Jamies Fine Dressings

These are a few photos from a shoot I did a couple of years ago. The client is still using them and has just asked me to produce a couple of large display banners. I had my son, a graphic designer as an assistant and used off camera flashes triggered with the Canon inbuilt wireless system, I now have Pocket Wizards. I had just purchased a dozen high quality AA batteries and had charged them up the night before. I spent a bit of time on the web researching rechargeable AA’s and the ones I purchased came highly recommended and were quite expensive. About half way through the shoot my speedlights started miss firing and then stopped all together, they all had flat batteries. I thought no way, new batteries, fully charged, must be something else. I had a full set of older cheaper AA’s that were also fully charged, and once they were fitted my problems were solved. I did some test at home and found that the batteries were discharging themselves after about 24 hours. I contacted the supplier and sent them back. Turned out that there was a complete shipment faulty, the supplier was most grateful that I brought the problem promptly to his attention. They had not sold many batteries from the faulty shipment so the recall was only small. This episode certainly taught me the benefit of having backup equipment. These dressings are absolutely the best I have tasted, here is a link to the website, Jamies Fine Dressings.
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Southern 80

I had a funeral in Echuca on Thursday so I stayed and made a long weekend out of it. The Southern 80 Ski Race was on so thought it would be a good chance to hone my skills in shooting fast moving objects. I mostly shoot with my 5D Mk II but this time I thought it would be good to put my little used 50D to the task. So I loaded it with my 70-200 f2.8L II set servo mode and was pleasantly surprised. I was able to track the fast moving boats with ease and the exposure was as close to perfect as one could expect. I think I actually took a good clean image of every competitor in the Saturday morning races. These are called “social” races for some reason, I don’t see anything social about being towed at such high speeds behind boats with thumping big motors, I think hitting the water at the speeds these boats were going would not be much different than hitting a brick wall. Editorial images and prints can be purchased here (link).

Local Birds

I love photographing wildlife, this gallery contains a number of birds that I have photographed between Kerang and Mildura, the majority being in the Swan Hill area.

Photo of the Month: January

This a composite of 6 x 21 megapixel images stitched together in Photoshop. It was taken just before sunrise at Wilmington SA. I woke up at about 6am so it was a great rush to get my gear together, jump a couple of fences and capture this amazing sunrise. The complete sphere of the sky was ablaze with colour, the only way I could think of to do it justice was to take a panorama, as the light was constantly changing I quickly set up my tripod and took these 6 images in portrait mode as quickly as possible. This would have to be the most spectacular sunrise I have see. The full size image is about 75 mega-pixels.

The heavens declare=

Photo of the month: December

Sturt’s Desert Pea, Swainsona formosa, the floral emblem of South Australia. I took this photo while on a recent outback trip researching a photography book I am working on for John Flynn’s 100th anniversary of the Australian Inland Mission. It was the first time I had actually seen a Sturt’s Desert Pea. We were not far from Broken Hill’s Sculpture Symposium when we spotted hundreds of flowering Desert Peas, the light was a bit harsh but I was pleased with this exposure after a quick edit in Lightroom.

Sturt's Desert Pea, Swainsona formosa
Sturt's Desert Pea, Swainsona formosa