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This was taken just outside "The Loft" at King St. Wharf during my work christmas party.

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Believe it or not, I actually shot this out of focus on purpose. You can see the camera has tried to focus on all the scratches on my lens filter. Makes for an interesting effect.

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This is a collegue of mine. His name is Cap'n Surly. He wakes up to dine and has no spine, he's really rather burly.

We had our work Christmas party last night. All employees attended dressed up as some type of super hero.  In many cases, the hero was made up. Some of the employees got quite creative. The shot you see above is Adam, our Executive Producer.  Note the condensation around his forhead. 

I'll be posting another shot from the night tomorrow because it was taken at 2am which is technically another day. :) 

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Not much to say really. I had the camera in Aperture Priority Mode because I didn't want to be constantly fiddling at the party with the varying lighting conditions etc. I was using my Nikon SB-800 speedlight (attached to camera) for lighting which performed flawlessly all night.

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I  was sitting on the train tonight and this shot popped into my mind.  I'm going to do some more with this subject at a later date, but for now, this is all I had time for. He was sound asleep, as you can see and his face is almost unblurred (there's a little softness around the lips) which is pretty good considering it was a 30 second exposure.

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I wanted to get a picture of Luke doing what he does for the majority of the day, within the setting that he most commonly does it (did you get that?). I thought the bars of the cot made a nice border for his face.

This was a 30 second exposure in an almost dark room.  I did a few shots at ISO 1600 with almost no lighting, but I wasn't happy with the amount of noise in the shot so for the shot above I turned on a dimmed lamp to give just enough ambient light to get this shot at 30 seconds. 

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I decided to take my camera out when I checked the mail the other night.  I basically layed the camera down on the footpath, aimed the camera at the letterboxes and took the shot. 

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I wanted to get some black and white long exposures of everyday objects. This is a 30 second exposure with the main source of lighting being the street lighting. The street lights around our place are all low pressure sodium which creates an orangy-yellow tint to the light which is amplified when doing a long exposure:

"Low Pressure Sodium (LPS) lamp is by far the most efficient light source used in street lighting. The lamps produce a monochromatic orange-yellow light, from lamps which are long and skinny. LPS is also a good way to reduce sky glow for stargazers. The light is easily filtered out for viewing the stars through telescopes. Drawbacks of using LPS lamps include the color rendering. When the lamp is on, everything around it looks either orange-yellow, black or shades in between. Also, as the lamp ages, it uses more wattage, which lighting designers need to account for. That increase in wattage does result in little-no lumen depreciation, meaning it the light output from the lamp stays fairly constant over it's life."

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A friend of mine had a bucks weekend which I couldn't make it to, but on Saturday night his best man put on a BBQ and a bit of "Ice Blocking" for those that couldn't make it for the weekend.

What is Ice Blocking I hear you ask? Basically you freeze a relatively large amount of water into the shape of a block, hop on and ride it down a hill. :) 

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I was lying in the grass below the "launching area" for the ice block riders.  It was about 7.30pm so the light was fading quickly and because I needed a relatively fast shutter speed to illiminate motion blur I had to open my aperture right up and set the ISO to 1600.  The shot above is one of about 100 but I liked it because the kid is looking straight at the camera.

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This is the snooker table in the office.  Being a friday night there were a few people kicking back and playing a few pockets. These two guys, Adam and Mada were in the middle of a rather intense game when I took this shot. Just look at the concentration on Mada's face.

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Hmmmm. Not saying anything this time. How about you tell me how I did it. (PS: It's not hard). 

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This guy was happily lazing on this park bench along the promenade near the ANZAC memorial in Hyde Park. He looked comfortable enough although from time to time he would sit up and almost be sick.  I took a few shots of him until he noticed me and grumpily started making his way towards my bench. I greeted him politely and made my way south, back to work.

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After walking around Hyde Park twice I decided to have a rest and promptly placed myself down on an empty bench along the promenade.  I'd been sitting there fro 15 minutes or so when this fella lay down on the bench opposite mine.  You see a fair bit of this in the park and so since I hadn't really captured this aspect of "CBD Life" yet, I decided I'd snap a few off. 

It was quite dark under the shade of the huge <insert tree name here> trees along the promenade and so I opened up the lens quite a bit f/4.  I left the ISO at 200 because I wanted to minimise the noise in the shot. 

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This guy was standing just south of Town Hall staring at me for around 10 minutes. I thought it appropriate to get a shot of him. 

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I was getting a little annoyed at his staring games.  As far as the shot goes I put him on the right so that the lunch time "rush" of people could be seen walking towards Town Hall in the background.  I also didn't want to point the camera directly at him because I was standing aroudn 10m away. :) 

I chose f/9 as my aperture because I wanted the people in the background to be distinguishable. 

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I was walking back to work from Hyde park, I was at the corner of Wentworth Ave. & Liverpool St. (begining of Oxford St.) and I heard a whole bunch of naughty words coming from the eastern side of Wentworth.  I looked over and saw this guy, talking to the sky. Well, not really talking, more like yelling.

Enough said… I'll let you all decide for yourselves as to the nature of this man, I just take the photos :) 

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Again… I heard, I looked, I shot. Probably the only thought I had before I took the shot was to open up my aperture in order to reduce the depth of field.  Looking at the shot now, I think I should have opened up another 2-3 stops so I could blur out the background a bit. However, the two people in the background staring at this guy does at context to the shot.

Oh yeah, if you look carefully to the left of this guy's head you can see his spit! :) 

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