, involving the enging 'running around' to alternately go one way then the other. It was replaced by a 'normal' arrangement of consistently descending track that ran through 10 tunnels but posed no such delay. It is now a narrow-guage tourist venture using Queensland locos and rolling stock.

Not a bad place to capture shots of steaming locos... especially in an Aussie winter!

posted by gtveloce  # 5:07 PM 0 Comments

Unintended consequences. I was standing at Sydney Airport back in 1978, analog Pentax in hand, loaded with Ektachrome, and took a shot of this Pan Am 747SP. Big deal? Well, maybe...

Because time marches on and things change, even the innocuous can take on new meaning. For example it's an SP, not your regular Jumbo. And Pan Am itself went bust. And in the background I have captured Sydney's skyline, as it was. In fact Sydney's tallest structure, Sydney Tower is caught here under construction. Now I didn't mean to get it into shot - OK, I probably did think about the background to some degree - but it was nice to get that slice of history in there. Otherwise it would be just another boring old 'plane shot.

posted by gtveloce  # 11:46 AM 0 Comments

Another low-quality scan but a worthy subject: Electra VH-ABH at Air World, Wangaratta, Victoria circa 1997.

Labels: airliners, Electra, Lockheed

posted by gtveloce  # 9:13 AM 0 Comments

Behind my woodpile I found this secret grove of mushrooms. They came and went in a week or so, but before they vanished I got up close and took some pics..

posted by gtveloce  # 9:06 AM 0 Comments

Not a perfect composition, I'd have liked to have seen the wheels in the shot, but dramatic nonetheless... as before, a long lens, hand-held.

posted by gtveloce  # 11:31 AM 0 Comments

Hmmm. A case of get as close as you can, use a long lens (400mm in this case, hand held), as high a shutter speed as you can get and follow the target... Tri-X 35mm Pentax shot, 1977.

posted by gtveloce  # 11:28 AM 0 Comments

This is my most popular image on Flickr. Why? It's not the greatest photo I've ever taken, but I guess it's exactly as stated - a seatpost that has failed. And in that sense it tells a tale that's both very personal and very painful; and one that other bike riders may imagine happening to them, if they are not careful!

FWIW it's a lightweight "3TTT"-brand seatpost that fitted into the slightly smaller than 'usual' diameter seat tube of my Look KG76 bike frame. You can see that it has had fluting milled out and painted black. It and the Look frame (with Mavic ensemble) were sold new to me in 1990, so the post was about 17 years old when it finally snapped, although it wasn't used for maybe 5 or those years and was never my only bike. It was a surprise, but not a nice one.

posted by gtveloce  # 2:23 PM 0 Comments

Have I overdone the Photoshopping? Maybe, maybe not.

posted by gtveloce  # 10:09 PM 0 Comments

Oh no it's more than that - it's the classic Alfa Romeo 4 cylinder. OK, it's been Photoshopped (some cutout and contrast adjustment, mainly), but it's still recognisably the ageless Alfa 4.

posted by gtveloce  # 1:08 PM 0 Comments

Sometimes a bit of shadow, a touch of backlighting and some glare can add to a photo... it's not so straightforward as the expected "fully and evenly exposed" shot.

posted by gtveloce  # 2:56 PM 0 Comments

I'm burrowing through some old pics. This is Tri-X, 35mm, probably a 200mm lens with Pentax K2 or KX. I like the effect of these 3 RAAF F-111s dumping oil into their afterburners (I guess that's what they are doing!) - it was a spectacular air show trick at the time, but I don't they'd do this sort of thing nowadays!

posted by gtveloce  # 11:36 AM 0 Comments