It’s been a while since I did my last photo hunting session. However, the sun was finally up that day and so myself and a friend decided to go to Hampton beach and walk along the beach to Middle Brighton, snapping possible objects and sceneries along the way. It was quite a bit of walk, but the weather was very nice and photography is always a fun thing for me. I’m glad to say that there are  quite a few good shots that I can add to my gallery today.

The gear that I brought with me  was my Nikon D300s, 90mm macro lens, 70-300mm telephoto lens and my trusty 18-50mm lens. Along with all the gear I also brought my Holga, but obviously it’ll take a while to develop the negative since no one seems to to 1 hour development anymore these days. There were a lot of things that can be taken on that day, the weather was very nice that it was perfect to snap pictures. The light wasn’t too harsh but not dark either, it’s like having a giant softbox illuminating all the objects.

This resulted in great lighting condition to take macro photos such as the one on the left (click on the image to show larger size), there  is not a hint of harsh light which I really dislike in macros. The photo was taken using the 90mm macro lens, handheld with manual focusing. The original flower was quite small, however as with any macro photography, it always pays to have a closer look at the things around you. Such as the dried (seed pods?) in the gallery below or the photo of seeds which is my personal favorite in this gallery.

When walking around places like the beach and taking photos of the scenery, it always pay to have both wide angle lens and telephoto lens. Most of the sailing boats photos were taken using the wide angle lens, however the boat with the orange sail in the gallery below were taken using the 300mm lens. The photo of the dog was also taken using the telephoto lens, obviously there was no way to come closer without drenching the equipments. I had to actually switch the telephoto lens to manual focus mode in order to shoot the dog properly since the focusing system was not fast enough (it’s an older lens).

The Processing Tools

This is an interesting portion of the post that I wanted to discuss. I have recently migrate my desktop into a Linux system since I’m a software engineer and it’s really so much easier to develop on it. However, image editing in Linux is not exactly everyone’s cup of tea, even for me. I remember a few years ago, opening RAW images and processing it with the available open source programs was really difficult.

As it turned out, there are really good software these days that one can use under the Linux environment to organize RAW files and edit them. All the images in this post’s gallery are edited under a Linux system. The setup that I have are: Ubuntu 10.10, RawTherapee 3.0 alpha for RAW files processing and Gimp 2.7. Granted both of the image processing software are on it’s development stage and by no means stable, however I have no issues whatsoever editing all of these images today. I think when the two software matures, they will be great. RawTherapee is very intuitive, reminds me a lot of Adobe Lightroom and it’s very efficient and quick. Gimp 2.7 although not available through the normal download has a lot of user interface improvements, the one that I love most is the single window mode, no more 3 separate windows open together (you’ll have this “issue” on Gimp 2.6).

If anyone is interested to get the tools, here are the ways, again, the software versions that I listed are on development, so proceed with caution:

RawTherapee: available via software center

Gimp 2.7: You will have to add the development repository first, then run the install command

remove any other versions of gimp

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:matthaeus123/mrw-gimp-svn

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install gimp

The Gallery

The Melbourne Moomba Festival 2011 is not something to be missed. This was the time to have some fun and enjoy the festivities. For 3 days, the people of Melbourne gathered and enjoyed rides and fireworks. It was great to see that huge number of people from different background enjoying the festival.

Obviously this is always a good time for anyone interested in photography to get out there and grab some photos. I went and did all the photography handheld at the time (I should have really brought a monopod at least, perhaps next time), there were too many people around to be lugging my tripod. Plus I didn’t go to the festival solely for photography reasons, I went there with some friends to have some fun too. Anyway, my gear at the time is just my Nikon D300s and the Holga.

As a plus, there is always a Moomba parade on the last day of the festival. During this yearly parade, we have the opportunity to see the participant from many different cultural backgrounds. Unfortunately I didn’t get a front spot at the time due to some prior appointment. otherwise there would have been more shots from the parade.

Checkout the gallery below, oh, and I’m sure you’ll be able to spot which ones were shot with the Holga.

On the more technical side, all images were post-processed ever so lightly using Nikon View NX, Holga negatives were scanned using Canon negative scanner.

Since the last post had a lot to do with point and shoot camera, this is a good opportunity to sneak in some of my favorite iPhone shots. The images in the gallery below are all shot using iPhone 3Gs with variety of camera software, some of them camera+, hipstamatic and photoforge (this is as close to photoshop on an iPhone as you can get).

I dare say that some of the images below can rival shots taken from a DSLR in terms of composition and colours, obviously if we are talking sensor size and megapixels camera phones are puny against any DSLR. I hope this can inspire people, that to take good photos you don’t have to have an expensive DSLR or vice-versa, having a DSLR doesn’t make one a good photographer .

Here’s the gallery for your viewing pleasure: