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For the past three days I have been up at Halls Gap in the Grampians with the camera club. Although I returned home yesterday, I took an extra day of leave because I knew that in addition to the long drive, the weekend itself would be tiring because of late nights and early mornings.

So today I didn’t do much, except some photo sorting. Although I did do a little bit of sorting through my photos from the weekend (mostly getting them off the laptop I borrowed) I decided that it would be better to return to the backlog.

The previous weekend I went out to Healesville Sanctuary on the Saturday, and then to the biannual Air Pageant at the Point Cook RAAF Museum on the Sunday. It was the Point Cook photos that I turned to.

This day really made me regret selling my 75-300mm lens when I sold my Canon 400d. Although it was the kit lens, by definition cheap, it would have given me reach that my 17-85mm lens just does not have. I also could have thought ahead and asked at the camera club. Borrowing a 28-300mm would have been excellent as I would have only needed one lens, but borrowing a 70-200mm f/4 would have been good as well.

The big downside of having a maximum focal length of 85mm was that most of what could have been good shots were just too small in the frame which meant that when cropped down they were too noisy with not enough detail. I shot 2000 photos on the day and my first pass brought the count down to 262. My efforts today brought that down further to the 58 that are now up on Flickr.

The weather was a bit ordinary for an airshow. Mostly overcast with patches of blue sky. That worked for some shots as it cast a moody feel:

While at other times the break in the clouds gave both lighting and a contrasting backdrop:

See Point Cook Air Pageant 2010 for all of the images.

Something else that I have done with this set is to try to give each image a unique name, not just “Place/Event (#)”. This did take extra time, but it is something that I should be doing. Plus it makes the subject of the photo much easier to identify.

… so finding entries for a ‘monochrome’ topic meant I needed to find suitable photos to desaturate.

After lots of experimenting I ended up with four images that I submitted last month, one of which was awarded a merit tonight:

This is a photo from the club outing to the Blue Lotus Water Garden earlier in the year. The flowers were originally pink/white and after converting to greyscale I spent a lot of time removing distracting spot from the leaves. It turned out to be worth it.

My other printed image was of the cooling towers at Loy Yang Power Station, also earlier in the year:

By changing the greyscale mix I was able to increase the contrast on the towers, as well as making the bright blue sky quite ominous.

I also spent a large amount of time fiddling with one of my images of the Murray 1 hydro power station to get:

My final image was taken by combining a Lego Technic figure, a seamless white background and a flash:

As promised last week I have continued working through my backlog of photos and have processed my photos from Brisbane last year. And this is despite being distracted first be the ISS and then the sunset.

The photos are a mixed bag:

Water and wildlife:

Buildings:

Cityscapes (day and night):

Brisbane 2009

On Friday night the Waverley Camera Club met up at Beacon Cove (aka near Station Pier) for a night shoot.

As we sat on the boardwalk eating fish and chips the sky quickly changed through:

Sunset from Beacon Cove

My final selection of 21 photos are all in the Flickr set. They may look a bit repetitive – there are only so many different shots of a sunset – but this has been thinned down a lot.

Earlier in the evening I stood outside on the front lawn in the dark for about half an hour. The result was this:

That is my first ever shot of the International Space Station passing overhead.

For a while I have been wanting to capture a shot of the ISS, yet I either didn’t find out about a visible pass, or I found out too late. This is despite knowing about the excellent Heavens-Above which lets you enter your location, and it will tell you whatever you want to know about objects in the sky. You can get a whole sky chart (which I looked up for the WCC star trails attempt earlier in the year) or a list of when an object such as the ISS is making a visible pass. This time I have a timely tweet from Wolf Cocklin to thank.

Now, the photo above isn’t that great as shots of the night sky go (a Flickr search for ‘iss’ returns impressive images), but for a shot taken from suburban Melbourne with plenty of light pollution, I am happy with it.

The actual pass was quite short so I took a few test shots so I would know what setttings to use, plus

As I didn’t know exactly where in the sky the ISS would appear or what it would actually look like to the naked eye, I first took a few test shots before aiming the camera up and to the south-southwest. The tests can be seen in the ISS visible pass (15 February 2010) Flickr set.

As there are other visible passes of the ISS for the next week I will attempt to catch it again, weather permitting.