Blog entries from December, 2014

Very few people know this, but for a number of years I have had a gym membership, the last few of those also including a weekly PT session. Recently I came to the realization that I was wasting my money, for the simple reason that I have not been motivated enough to make proper use of it. Something needed to change.

When I first started it was right in between my home and work, but then after I bought my place it was a bit (not much, but enough) out of the way so that it required a conscious decision to go. Now that I work in the CBD, it is in the opposite direction and required more pre-planning if I was to go after work.

I had a thought, what if I reset what I was doing and started going for walks around my local area? As well as being free, I don’t need to travel anywhere to go for a walk, I just go. I could also mix it up by going different ways, sometimes hilly or sometimes flatter, sometimes through parkland or sometimes past houses…

Over the past two weeks I have gone out seven times, I am going to cancel the gym membership and see how this goes. Things can always change in the future such as getting back into cycling to work or even finding a closer and more convenient gym.

Among my growing collection of unfinished blog posts there are a couple about my entries to the monthly competition at the camera club. As the year is now over I am rolling them up into a single post.

One of the few photos (because there were so many people) I took on the Trey Ratcliff photowalk in early 2013 was of the underside of the Princess Bridge.

In 2013 I joined a weekly black and white photo project, while I only managed to stick with it for six months it did force me to take a number of new photos specifically for monochrome. This was was taken for technology.

Taken while on a photowalk, submitted for archtecture, the to the camera club.

While on the club weekend away to Marysville a couple of us split from the main group and headed west towards Murrindindi. There were a few other cars and bikes around that had kicked up dust and while stopped taking photos of the rays of sunlight some bikes went past. A fair amount of adjustment was done to balance out the light, and in the final version the bike and rider was darkened to be a silhouette. This was awarded image of the month for May and then got third place in the end of year competition.

How could I not resist submitting an image of a Lego minifig that shot for silhouette under ‘Shadows, Silhouettes & Reflections’.

The topic one month was ‘creative’ and I had no idea what to submit, it was a struggle as I try to be accurate and reflect what is there… While sorting through some older images I came across an image that after some extreme level adjustment came out like this:

There were three competitions after I returned from my US trip and all of the images I submitted were from that trip. Starting with this early morning shot in San Francisco. It wasn’t until editing the image later that I noticed the cyclist which I thought changed the whole feel of the image. At the monthly competition this received a merit, and in the end of year it received second place for monochrome print.

I don’t take photos of people, so for the portrait competition (even when extended to include animals) I struggled and only submitted one entry, but it was this image of an owl in Owl Canyon which is near the infamous Antelope Canyon in Arizona.

It took me a while to adjust to my new job (started right after returning from my US trip) so I got a bit slack with entering printed images. I should have made the effort as the judge liked the two images I did submit for the ‘Travel’ competition, obviously they are from my US trip.

I still have a lot of things on my todo list, but one thing for sure is that I enjoy going out to take photos and I will make sure I find the time. We have the list of topics for the club competitions in 2015 and I have just seen that the B&W Project will be running as a project 26 in 2015.