This boat shed on the Swan River is probably one of the most commonly photographed scenes in Perth, along with Cottesloe Beach and the city from the South Perth foreshore, but this is my take on it. The conditions seemed perfect on this particular day as the water was really still and calm. This allowed the reflections from the nice fluffy clouds to really show up on the surface of the water – something I had been waiting for before I shot this scene…

If only the door wasn’t busted up. Oh well, it may add to the gloomy processing I applied.

This is a 7 photo stitched panorama. Each frame was exposed for 1/50th of a second, at f/18 and ISO50.

As usual, comments and critiques are encouraged. Thanks!

A couple of months ago I entered 3 of my photographs into the Epson International Photographic Pano Awards. The final results were released today and I am pleased to announce that I received 3 Bronze Awards for my entries, with one of them placing 22nd in the top 50 in “The Built Environment” category. 945 photographers submitted over 2700 photographs, so I am quite proud of that achievement.

I have also been meaning to mention another competition I entered not too long ago; WAMI Kiss My Camera. I entered a photo I took at a live show that Gyroscope put on in Surfers Paradise late last year. The photo was chosen as one of the finalists and is on display at the Museum of Western Australia. Visitors to the exhibition will choose the overall winner out of the 45 photos on display there.

Check out my award winning photographs below:

I spent a day driving around Perth, mostly up and down the coast, looking for something to shoot and not really finding anything that was too appealing. I had basically given up and was heading home as I was saturated from a sudden down pour while out shooting Trigg and it was getting pretty cold and windy. On the way back home I spotted this tree with awesome autumn colours beneath it, and decided to stop. The overcast conditions were perfect for the scene. It was still raining so I waited in the car listening to music for a while for a break in the weather. It never came.

I wanted the shot and I was getting impatient. I wasn’t going home with nothing! I tore a hole in a zip lock sandwich bag I found in the glove box and stuck my camera inside. The lens was poking out from the torn hole. It wasn’t easy trying to set up the shot with a foggy plastic bag over the camera buttons and LCD’s while getting even more saturated, but I managed.

It’s an 8 photo panoramic stitched in PTGUI Pro, and then processed in Photoshop of course.

I’m pretty happy with the way this photo turned out, and a few other people I’ve shown it to have loved it also. What do you think?

This long weekend found us down at Mandurah, a beach side town about 75km or so south of Perth, Western Australia, for lunch and to visit some friends.

The crew decided to meet at the Brighton Hotel for lunch. We had some time before lunch to have a quick look around the Mandurah foreshore. Mandurah has changed quite a lot since I had been down there last – a few years ago. Emily and I spent a bit of time looking through Christian Fletcher‘s new gallery, which I found quite inspiring.

Anyway, after we’d all finished eating we agreed to meet back at the holiday house, but I noticed some nice clouds forming in the sky as it was getting later into the afternoon. I thought it would be a good idea to head to the beach to take a few photos before meeting back up with everyone else, and it was. As the sun dropped down closer to the horizon, just about everything in the scene began to glow with bright orange and yellow hues. Lately I’ve had a fascination with trying to capture interesting leading lines along the shoreline while shooting beach scenes, and the conditions were perfect for it.

The photo below was shot at 5.05pm – 2 seconds, f/20, ISO 50 – Canon 5D Mk II.

Lancelin is a small fishing and tourist town about 120kms North of Perth City and is well known for its large sand dunes just behind the town. Jamie Paterson and I spent a few hours up there taking photographs of the dunes in absolute darkness, lighting up our scenes with car headlights and hand held torches. It was a heap of fun and time flew by. I didn’t get home until about 1am but it was most definitely worth the long day in my opinion.

Initially, I thought I would be converting all of the photos to black and white because I wasn’t sure about how the different colour temperatures from the head lights, moon and torches would look, but as it turns out, I love the gold tones against the purples in the final image. I have posted a black and white for comparison anyway so I can hear your opinion.

The black and white photo below was shot in Bulb mode and was around a 5 minute exposure. The colour photo to the right was shot shortly after and was exposed for almost 10 minutes.