Fantastic FNQ photo Friday

You can tell I'm over the wet season, and the stingers! I'm ready to hit the beach. How appealing is this?

To enjoy the same relaxing dip you'll have to take a short plane flight from Cairns over to stunning Lizard Island. I was on assignment there for Destinasian magazine.

It was a pretty short trip to get images to accompany an article on the island and it was all shot on print film. Yep I still have my film cameras - both 35mm and Mamiya Medium Format. And believe it or not this is the only client that I use them for, but that alone is worth keeping them around for.

The shoot was mostly interiors of the room and close-up shots of various decorative elements - a la Vogue Travel - but on the morning before I was due to fly out I managed to go for a walk up to a bluff overlooking the coast.

And what a spectacular view it was. It's really hard to appreciate the beauty of ocean like this unless you can get up above it. I had actually put Fuji Velvia in the camera that morning because I always take some slide film along with me whenever I'm shooting a film job. It's always nice walking toward the future, but sometimes it can feel really comfortable just to slip back into the past for a bit.

Lizard Island has an amazing resort which I would thoroughly recommend but if it's a bit out of your price range there's also a National Parks campsite on the island. Only problem is that you have to take in all your supplies with you because there are no facilities whatsoever. But if it's adventure on a pristine tropical island you want this is where you'll get it. Oh and keep an eye out for the giant Monitor Lizards - they're the reason the island got its name in the first place!

I don't get Social Media!

People - Images by Paul Dymond

Well, I guess I get it. I mean I blog here and that somehow magically links to my Twitter and Facebook accounts. What I mean to say is that I'm probably pretty ordinary at leveraging the power of it compared to others. So here is a little play and attempt at delving into it via my Photoshelter website. You see they have these buttons whereby you can post your galleries to your Facebook and your Twitter accounts - would woulda thunk it? So if you go to my Twitter page, or my Facebook page you can see the above gallery on my website. Or you can just enjoy the pictures here on my website. Confused? I know I am. :) But I like the fact that I can share a whole bunch of photographs with you all so easily so I will persevere through my cloudy fog of lack of knowledge!

The Shuffle function isn't just for iPods but photos too

One of the things I love about my iPod is the shuffle function. I often like to set it to play every single song I have stored on there in a totally random order. I make sure that I exclude audio books from the playlist and keep it at just music.

Of course it's all songs that I've put in so (hopefully) it's all stuff I like, but you know those times when you just don't know what kind of music you're in the mood for? That's when this function comes into it's own and I always feel a moment of trepidation just before the next song comes along, simply because I have no idea what it's going to be, but I know it's bound to be something I love.

And I often do the same with my photos. There's lots of advice out there about how if you're putting together a slideshow, or a portfolio, then you should stick to a theme, or an orientation (all verticals or horizontals) or at least have some central point of cohesion that the presentation hangs off.

But sometimes you just wanna have fun. You want to remember the pictures you've taken in the past but you don't exactly know which pictures you want to look at. Play a slideshow on random I say. Go back six months, a year, two years, further if you're brave enough. Pick your favourite cataloguing software of choice and just play every single picture randomly. You might be there for a while but I guarantee you'll have a blast!

It really is so much fun reminiscing about past photographic adventures whilst having no idea whatsoever what the next picture is going to be. And why this picture? It came up randomly when I was searching for an accompanying pic. This is inside the Roger Rabbit ride at Tokyo Disneyland. A look at the metadata tells me it was taken at 1/5 second at ISO 3200. I knew I probably wouldn't pull it off but wanted to see what would happen. Sometimes you've gotta let go of the controls and just put it in 'Random'.