The year that was....Part1

Well another year has gone. So long 2012, hello 2013. As I'm sure it was for many photographers, this past year has been one of challenge, change, great photographic opportunities and a lot of fun. I thought I would share with you some of my favourite images from the past 12 months. Some of it travel, some of it editorial portraiture, and some from my private vault of family pics. Because my family are the people who allow me to do what I do. They give me the inspiration to come up with new ways of seeing the world, the encouragement to keep going when things are tough, and the pats on the back when I score a home run or two.

OKINAWA

What can I say about this tropical paradise? It was one part of Japan I'd never been to before and when my wife suggested we go and take a look I was jumping up and down. The top image is from the Churaumi Aquarium and is definitely one of my favourite shots of the year. Three fully grown whale sharks in the world's largest tank? Pretty hard to top. Below are some more of my favourites from that trip.



Churaumi Aquarium backs on to the ocean, and much of its sea water is pumped into the park and then out again in a giant recycling system. Many of the tanks are open to sunlight above as well, which means that gorgeous rays slice down into the water to create beautiful natural effects.




This is another favourite from that day. Next to the giant Kuroshio Tank (where the whale sharks live) is a cafe where you can sit and have your lunch and watch giant grouper, Manta Rays and giant tuna swim by. A truly amazing sight.




Another wonderful attraction on the main island of Okinawa is Ryukyu Mura (Village), a historical museum/theme park set up to show what life was like in the Ryukyu Islands centuries ago. Many of the houses are original dwellings brought from the surrounding countryside brick by brick. This man is a wandering minstrel who entertains the crowds.



This lady performed a traditonal Rykyu dance on stage for visitors. Afterwards my ham of a son got a chance to go up and show his skills!

 KYOTO AND NARA

My second big trip to Japan this year was Kyoto, Nara and then up to Hokkaido for 3 weeks or so. As regular readers of my blog will know, my wife's family lives in Sapporo so we visit every year. This year we timed our visit for Summer and my eldest son went to school over there for a couple of weeks - which he absolutely loved.

But before we flew up to Sapporo we spent a week travelling around Kyoto and Nara, somewhere I hadn't been since I was an exchange student 23 years ago! Wow, I feel old now. :)




You could almost call this trip the Buddha Tour! We saw a lot of Buddhist temples and Shinto Shrines. This statue is in the grounds of one of my favourite temples - Ryoan-Ji Temple. Buddhism was imported from China centuries ago and lives comfortably alongside the native Japanese religion of Shinto.



The other big theme this year was green! What amazing colours. The greens really are luminescent, and with all the rain we had the whole world was just glistening. This beautiful yellow leaf and moss is also in the Ryoan-Ji Temple.



These beautiful maple leaves are in the grounds of the Golden Temple or Kinkaku-Ji. Unfortunately (or not depending on how you look at it) it was pouring with rain so most of my shots were taken from beneath a protective umbrella and I hardly got anything worth showing of the actual temple itself. But what the weather lacked in blue skies it made up for in soft, overcast conditions perfect for details shots and bringing out the brilliant greens.



This is a small waterfall just behind the main Golden Temple. Without soft, cloudy light there is no way I could have held details in the highlights and the shadows.



Next stop was Nara and my favourite place was the divine Kasuga-Taisha Shrine, a Shinto Shrine. You are greeted at the door by lots of wild deer looking for a feed, giant barrels of sake (donations to the shrine) and hundreds upon hundreds of stone lanterns, probably the most famous sight of all.



These are the stone lanterns - or Ishidoro - leading up to the main Shrine. Simply stunning and a telephoto lens brings them really close together to give a sense of how many there are.



Another favourite from the Kasuga-Taisha. Usually I prefer portraits where there is obviously interaction between the photographer and their subject. In the case of shrine attendants that is often very difficult because many of them are quite reluctant to be photographed. So instead I tried to create a type of envrionmental portrait showing their relationship to their chose profession.



Of course no trip to Nara would be complete without getting up nice and close with some deer! This one fellow was lying beside the main entrance path to the home of the Giant Buddha - Daimonji Temple. He had obviously had his fill of deer crackers, patting tourists and crowds and was just taking it easy by the side of the road, watching the world go by. Needless to say he had to have his portrait taken. After Nara we headed back up to Sapporo. Most of the time was spent doing family things - which often involves a lot of baseball, playing in the park and eating yummy food! But I did also get to spend a day climbing the local Mt Maruyama with my father-in-law, a man in his late 70's and still fit as a fiddle. Here are a couple of my faves from that day's hike.



A local squirrel - the Ezo squirrel - half way up the mountain. They are quite tame and a local photographer had been feeding it some sunflower seeds in just the right position for a nice backlit shot. The elderly lady photographer kindly showed me the best position to be in. That's what I love about photographing in Japan - people just respect what you do and try to be as helpful as possible.



To be honest I can't really tell you why this one appeals so much. I think it might be the deep green, and the naturally vignetting darker leaves in the corners. As soon as I walked past this spot I just had to grab a photo.

Of course my trip wasn't a solo effort. I had my wife, two sons and father-in-law along as well so my favourite images of 2012 wouldn't be complete without some of them!

I bet you never knew I had an afro! Rocking the funky look here. :)

Stay tuned for Part 2! This time I'll move on to the great fun I've had creating memorable environmental portraits here in Cairns over the past year.

Hoping for gloomy weather

I'm sure it's not every photographer who actually hopes it's going to be grey, cloudy and miserable but I found myself wishing that a few weeks back. I had another portrait shoot to do for James Cook University - this one was of Allana Brown who is a Senior Project Officer at the Queensland Indigenous Land and Sea Ranger Programme. So I knew I wanted to photograph her outdoors.

I also knew that later in the morning I was photographing another one of of JCU's Sustainability graduates in the tropical rainforest so I went for the ocean part of her job title!

Sunrise in the tropics is very hit and miss -as evidenced by all the people left grumpy after clouds obscured the solar eclipse from some locations last week! We always have clouds on the horizon, and often totally in front of the sun.

In my case I was looking forward to trying a technique I'd read a lot about but had never had a chance to put into action. It involves using the Tungsten white balance on your camera to turn the grey background into a lovely shade of blue. Perfect for when it's really a lovely shade of horrible grey!

Of course when you do that Allana goes blue as well, so to combat that you need to light her with a flash - in this case a 580 EX II speedlite. Just shooting straight flash would still turn her blue so you need to put a CTO (orange) filter over the front. The strength of the orange colour will affect what colour Allan is without affecting the background at all. In this case I wanted it to seem like the sun was shining golden so I added quite a strong filter to the front and shot with a telephoto lens to bring the background mountains in nice and close.

I love the combination of orange subject and tranquil blue background and this is definitely a look I could get used to on those frequent cloudy days.

A lovely day for beach volleyball

Well I have to admit I'm probably not particularly well known for my sports photography.I don't think the Olympic Committee is going to be calling any time soon but the week before last I had an absolute blast covering the National Indigenous Tertiary Education Student Games (NITESG) for James Cook University.

I photographed the students playing netball, basketball, touch football and this very photogenic sport - beach volleyball. It was great to be down on the beautiful Cairns Esplanade with sensational blue skies above and balmy temperatures - at least for the competitors who had come up from down south.

It's great to see young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander university students coming together and showing their sporting prowess while having a really good time. Needless to say JCU Cairns won the event. :) Hey I'm allowed to be biased.

Envrionmental Portraiture in Cairns

  There's a little known secret about travel photography - many of its practitioners earn part of their living from other areas of the business. It may be writing, it may be teaching and leading photo tours or it may be working in other areas of photography as well.

In my case I write a little, teach a little and have the great pleasure in creating dynamic portraits of some really amazing people here in Cairns for both editorial and commercial clients.

Over the years one of my favourite clients has been James Cook University. Not only are the assignments often a photographic challenge - eg illustrate a postgraduate student studying terrorism! - but they give me the opportunity to meet some really interesting people.

One such lady was the amazing Jennie Gilbert. Jennie runs the Cairns Turtle Rehabilitation Centre out on Fitzroy Island, just off Cairns, and is also studying her post-graduate at JCU. She's just about to officially open a brand new facility over on the island, and in the meantime I had the opportunity to photograph her at a makeshift facility in the port area of Cairns.

The biggest challenge here was visual. The turtles live in big plastic tanks under a green shade cloth, surrounded by a lot of debris as they were packing up to move house! So we couldn't shoot wide because we would get all that stuff in that photo. The other challenge was it was very bright outside and very dark under the shade cloth. So in order to have Jennie appear nice and bright whilst still showing some sky in the background we needed to set up lights.

In this case I used a nice big shoot--through umbrella with a Canon Speedlite shot through it. I usually use TTL but my infrared trigger wasn't working too well in the bright sun. Enter my super-duper long TTL cord. It runs about 7.5 metres and I use it outside all the time.

We had to work quickly and efficiently so the turtle didn't get too stressed at being out of the tank. On this shoot I got to take my boys along as well and they were so impressed at being able to hold a turtle. I'll let you know when the Fitzroy Island site is up and running - it should be fantastic!

New gallery of images from Japan

Well it took a little while but I've finally finished keywording, captioning and uploading my recent batch of images from Kyoto, Nara and Sapporo, Japan.

Regular readers of my blog will know that my wife is Japanese and we go up there at least once, sometimes twice, a year. Usually we just fly up to Sapporo to visit family but this time we spent a week with my father-in-law travelling around the ancient capitals of Kyoto and Nara.

And what a treat it was. Heading into spring meant that all the new growth was out and everything was bathed in a luscious green. The image above is from the Kasuga-Taisha Shrine in Nara, which is famous for the thousands of stone lanterns, known as 'ishidoro' which line the main path on the way up.

It's a beautiful. peaceful place interrupted only by the marauding deer that nearly bowl you over in their quest for a feed!

So pop on over to my Latest Work gallery where you'll find some of my favourites.

Also I have been regularly posting new photos from this trip over on the Have Camera Will Travel Facebook page. So if you haven't Liked us yet pop on over. I regularly pass on little tidbits and pieces of photography news that I discover on the web.

I look forward to seeing you there and having some conversations!

The green of Japan

This was the first year in quite a while that I'd visited Japan in spring and I'd forgotten how stunningly green everything is. In the days of slide film (and I know a few of you are still enjoying them!) there was a film made by Fuji called Velvia. It was ISO 50, which for those of you who are lamenting the fact that your camera doesn't go to ISO 12,800 must seem slower than a tortoise with a broken leg. You usually had to shoot it on a tripod and it was incredibly contrasty - forget about capturing any details in the shadows if you kept your highlights in check.

But the one thing that film did incredibly well was saturated greens. People here in Australia would often complain that they would look unnaturally green. I used to think that in some situations that was true, and then I saw the greens in Japan and understood where the film had come from.

It's one of those colours that just has to be seen to be believed. A brilliant irridescent green that seems to cover the entire world. Here are a couple more shots from that day. I hope you enjoy them.

Kyoto trip sneak preview!

The downside of digital photography? Editing, keywording and captioning thousands of photos after a trip. Although I have to admit I do enjoy looking at all the images I've shot and reminiscing about what a great time I had!

This trip was a bit of a blast from the past for me. I lived in the city of Kobe, in Western Japan, as a high school exchange student in 1989. So I often visited Osaka, Kyoto and Nara. This year was the first time I had been back since then - so roughly 23 years!

The overwhelming theme for me this trip was green. It was Spring and all the trees were bathed in their new growth foliage. You can see why Fuji invented Velvia slide film. For those of you who've never shot slide film Velvia was famous for its highly saturated blues and greens. I used to think that the colours were pretty over the top until this trip where I experienced them for myself in real life.

We spent a lot of time visiting various temples and shrines. The difference between the two? Temples are Buddhist and shrines belong to the Japanese Shinto religion. They are often found side by side as Buddhism was imported into Japan and had to find its way alongside the already ancient Shinto traditions and beliefs.

You can tell Shinto shrines by the famous Japanese torii gates that are often found at their entrances. Shinto believes in gods residing within every living thing so often you will find sacred ropes tied around large trees which are believed to house gods. Buddhist temples are of course famous for their iconic statues of the Lord Buddha in many different forms.

Anyway I'm still busy keywording and captioning but wanted to show a quick preview. The first image is a young couple on holiday who are having their photograph taken in traditional Japanese dress - a kimono for the lady and a yukata for the man. This was taken from a small street in Kyoto just near the famous Kiyomizudera Temple. I was walking past and just noticed it out of the corner of my eye so made a quick image. I love the pose of the photographer - any lower and his bum'd be hitting the ground!




This second image was taken inside the grounds of Ryoan-Ji Temple - home to the famous raked gardens and rock islands seen in so many tourist brochures. I was overwhelmed by the intensity of the greens but, like the rainforests here in north Queensland, knew that just green alone a photo does not make (I sound a bit like Yoda!). Anyway I was thrilled when I came across this conveniently placed Japanese Maple leaf, one of only a few which had just started to turn yellow.

Anyway back to the keywording! Keep tuned and I'll have some more images to come as we go along.