faceyoursfears - my photography blog

japan

2009-01-28T21:56:00.008+11:00

We've been back for a week now... such a fun holiday. So much to do, I think we packed in quite a bit. Started in Osaka but travelled straight to Tokyo. We spent about 5 days there; visiting a few temples, shopping, and just travelling all over the city.

Then we headed up to Hakuba, near Nagano, for a week of snowboarding. It was awesome but so cold.

After that week was up we travelled down to Hiroshima and Miyajima. A couple of days there and then off to Kyoto for temple craziness. So many to see... I think we did pretty well. I don't think my feet could have taken much more walking. :)

Our last day was in Osaka and we went to the aquarium, then we caught our plane home (when it was finally ready).

Here are a few photos... I am really happy with my d90. Especially the LCD screen, very nice to use.

Matsumoto Castle near Nagano. A very photogenic place.

We went to visit the snow monkeys in Yamanouchi. This little place is near the start of the 2km walk from the bus stop to the monkey park.

Torii gates at Fushimi Inari-taisha. Hard to get photos without people in it. :)

Lights in Dōtonbori, Osaka.

More photos to come. ;D
Later.

time for an update?

2008-12-27T17:57:00.004+11:00

Haha... I guess I was lying about updating this blog with Mexico posts... head over to my flickr to check out the photos. :)

Here is some photography news... I bought a new camera, a Nikon D90. Here's a photo :)

Oh... another thing... I'm heading off to Japan for a few weeks with ozzy, leaving tomorrow! It should be awesome... We're planning to fly into Osaka and travel straight to Tokyo for new years... Then to Hakuba for a week of snow boarding. After that we will probably head back to Osaka, Kyoto, and possibly Hiroshima... but the last week and a bit is still open at the moment.

Cya when I get back, happy new year to everyone. Bye!

back from mexico

2008-05-14T21:51:00.002+10:00

Actually got back last Saturday. I took over 2000 photos; 420 with my 12-24mm, 914 with my new 35mm, 592 with my 50mm and 202 with my 70-300! I'll be going through them and slowly posting to flickr. Hopefully I'll get some sort of blog posting of what we did over there happening as well.

mexico

2008-04-11T22:12:00.002+10:00

Well I'm off to Mexico for a month, travelling around with dtra and ozzy. It should be heaps of fun. Hopefully I'll be back with a heap of good photos to blog about. :D

Later

australia day at cumberland river

2008-04-09T22:59:00.002+10:00

This is just gonna be a short post. Me, Ozzy and dtra went to Cumberland River for the Australia Day long weekend. We took a few photos, went swimming and body boarding and pretty much just relaxed for a couple of days.

Didn't do much on the first day, we went for a short walk up the river and had a barbecue dinner. After it got dark we walked out to the beach and took some experimental shots of the great ocean road. Also down in the water there were some mystery glowing things washing up and then disappearing. No idea what they were. :S

The next day I woke up early (about 7am) so I got up and went for a little walk, then later that morning we saw a little grasshopper... dtra, with his macro lens, got some really nice photos. I tried to reverse my 50mm with unusual results. ;D We went for a bit of a walk up to castle rock. It was quite a long walk but it was ok. We saw an Echidna, and I almost stepped on a snake. The only but I didn't enjoy were the downhill parts. :(

After that I put my camera away for the rest of the weekend. We went body boarding a few times and went to the Lorne Pub for dinner and to watch the Australian Open final. We got some ice cream's but my cone was structurally unsound and ended up in the dirt. :~(

rottnest island

2008-04-07T21:44:00.004+10:00

I was planning on posting separate items, splitting up each day we spent at Rottnest Island, but I've run out of time (lazy). So I'm just gonna post an overview of the rest of the time that I haven't already written about.

My sister and I decided to ride out to Parker Point, where we had swam earlier that day, to get some photos of the sunset. It was one of the best sunsets I've ever seen. It lasted forever and went bright red.

We didn't think it would be a problem riding home after the sunset. Even though it was dark and we didn't have lights on our bikes, there are no cars on the island. We didn't count on the Quokkas though, those things can be suicidal! One ran straight under Kate's bike. She came off and scraped her toe on the ground. :( It was a bit upsetting but I think the Quokka would have been ok, they are tough little buggers. Kate was ok too. :)

The next day we rode to a different beach for some swimming, this time on the north side of the island. It was a really nice beach with a big reef and huge fish swimming around. I decided to come back to this beach later for the sunset. Kate didn't join me this time. :D

The Freo Doctor was blowing hard that night. Riding west, it was harder to ride down a hill than it was riding up it on the way back. I arrived for the sunset a bit early but it was nice to just sit on the rocks with the wind blowing around. In the end, the sunset wasn't great... but I had more fun taking photos of the rocks.

On our last day on Rottnest, I just realised I hadn't taken any photos of the Quokkas yet. We went for another bike ride but didn't see any. But it didn't matter, we knew they would come out in the evening. So later that day I went out to look for some. It took forever but finally found a few in some trees. I took a few photos and headed back to our cabin. When I got back there was a Quokka waiting for me at the front door! :)

So that's about it! Sorry about the rushed post and sorry that it's so late! Tomorrow, something a bit more recent ;), my long weekend at Cumberland River on the Australia Day weekend. :)

new 35mm lens + extension tubes!

2008-03-27T21:26:00.004+11:00

New blog post?!! (I'll get back to those Rottnest Island posts some time) I've bought a new lens, It's the Nikon 35mm f2D. It looks pretty much identical to the 50mm 1.4, except it has different writing on it :). Also I noticed it's made in Japan, not China, if that means anything! :/

I haven't really had a chance to use it yet, I will on the weekend. I also picked up the Kenko extension tube set. I had a quick play around with them at work, they seem to work pretty well, they focus really close.

I guess the real test for these will be when I go on holidays to Mexico in TWO WEEKS!! Not very far away now.

riding around rottnest

2008-02-19T21:48:00.005+11:00

On our first full day in Rottnest Island we hired some bikes and got away from the crowds. None of the schoolies can be bothered moving away from the main beaches, so the rest of the island was very quiet (I think a lot of other tourists stay away to avoid the schoolies). :) We rode around the bottom of the island to Parker Point and went for a swim there. There were a few Ospreys flying around a nest on the cliff... I didn't manage to get any decent photo though because I only had my 50mm lens and couldn't get close enough. Also I managed to get my camera set on 1600 ISO without noticing. :( I've gotta remember to check my ISO setting more!

After a bit of a swim, we got back on our bikes and headed north to a lighthouse in the middle of the island. Then we headed home. Click the photo below to view my Rottnest Island set on Flickr.

fremantle prison

2008-01-22T21:30:00.000+11:00

Seeing the sights around Fremantle, we visited Freo prison. We took a guided tour around the place which was pretty interesting. As soon as we walked into the prison grounds I had a weird déjà vu experience. Obviously I have never been there before but then remembered I had seen the prison on the TV show, The Amazing Race.

The most interesting thing were the art works which were around, on walls and in the cells. I just realised that I haven't put one of these photos on Flickr... maybe I'll add one later. I've got a couple of photos of the non-arty cells though.

fremantle skateboarding

2008-01-20T20:31:00.000+11:00

Came across these skateboarders in Fremantle, Western Australia... The road was closed off and they had set up a few jumps. The building in the looked really good with all the broken windows and graffiti. I set my camera to continuous auto focus so that I could keep up to the skateboarders coming in. I wish I had stayed for longer to get a few more photos, but I only ended up taking about 15 shots (and most were not in focus or just bad exposure). :(

happy new year!

2008-01-08T22:12:00.000+11:00

Check out dtracorp to find out what I got up to on new years. Unlike me, he actually updates his blog fairly regularly. :D

new zealand photos

2007-12-13T23:05:00.000+11:00

Feels like I've been going these New Zealand photos for ever! I've got a heap of new stuff I wanna get started on. Anyway, I'm nearly at the end so I though I would post a link with some of the photos.

This first one is from our trip from Christchurch to Queenstown. It took us a lot longer than it should have, but we stopped a lot for photos and I think we got some good ones.

This photo is from one of the days in the Queenstown area when we didn't go snowboarding, we pretty much just spent the day driving around looking at tourist spots. We took a short walk with the sheep here at Homestead Bay.

This last photo is of Cecil Peak, a mountain which was just across the lake from our hotel in Queenstown. It's a pretty impressive mountain... we went out quite a few nights to get photos of the sun setting behind it.

Check out my New Zealand Flickr set if you want to see the rest of the photos.

Later.

back from rotto

2007-12-03T22:11:00.000+11:00

I actually arrived back last Friday... It was a pretty good holiday, probably the only thing that stopped it being a very good holiday was sharing the island with hundreds of schoolies. But they weren't too bad I guess, and the island is pretty awesome... so that makes up for them.

Hopefully I'll post some photos in the near future... I'm still going through my photos from NZ! I think when I post photos to flickr I'll also post a small little blog about the photos or holiday or whatever. I shoulda done this with my NZ pics, oh well... We'll see if it happens this time.

Here's a little teaser...

Laters.

wooo schoolies!

2007-11-23T21:19:00.000+11:00

Well not really, I'm going to Rottnest Island for a week and it just happens to be schoolies week. Hopefully this won't affect the holiday too much and I'll be able to get some good photos taken and spend some time with the family.

When I get back I'll be heading straight off the plane to the Movember Gala Party which should be interesting!

See Ya!

movember

2007-11-03T17:35:00.000+11:00

It's Movember time again! This is my forth Movember (since winning lame mo in 2004 :D) and the whole thing has been getting bigger and bigger every year. This year looks like the biggest yet, the party is going to be held somewhere in the Docklands, hopefully I will be able to go because I'm gonna be in WA towards the end of the month.

If you want to sponsor me, click the link below. It's all for a good cause, prostate cancer and male depression.

Thanks!

around the bay in 50km

2007-10-22T21:17:00.001+10:00

dtra, ozzy and I went on the around the bay bike ride yesterday... not the full ride, but the 50km version. It went from the city to Altona Beach and back. It started early and as usual I hadn't organised anything so I got up at 5:15am to get all my stuff together. I was surprised to see the sunrise... I didn't know the sun rose so early! I shoulda got a photo... I'm not likely to be up so early any time in the future. :)

After picking up dtra in Box Hill we drove to ozzy's place in North Melbourne. As soon as we got there dtra found out that he had forgotten his helmet! It was still early so there wasn't going to be any bike shops open. We decided to ride to the start point of the ride and hope they were selling helmets there... So we took off from ozzys, through the city (watching out for any police) and made it to the start point in Alexandra Gardens with no problems. Unfortunately they didn't have any helmets. dtra did manage to score a Michelin cap though. :) Anyway one of the guys there said that there would be bike stores on the way, so we started the ride.

We started off nice and easy, ozzy and I hadn't trained at all and dtra was feeling very self conscious. :D Also there seemed to be police everywhere. I'm sure they must have noticed that dtra wasn't wearing a helmet but for whatever reason didn't pull him up on it. At least they didn't until just before we got to the Westgate Bridge, we were turning a corner and heard one of the cops yell out "Hey mate, where's your helmet?" and dtra was forced to pull over. It wasn't looking good for a while but after a minute or so arguing with the cop, dtra was let go and told "If you come off, it's your own fault"! I don't think we saw any more police after that, which I'm sure dtra was pleased with! :)

The Westgate Bridge was fun to ride up (and more fun riding down), it was very windy at the top! After the bridge we had a few detours to find dtra a helmet, with no luck. We got to Antona Beach at about 10:30 or something, and stopped for a couple of snags and a drink. I think I stiffened up during the break because when we got back into our ride, I was very uncomfortable! It was starting to heat up as well, I think it was about 30 degrees. On the way back, dtra decided to take off on me and ozzy, I saw him at the start of the Westgate Bridge but then lost him again. Westgate Bridge the second time around was fun again, I hit my max speed for the day coming down, about 50kmph. With the hardest bit over, we were on the home stretch, we caught back up to dtra with about 5km to go and all rode together to the finish.

At the end of the day it was a good experience, I don't think I would want to go any further, riding a bike for that distance is too uncomfortable, especially in that heat. Here are some stats from the ride:

Distance: 57.66km (extra due to detours maybe) :D
Time: 3 hours, 15 minutes.
Average Speed: 17.7km/h
Max Speed: 50.9km/h

hmm

2007-10-16T21:20:00.000+10:00

Haven't blogged for a while. Dunno if I've got anything interesting to write about. :S I'm still going through my New Zealand photos and uploading them to Flickr. I haven't really taken any photos since that holiday. I've been slowing down a bit with photos lately thought cos I've been stuffing around on my new computer. :)

Also I've gone over my download limit for the month so I'm stuck at 64kbps for the next two weeks... which makes uploading and viewing photos annoying... it makes doing anything on the internet annoying actually.

chook hunting

2007-09-25T22:49:00.001+10:00

Earlier tonight my Mum dragged me outside to look for a missing chicken. I thought it might have been taken by a fox or something because we couldn't find it anywhere! It didn't help that it was pitch black and we only had one half decent torch. Anyway after about 15 minutes of looking we were about to give up but we decided to get Locky to help us with one last look around. With a bit of encouragement we had him sniffing around for this chook and it wasn't long before he began taking interest in one particular bush. When I looked in the bush, there was the missing chook! I was quite impressed with his tracking skills, I don't think we would have found that chook on our own.

Locky was rewarded with a couple of snacks and a lot of patting... I think we over excited him though cos he started running around like crazy and crashing into stuff. :D

mooo

2007-09-17T22:20:00.000+10:00

Well it's been a while since my last post... I've been going through holiday photos and uploading to flickr. I've only been posting a few every day or two (this way I maximise my flickr views) ;). I think I'm about half way through the photos.

Something interesting though is that I received my 10 free moo minicards, which I got for signing up to a pro flickr account. They're very cool... I'll probably get some more printed out when I've finished with my New Zealand pics. Anyway, you can click the image below to see my 10 cards. I've even had some interest in trading Locky! ;D Trading cards seems to be the thing to do for flickr members, there are groups dedicated to trading moo cards.

tennis

2007-09-01T20:36:00.000+10:00

We had our grand final for Saturday tennis today. Saturday tennis is played with a team of four and we play 3 sets each so it's best of 6 sets. We faced up against Deepdene who we beat quite easily last time we played. But we weren't over confident today because this time they had a number one player who we had never seen before. He turned out to be a really good player too, but we also have a good number one so they matched up nicely.

The first couple of sets were both close but we won them both 6-4. There were a few mind games before the next two sets... they asked which court the 1 and 3 players will be playing on and we pointed to our number 1 and 3 player. Their top guy who we thought would be playing number one walked over to the 2 and 4 court (maybe they thought he would be able to get a couple of easy sets playing against me)! But I sent our number one over to play against him. The opposition gave a few puzzled looks and I'm sure they thought about changing players around again. In the end they stayed where they were so both teams had their number one players playing as number two. :D

The next two sets went our way as well which meant it was all over. I think I must have switched off in the last set because we lost it 6-2! But the other guys won theirs so we ended up winning the day 5 sets to 1. The day seemed a lot closer than that (if the result was calculated on games we would have only won by 6, 34-28), they definitely made us fight for our win.

The other good news is that my Thursday night team won their grand final while I was away on holidays. So after going a few years with no grand final success, we've won two in a couple of weeks! :D

back from holidays

2007-08-27T21:53:00.000+10:00

I'm back from New Zealand, it was a pretty cool holiday. Went with dtra, we did lots of fun stuff and took a few photos :). First couple of days were spent traveling (we managed to turn a 6 hour drive from Christchurch to Queenstown into an 11 hour drive) :D. Then we had 4 days of snowboarding, followed by a couple of days of sightseeing and a couple of days of extreme activities. I'll probably go into more detail with separate posts when I go through my photos (over 1200 shots) :). But for now here's the most important thing... me doing a 134m bungy jump, the highest in New Zealand. :D

holiday!

2007-08-13T20:12:00.000+10:00

I'm off on holiday to Queenstown, New Zealand. So this will probably be my last post for a couple of weeks. It's gonna be awesome, 10 days of snow boarding, photography, and bungy :)... Speaking of bungy, I've just realised that I never got around to uploading the video of me jumping in Koh Samui, Thailand. Well, here it is. As you can see by the look on my face I was completely NOT scared. :D

revenge!

2007-08-10T08:57:00.000+10:00

Tennis semi final time, we played the team that beat us last week. This time they were no match for us :D. It was a wet and windy night and after starting late because no one came to unlock the courts for us, it looked like we were going to be washed out. What's with that, it's finals and they forget about us?

I was really pumped up at the start... maybe a bit too much because after I hit a smash which bounced over the back fence, I had to run right around the courts and club house to get the ball. But instead of doing that I climbed the fence and banged my knee on the way over. It was really sore for a couple of games but eventually the pain went away.

The wind seemed to be to our advantage, or at least we handled it better than our opposition. The rain didn't bother me either, it was light rain but the wind made it seem a lot worse than it was. By the time it really started to pour down, we had three sets to one and even if the opposition had won every game from there, we still would have won. So we called it a washout and a win to us.

Grand final next week, it's up to the other guys to get the win because I'll be on holidays. They are playing the top side so it will be tough but I think they can do it.

night photography

2007-08-08T22:30:00.000+10:00

I decided to head out tonight onto the dark and dangerous streets of Croydon, to test out my Tokina 12-24mm lens with some long exposures. Well, maybe it's not so dangerous but it is definitely dark. Especially on my street where most of the lights are covered by trees.

I didn't really take that many photos, I wanted to move along quite quickly so that people wouldn't think I was just hanging out in front of their houses. I'm pretty happy with the results, but there was quite a bit of lens flare. I think next time I'll take the filter off my lens before heading out and see if that makes any difference.

Check out my photos on Flickr.

favorite blogs

2007-08-05T14:11:00.000+10:00

Here is a list of the blogs I subscribe to (links open in new window).

dtracorp - One of my friend's blogs... It's all about sports, photography, movie reviews and just random stuff that dtra does (like working on his site).

indigofan - Jeans and other cool clothes bought by one of the guys at my work.

samwa - Funny geezer that I work with.

Strobist - Photography lighting tips.

ScottGu - Actually I don't check this one but I probably should, it's all about .NET.

*NEW* Outtram's Weblog - Another guy I work with. He's really into photography, especially lighting.