Take me out to the ballgame - Japanese style.

 In honour of the fact that, after quite a break, the Japanese pro baseball series is back on again I thought this would be a good opportunity to post some images I shot last year.

I went to a game of the Sapporo Fighters. My wife is from Sapporo and one of her friends from kindergarten is a rabid fan - whether of the tall, muscley players or the game I couldn't quite tell!

Anyway I got to sit in the stands with her just-as rabid friends and we had a great old time of it. With all the horrible things that country is going through at the moment I thought it might be fun just to post some nice pictures.

For those who are curious I took just three lenses a 10-22, 28-70 and a 70-200. So not quite enough reach to shoot the players up close but close enough to give my friend pictures of her heroes where she could make out their faces! Hope you enjoy them!

You'll only ever be as good a photograher as you want to be.

I've spent the last week or so doing some enthralling reading - all about converting images from RGB to CMYK via Rick McCleary's book CMYK 2.0: A Cooperative Workflow for Photographers, Designers, and Printers and on how to optimally sharpen my pictures via the late, great Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe's book Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom (2nd Edition)

Not exactly as boring as watching paint dry, but pretty dry stuff nonetheless. Certainly not one to take to book club on a Friday night. But I find it really interesting. I find myself getting quite excited as I realise why this or that thing happens to me every so often.

Take this picture here. I once had it printed in a magazine a couple of years ago and the bright reds turned out yellow! Now this picture has been published a lot and I had never seen it yellow before and I got to thinking that it must have had something to do with the conversion to CMYK for printing. Now, after doing a bit of reading, I know that it was most likely caused by the reds being out of colour gamut and they used Relative Colorimetric conversion instead of perceptual which would have been better.

Now that I'm feeling really geeky my point is this. How good a photographer do you want to be? How much effort are you prepared to put in to being the best you can possibly be? Because this decision will greatly affect how good you're ultimately going to be. The best position to be is in one where you're constantly trying to be better than you are - never satisfied. Competent, confident but always hungry for more.

I met a photographer once who said to me that she was amazed at how good I was at using apertures and shutter speeds to control the look of a photograph because she had no idea how those two variables worked. And, yes, she was working professionally and selling her services. Now that's an extreme case, and perhaps boning up on CMYK conversions and sharpening is another extreme case but if you give up learning you'll never be as good as you can be.

I remember chatting with a good friend of mine about his work - a travel writer and photographer just like I was for nearly a decade. And he mentioned that he was busy working on being a better writer. And at that very moment it clicked. I didn't want to be a better writer. I was quite happy at the level I was. I was getting published widely, making a living and pretty much cruising. But I suddenly thought I had no right to. If I wasn't striving to be better then I was letting not only myself down, but my clients as well. Didn't they deserve the best possible collaborator they could get?

In the digital era being a better photographer doesn't just mean learning new flash techniques, getting a better camera, or even developing your vision and finding your voice. Sure it may be all of those things, but also so much more. It means understanding all about colour spaces, image file formats, monitor profiling and a whole bunch of other stuff we never needed to know about. And yes, even sharpening and CMYK conversion maybe. Do your eyes gloss over at the very thought of having to learn that boring stuff? Rather be out taking pictures all day and leave that stuff for the geeks? Or are you chomping at the bit to glean any bit of extra knowledge that will help you improve your craft?

Search your heart and the answer might surprise you. How far do you want to take this? How dedicated are you? Your answer might make or break your photographic career. At the very least it will determine how good you'll ultimately be.

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'.

Fantastic FNQ photo Friday

Is it any wonder people want to come up here on holiday? With the fun these two are having how could you not want to visit?

I always forget to say that if you fly into Cairns one of the first things you'll see as you drive out of the airport is a giant billboard on the left hand side.

The billboard is an ad for Quicksilver Cruises and the picture is one of mine. Done a little while ago it is used to promote their outer barrier reef cruises, which leave from lovely Port Douglas.

My boys love dropping Mum off at the airport because they get to see 'Daddy's picture' every time they come back. I know my usual FNQ Friday is slightly different but every so often I have to take a moment to take pride in the images I produce, and boast just a little! :) And it's not often you get to see a picture you've taken twenty feet high and passed by tens of thousands of people every year.

Don Quixote cows

With what's happening in Japan so far to the fore of everybody's consciousness at the moment, and in light of all the talk about the benefits or otherwise of nuclear power I thought it might be a good time to post an energy picture!

Of course with the usual Paul Dymond twist. You see north Queensland is home to the state's largest wind farm, just a couple of hours west in the small town of Ravenshoe.

I've driven past Windy Hill quite a few times but had never really thought about how I wanted to photograph it. And then it kind of clicked. I remember reading somewhere that one of the arguments that opponents to the farm used was that it would upset the cows and they would hate the things. Here was my angle.

I'd seen plenty of pictures of the windmills themselves - in sunny weather, cloudy weather, atmospheric stormy weather. But I'd never seen any pictures with the cows in them. Come to think of it, every time I'd been past, the cows were nowhere to be seen.

So one day when I was driving past and noticed a herd of cows all milling around near the base of the giant turbines I knew this was the shot I wanted. I put on a wide-angle lens so I could have the cows big in the foreground with lots of green grass, and still have the windmills visible in the background kind of blending in (if you can possibly blend a big white spaceship into the natural environment!).

I have to say, the cows seemed more perturbed by me than they did by the wind turbines. Not that I'm an expert or anything but they seemed as contented as any cows I've ever seen before. Just saying...