But that is not to say I will just give away my work.

In light of a number of recent posts people have done about “free” photography and the real cost of getting some of these shots, I have done some thinking around commercial use of my photography. I have decided in no way related to the announcement last week of the Nikon D4 that the shot below is worth USD $5999 RRP. (for the autographed version ( Limited edition of 1 ))

–  Update –

In NO way related to the announcement of the Nikon D800e today… none what so ever… I have decided that this image is on sale at USD $3300

—-

I could tell you about how much the camera cost, the lens, the tripod, the fuel for the car to get to the location, the time and planning to get the shot, the years of waiting for just the right moment, the software and computer equipment to process the shot.

I could point out how this has a lot more going for it that a shot of a field ( even if that shot is 3meters across ) and is dramatically cheaper.

I could say how people want to just use my shot and give me credit for it in the hope that it gives me more publicity…

I could just tell you about the new Nikon D4 and how cool that camera sounds.

( Excuse me whilst I wipe drool up from my keyboard )

Completely unrelated to the last statement I promise….. this shot is now worth the same as the Nikon D4….

and all the details on when and how this shot was taken are in my Missing from the EXIF blog post

or you can buy it Redbubble but that version is unsigned…

The $5999 version will be signed. Perhaps it is my signature that is worth the most money after all.

–

Update:

ok.. really the just confirmed D800 is best suited to my style of photography…  36megapixel FX with 15.5megapixel DX for my DX lenses…  drool…..

–

I’d like to thank all those that encourage my photography over the last 12 months from those that purchased prints, to the countless who RT’d my tweets and left comments here and on Flickr.  And thanks for putting up with all the #wolfcatcubs photos as well.

Hopefully next year I will be able to get out some more… but I doubt it.

Wolf.

In reverse order of date taken.

Now that is a bolt of lightning

Finally got a nice clear bolt of lightning… now if only I had a clear view of the sky…..

Monstering Melbourne

Over 20,000 views makes this my most popular image on flickr.

and all the details on when and how this shot was taken are in my Missing from the EXIF blog post

And for sale at Redbubble

Simplicity

This has a Japanese feel to it for me. Shot from the End of North Road, at 500mm.

And for sale at Redbubble

Dancer

Something about this shot sings to me. The simplicity, the story and the power.

And for sale at Redbubble

Mum and Zara

Choosing one shot of the #wolfcatcubs was hard, this one for me says it all.

Red and White – Moomba Fireworks

The first time I actually went to Moomba.

And for sale at Redbubble

The Belly of The Beast

After a number of trips to Avalon, I finally got lucky. Not only did I have the right gear, (Nikon D7000 + Sigma 150-500mm Lens) but I got to see this aircraft fly.

Contemplating the day that was

One of the first shots taken with my Sigma 150-500mm. A lens that 12 months later I am still in love with.

Step by Step, showing the Lightroom processing for the the shot here

And for sale at Redbubble

Keep your Cool

(from one of the only out of the city photo trips I did all year)

And for sale at Redbubble

The long shot… North Road Jetty #nyemelb

Details and Background about this shot here

And for sale at Redbubble

And they have the advantage that you don’t have to leave home and face the increasingly maddening crowds of Xmas shoppers.

Eg…

Prints

T-Shirts

Calendars

And the full of prints/t-shirts/calendars/stickers and lama’s* range can be seen here at my Portfolio

(Note: Lama’s may not be available in your country )

Last Dates for Xmas Shipping ( Non Express )

and don’t forget that all profit goes to a worthy cause…my camera fund, which has been dramatically curtailed due to the #wolfcatcubs.

Those that know me know I carry my DSLR camera with me nearly everywhere.  Yesterday proves why.  The best photo is always the one you get with the camera you have.  To that end it is preferable that you have a better camera. So walking through town on my way home mother nature kindly put on a very nice rainbow. ( This shot for example is from my phone)

I had no more than 10min to spend getting shots by which time the rainbow had gone.

I used a Nikon D7000 with the kit 18-105mm lens.  When I could see where the rainbow was facing, I quickly walked up to Fed Square so I had the foreground element I was after.  Rainbows are all very nice, but framing a foreground adds an extra dimension to the shot.  I didn’t have my 11-16mm Tokina on me, so decided to go for the stitch later panorama series of photos.

When shooting panoramas it really helps to move the camera off Auto Mode as well.  This way your shot has even lighting across the whole image.  If you shoot them in auto, you will end with dark and light banding as each shot has a different exposure.  You can if you have time shoot in manual to pull up the dark parts of the shot if you want, but I was racing the setting sun with this one.

This shot had a bit of post processing as well.  Given I was racing time to get all the frames for the panorama as well. In Lightroom all that I did was just apply the lens correction to all of the shots.  This takes out the barrel distortion and vignetting as well making stitching much easier.  Then I exported all the full size images as JPG’s to Microsoft ICE.  I did try Photoshop, but ICE did a much better job of stitching.

Then came the fun part.  Images never look the same on a monitor as they do on the back of the camera.  In this case all of the Fed Square was to dark.  The sky was balanced how I wanted it, but not the people.

In Photoshop I created a Curves adjustment layer, then created a mask for the bottom half of the image. Then I adjusted the curves to help pull out the rich golden tones that I hadn’t pulled up in the raw shots.

All up, about 30 min of processing work for this shot…

I’m a really pleased with the final image and hope you are as well….

(P.S Now you can buy it as a large photographic print as well as in a mounted print…. )

Just as people expect learners on the road to drive badly, I am trying to manage expectations around my ability to be a father.

Get your own here on Redbubble

To put the camera through it paces I thought I would head to one of my usual spots, take just the Sigma 150-500mm lens and see what I could get. Whilst looking for shots, I walked back from the jetty a bit and found the perfect composure I was looking for.  I am a big fan of taking photos of people, where you can’t tell who the person is.  If you want to enter shots into competitions for example, they often want release forms for the subject.  Not having the subject identifiable fixes this issue.

I took 18 shots to get this one,whilst it is either the first or last shot that ends up being the keeper, this was in the middle of the series.  I was looking for a breaking wave and the girls hair to be flowing just the right amount. All the while I was kneeling on concrete to get the right angle for the shot as well.

Here is the Final Version of the Image as you can buy it on Redbubble

Each of these images opens into a new tab/window, in Flickr Lightbox mode so you can see all the details.  These are untouched screenshots, so that you can see the whole process I went through. You will notice a few extra steps, where I tried a few things, which didn’t work, then carried on, such as a black and white version. But I haven’t commented on them.

The time frame for this processing was just under 5 min of actual sitting in front of the computer time.

Stage 1: This is the Raw Shot. So, I know I have the composition right, but the colour balance and weighting of the shot isn’t quite what I was after…

Stage 2: As my Sigma 150-500mm Lens is in the Lens, issues such as barrel distortion, vignetting and chromatic aberration can be fixed in one click.

Stage 3: I knew I wanted to pull the blacks up in this image, so I did a quick tweak of the black clipping just to see if it was worth progressing with the image processing. Often, once you start processing, with an end result in mind, you will come across images that you just decide not to finish with.

Stage 4: Ah Autotone… I like you as much as I hate you. It always overblows shots as far as I am concerned. I always end up pulling the shot back, but it can be a good quick fix to a number of issues.

Stage 5: And yep, the next thing after the autotone, is to pull the exposure back from the +0.65 that Lightroom’s Autotone did, back to +0.23. So some of the image is brought out, but not to much.

Stage 6: And like Stage 5, this was a tweak to pull the brightness down, so that the image is a lot more muted over all.

Stage 7: I needed to go back and pull the blacks up a bit more at this point, to push detail out of the shadows that had crept in so that your eyes follow the lines in the image.

Stage 8: Hand holding a 3kg lens of camera and lens in high winds whilst kneeling on concrete does of course mean your shot is never going to be perfectly straight. This was just a tweak to the rotation to line up the vertical elements.

Stage 9: This is a two stage process. Firstly using the Brush Stroke tool, I selected the girl, and the pole she was leaning against so that I could apply a filter directly to just those parts of the image. As Lightroom, remembers the last settings, it of course made them over exposed, but it is handy to see the shapes that I was covering.

Stage 10: Now I just reduce the exposure on the brush tool path, from 1 to -0.88, which drops the colour and the detail from the girl leaving a stronger shadow and removes the distraction of the details of her clothing, but keeps her hair and the rest of the image in balance.

Stage 11: Once you have finished doing the major changes to the balance of an image, what looked straight before may not look as straight again. So this was to fix the aesthetic straightness of the image.

Stage 12: In all the above tweaks the golden colour had become a little washed out. So this was just a tweak to the Clarity and Vibrance to pull the image up a bit.

Stage 13: And to finish off, just a small push to the saturation to ensure the image colour and feel was as rich as I wanted.

And the Exif Data for the Shot:

and the Flickr Version of the Shot…

I don’t like the “New” Twitter layout. And the constant reminders that it is going to go… ” our using an older version of Twitter that won’t be around for much longer” fill me with what is in reality a #firstworldproblem kind of dread.

I run a lot of accounts off and on, and yes I am more than familiar with a number of apps and different solutions. I use Seemic on my phone, have used dabr on my old phone, tweetdeck on my computers and even twirl. But I like the simplicity of “Old Twitter”.

With 40k+ tweets, and having been on Twitter since May 2007, I think a: I crap on a lot and b: I am a regular user of the platform. And whilst I see all the benefits of the apps, I like the simplicity that the web interface gives me. Also it means that I am in my primary app for content creation and can just move between windows to share content.

I like the clean nature of the website and that it does just sit into the background, apps demand to much attention and show the flow of information almost to well.  I know every tweet and every link doesn’t need to be read, certainly, not in the same window. If I want the content, I am happy to let it load in another window for example, or just bookmark it for later reading. I like seeing when I have new Direct Messages, not have them hidden in a tool bar.

I like the stability of the old twitter as well. All the bells and whistles just create problems. I move between new and old computers all the time and find that new twitter eats content, breaks media and causes more frustration, ironically leading to me missing more content.

I can see why people do like the new twitter, but I am not one of them.

Given that my original tweet “dear twitter stop threatening to get rid of old twitter or I will write an angry blog post that 5 people might read.” made it to the home page of twitter, was rt by hundreds of people and has got me lots of comments about it, I don’t think I am alone in my thinking.

So I implore you kind folks at twitter, who give me a service that I have not paid 1cent to use, let me have old twitter as an option.

Cheers

@wolfcat.

P.S can you please fix my direct messages count, and whilst you are at it… get rid of the people squatting on twitter handles for more than 12 months.

P.P.S I still like you Twitter, and I still want to be friends with your website.

One of my favourite shots of the the setting sun, is the melting on the horizon version.   The one with the full disk of the sun visible through the long light, and just at the point it is touching the horizon, with the extra distortions that the atmosphere gives the shot.

When I first got my Nikon D90 DSLR, it came with an 18-55 and a 55-200mm lens kit.  All very nice, but 200mm still meant I had to crop a lot on the image to get the focal point out of the shots I was taking.  Next was my 70-300mm.  Much better… but still to much cropping on a 12megapixel image to pull the shot I wanted.

Finally I got my Sigma 150-500mm.  For two weeks after I got it, I was running down to the beach at sunset.  And every evening I either had something on at sunset, or as was the main case, a beautiful sunny day would turn cloudy at the last min, or the line of cloud 15degrees above the horizon would still be there.

Now I am lucky I live 10min drive from the water and that the sun sets over Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne for me.  To be honest I am not a morning person, so having to get up at 5am for the shot wasn’t going to happen.

Finally, I get the cloud cover I want, and the major bit of luck the atmosphere I wanted.  It is always hit and miss with sunsets as to what you will get, if the sun will slide cleanly into the water, or play nice optical tricks in that last few min before it sets.  Here I got that balance.

This is a hand held shot, although a tripod for the sunset does make life much easier, even though you have to tweak the position of the camera on the tripod as it will move a few degrees as it sets.

This is a touch of patience and a touch of luck, combined with a 500mm lens.  I hope you like it as much as I do.

The EXIF Data:

It was also featured on the RedBubble Home Page… ( Click on the link to buy the image )

This video is the Moe and surrounds part of the trip. The to and from Moe was just freeway driving, so here is the more interesting 220km (roughly) of the trip. Video was recorded on a Microsoft HD Lifecam at 720p at 7.5fps, then compressed down to a single 5min movie.
Enjoy.

(Choose full screen to watch in HD, or watch on youtube for lower res version )

The Approx Route of the video ( this doesn’t include a couple of dirt tracks that I drove up, like the road to Mt Erica Car Park )

View Larger Map

And what I was after were shots like this of the Power Stations in the Latrobe Valley.

And the trip was timed for sunset… ( which luckily for me had some nice golden colours )

( These Shots are also on Redbubble as well )

it was too good not to share

[image title="inbeta-photo-small" size="full" id="1620" align="center" linkto="http://www.redbubble.com/products/configure/6247542-kids-clothes" ]

 
Click on the image for the RedBubble link… ( also available in t-shirts and hoodies )