Mini Swim meet this morning.

A tiny little swim meet this morning, just for fun at the Gail Walker Swim School.
In an indoor pool of course, cause doing any swimming outside today would be a little silly!

One of the nice things about this pool, apart from the fact that it is heated... is the big window at one end of the building, it makes an awesome spotlight as people get to that spot.

Here is Zak.

Photogeeking:  this is basically straight out of the camera, spot metering on Zak.  A tiny tiny bit of contrast adjustment afterwards.

Clothesline Star Trails Of Unusual (size)

Ok weird title, I admit it....
but it goes with the weird photo.

Shot with the camera open for about half an hour under the clothes line... a tiny bit of playing with the colour and out  comes this....

(oh and the title was attempting to be ROUSs, but it just missed hopelessly... {and if you are the person who the title was really directed at, then I know that you already know what an ROUS is... [and if you do not, you need to read / watch one of the all time classics.....]} maybe I should stop trying to do multiple messages in my titles.....)

...and sometimes you cannot get it right...

The boys had a sick day yesterday... and I was not sure if I was well or not... so I used it as an excuse to take a couple of photos at training instead of doing any real work.

So I wander in with three quarters of a metric tonne of gear (two flashes, a couple of flash stands - even an umbrella) and set up to take some photos of one of the black belts while he trains for his second dan grading....

Yeah...

did not work so well.

The question now is... after such and incredibly spectacular failure... will I be brave enough to ask people if I can do it again?

My hands

Couple of photos from this week.
One - playing with a couple of flashes and a punching bag (and Xander - whose timing was impeccable on these shots!) 

Some of the outtakes from the bag punching shots will never see the light of day.... lets just say that skin is not meant to be seen at highspeed under impact.


Photogeeking: punching the bag.  A flash well behind the bag as a rim light (also gets my face), another at the bottom of the back pointing up where my arm will hit....  then I dipped my hand in some flour to get the dust.

Second one - flash on the table raking across my hands to get all sorts of texture, and a much less powerful one above spotlighting down on it...

Weekend play

Last weekend, we went to a couple of parks and the boys and one of their cousins had a good, fun old fashioned play...There was swinging... and then there was flying....

Sometimes it is so hard to keep kids under control!

I try to let them know that it is impolite to fly in public, but sometimes they just do not listen!

Photogeeking:  first photos all taken with off camera flash on high speed sync, at about 1000 of a second so that I could get the background a little dark.  Then I played with some Nik software with them.  I am still trying to work out if I can afford to buy the Nik software - it does some nice things - but am I just being lazy when I could eventually get most of the results in photoshop?

The flying ones involved walking around with a step ladder and a tripod... taking a photo of the background and then of the flying... going into photoshop, putting the background and the people in the same document and then masking out anything that was not meant to be there.

Where I Live

My drive into town yesterday morning, on my way to sit in a coffee shop and do some work.
There are worse ways to start a day!

Of course - the reality of it all was a little less dramatic....

This is what the people driving by saw!

Foreign Money Day

...
I was going to call this International nothing happened day.

I am still not heading off to China... but I am sure it will happen soon.  So nothing happening there.

Did some astonishingly boring work... so nothing happened today....
Something must have happened on this day of the year once... but not today.

We are 193 days of the year in and we have 173 days to go... both a prime numbers and this only happens this way in a leap year.  Surely that must make the day important!?


To celebrate the nothing, I thought I would show you a strange little thing I do...
In my wallet, along with the Australian Dollars, and the Chinese RMB, there is always $5 US.  It has sat in there for a few years.
I like having it in there, but would not be able to tell you why - (I doubt if I could bribe anyone for $5....) but I think in a pinch in most of the countries I would visit... I could at least get a diet coke or something!

And given that little revelation, and because the day has not been claimed by anything else... I am calling it "Foreign Money" Day.  So celebrate "FM" day for me by trying to spend some non-indigenous money somewhere and tell me how you went!!

Not on a plane....

I am meant to be on a plane to China in 4 hours time....
But there is some confusion with some paperwork.... (at least I think it is just paperwork...)
and so I am not flying off anywhere for the moment.

I do not need any flight angels making sure I get to my destination ok today.  Maybe I will need one again in a week or so....

So instead of packing this afternoon... we went to a shopping center.  I got to have a play with a bungy-trampoline!!  I was a little bigger than most of their clientele.  This is me in the middle of a backward somersault.  My double somersault did not work so well.... but luckily I do not have a photo of the result of that!!

I nearly died this morning....

Driving down the highway, just like any other morning.....
I was faced with a situation that every driver fears, but few have had to face....

Somehow I managed to get through it... I lived to blog this... someone up there must care about me...

There, in my lane...
sitting pretty... like an evil, car crashing, yellow flower of death ...

was a BANANA skin.
I have a copy of a photo of an actual re-enactment of a simulation of the banana (not his real name).

Turns out some maniac tradesman had been throwing them out of his car screaming something in Italian..


(the real story - as I was driving to work today, I drove over banana skin... I thought it was funny....)

Misty Morning

Misty morning the other day....  all very pretty...
I managed to capture something that nearly looks like it felt...

Happy July 4

To anyone who is basking in the sun, sitting beside a pool, eating enormous amounts of BBQ, or even manning a fireworks stand... have a great holiday....

July 4th on this side of the world for me involved a long drive (without any food or a SINGLE COFFEE!!!) to get a whole heap of medical tests done before heading off overseas again...
I also got to pretend I was a pin cushion with the number of injections I got.