Happy New Year 2012 from Melbourne

We've ushered in the New Year about 4hrs ago and I thought I would post a few shots from Melbourne (including some H2O for Craig)....  Wishing you and your loved ones good health and prosperity in 2012!
 

Early crowd...

Almost midnight...

Some of the early fireworks

About 600,000 people attended...

Crusing along...

Water, water, everywhere!

It looks like we may have slowed down a bit over the holidays. That was probably predictable but hey, who was paying attention? I hope everyone had a great time with family and friends, ate too much, and took too many naps (is there such a thing Paula?). I am going to attempt to get us up off our couches with a new assignment theme, one we should all be able to do fairly easily.

The theme: WATER

Water in any form - could be liquid, frozen, solid, steam, snow, bottled, moving, still, ice carvings, wild animal breath, you name it. I'm thinking we could all post a few photos of any sort of water that strikes our fancy. So let's see what you've got in those creative heads of yours. Go get your H2O on!

Let it snow!

It was snowing like crazy the other nite...and I dragged out the trusty tripod, to take some snow pics...and it kept moving....dang...so I threw in the towel and then I tried a flash with my little canon g11...and here is how it turned out.

Canon G11       ISO 800    13mm     f/3.5 @ 1/15   (with flash)

Ice Feathers

Thought I would share this photo I took this morning. I went out to start my truck and noticed these ice crystal formations on my wife's car's windshield. What made them different was how they were formed. As the temperature dropped below the dew point and moisture formed on the windshield, the wind was blowing fairly hard. This caused the micro-droplets of water to move across the glass surface in these wispy formations before they froze. Now it dawns on me I should have put something green in the car beside Irene's red sweatshirt to make it look more Christmasy.

Maiden voyage

Well it wasn't the best of days for shooting but I had to get out with the new 60D and see what it would do for me. This thing has some features that my old 350 did not so there was a lot of learning today. One of the really cool features this camera has is some good controls over the auto-focus. In one of the modes you focus on your subject and if it moves, the camera continues to auto-focus on the subject as long as you keep it in frame. This turns out to be great for shooting birds since they move around so much.

These wood ducks are among my favorites, very colorful but extremely shy. I shot these in one of the wetland areas along the river by my house. These guys only show up in the winter so it's a treat to actually get to photograph them...if you can. I took great stealth and lots of patience to keep from spooking them. When they are standing on one foot, you can tell their guard is down a bit and can move in a little closer.

Note to self...turn off cell phone when stalking wild animals.

B+W Conversions...

D90 f/4 12-24mm/13mm 1/30sec ISO1100

B+W Contrast

B+W

I decided to use one of my earlier posts (5 favourite/grateful things) because it leaned towards B+W to begin with thinking it might be easier....  don't ask me what I did exactly as I cannot recall except to say that image on LHS is normal, middle image is B+W conversion with added contrast, however whilst it shows up some additional features I prefer the RHS which aims for purer B's and W's.

D90 f/5.6 12-24/12mm 0.62sec
+0.7Stop ISO200

Another attempt....

B+W Contrast

B+W

thanks for the suggested assignment Paula and I agree that taking the "flatness" or excessive grey-scale out by playing around with the brightness/contrast livens up the image although trick seems to be not to replace with washed out or too dark an image...  and there is still room for improvement if I spent more time tweaking I'm sure...

Now if only someone (anyone?) can explain why this crazy blog publishing tool behaves erratically or is it just me??? Any attempt to move and place images and text is like buying a lottery ticket - purely random and I never seem to win!!!

Finally!

Hopefully this is the only photo I will post taken from my iPhone. I know, I shouldn't be doing that even once but it is the only way to show you what a great day it was for me today. I finally went down to Idaho Camera and plopped down the bucks on a Canon 60D body. This is a great upgrade in technology from the original Canon Rebel 350D entry-level SLR I have been using for the last eight years.

I realize this means I have no excuses now but I am willing to take the heat from all y'all in order to own this jewell. The best thing about this 60D? It has a flip out screen so I no longer have to lay down in the goose poop to get that great lizard-level shot! Like my mama always says, "for crying out loud, will ya get up out of the goose poop already?"

I'm excited and looking forward to exploring my world through this new camera and getting my shutter on!