Nature Boy and the Photography Course

Got pretty ill this week with a stomach virus and for several days the only thing of any interest aside from watch Curb Your Enthusiasm replays on HBO was taking Goldie for long walks with my camera. As such, this week’s photos feature a lot of shot of Discovery Bay wildlife. In fact I started taking lots of pictures of birds, then spending my days trying to identify them. Yes, I was very bored. To pass the time, I thought I would read through a decent looking free online photography course that I found. Lesson one of the course focuses entirely on composition, making no mention at all of camera technicalities, and finishes up with a couple of assignments based on the lesson content. Going out with my camera and this lesson fresh in my mind really changed the way I approached my photographs, and particularly how I chose and cropped a few of the final shots.

The full course, by Jodie Coston, is available here.

It's well written, easy to follow and is essentially a very basic photography course. It seems to me that if you are a beginner, it would be a perfect place to start. If you are at my stage of starting to become comfortable composing, capturing and cropping photographs yet far from considering yourself a photographer, it really helps re-enforce some vital rules. Even if you are a bit of a pro it never hurts to revisit the basics. However, if you are perfect, just ignore it.

With that, here are last weeks photographs. FYI photos 5 & 6 are my attempts at the assignments for the course.















- Joe

This week's offerings

The weeks keep flying by and the photographs stacking up. Got a new tripod this week so managed to pull off a decent panorama and some low-light/night shots. Also, in my quest to become a master of my SB600 I found a great blog called Strobist which caters for everybody from total douchebags like myself to strobe masters who love nothing more than to sit around all day talking about light placement and umbrellas. On the downside all it has done is add to the list of stuff I want to buy .i.e Remote triggers, strobe stands, umbrellas etc etc. Oh well, in time...

Anyway, here y'are:

Take care

Joe

Another Week in Images

Okay, so it's a little late this week, I have been pretty busy and only just got around to uploading about 1 weeks worth of photographs today! Photowise it's been pretty exciting. I cleaned my sensor (see my last blog entry) and I also bought a new Tripod which means I can go out and get some nice Hong Kong nightscapes and finally experiment with HDR processing. I also really got down and dirty with my SB600 strobe flash with pretty successful results. Here's this weeks offerings inlcuding a trip to Lamma Island, Samantha's hands, some shoes and a certain over-photographed rabbit:















Peace!

- Joe

Good Afternoon Vietnam! (+ This Week in Pics)

I have booked tickets to Vietnam for the Chinese New Year break! W00t!

Chinese New Year is a pretty popular time of year to visit Vietnam as the Vietnamese equivalent of CNY, Tet, is also taking place. I am really excited to see what the Vietnamese get up to and experience "how they roll" at this time of year. No doubt it will involve a lot of scooters. It's almost a shame to be missing the New Year in Hong Kong because it can be really good fun and people hand out free money (no joke!), but I can't turn down a trip to Vietnam now, can I? Hopefully I will also get the chance to go down the (frankly, petrifying sounding) war tunnels as well as fire some guns or something. On top of this, accommodation is free as my girlfriend's folks are based out there now so I won't be writing any hotel reviews or the like. Other than that the trip is little more than an excuse to go to a new country and lounge around in the sun for a few weeks.

So, let’s talk technicalities: the flight was fairly pricey ($3,750HKD + $100HKD insurance) and we will be flying United Airlines, which means no Asia Miles :( :( :(. A VISA for Vietnam will also set you back $300HKD if you are coming from Hong Kong, and takes 3 working days (express VISAs will set you back $500HKD). Ring (852)25914517 for more details!

Err, yeah. That's about it really. A very straightforward trip!

As for my silly photographs here are this week's offerings. Take note of Monday's Vietnamese themed shot; we booked our tickets that day and I felt like visually rejoicing. Can you feel the happiness? Enjoy.

A Week in Images

Well, I thought since I was doing this project 365 thing that I would post some of the outcome on here. Hell, I realise nobody reads this (I mean I am getting on average around 3 -5 hits a day....serious circulation eh?) but it can't hurt right? Well to avoid taking up an outrageous amount of space here are the thumbnails of my first week of Project 365! Yeah,

I know there are 8 pictures here...I took two for my first day because I was so excited.


















The full monty is available HERE!