Hey everyone. Been some time since my last update. Homework and school has been keeping me quite busy the last few months, but for a short period i'm on holidays (though that hasn't stopped them from giving me work to do).

I spent most of last week in Fitzroy doing another photo course as the Centre for Contemporary Photography, which was, erm. Interesting. I enjoyed the course and learned a fair bit but unfortunatly less can be said of the other attendees. I was under the impression they were there because they had to, not because they were interested in photography. This resulted in many idiodic shenanigans to say the least.

I did, however get a chance to use pro level studio lighting, experiment with light meters and visit a fine-art level printing lab. Shooting the Pentax on full manual for two days was interesting though resulted in many unusable photos.

Payed a visit to Vanbar Imaging last weekend, damn awesome store. Unlike Michals in the Melb CBD they actually know what their talking about . Unfortunately This visit has insipiered my to buy a pair of these lil' babies:



That is a Elinchrom Skyport wireless flash trigger. Their basically a 'cheaper' version of a Pocket Wizard. I've been wanting a set for a while now so that my flash is not limited by the lenght of the sync cord, there are cheap $30 Ebay triggers but I'd like something more reliable and something that will last. These retail for about $350 (hence the quotations on the term cheap) for a universal set with one transmitter and one reciver. Meaning I could get 2xuniversal sets for one PW transciver. I could go on but this is beginning to sound like an infomercial for Elinchrom.

The plan is to eventually build a Strobist so i'm looking at buying another Metz 36C-2 Flash, two Manfrotto Nano light stands, the skyport triggers and the various adaptors and umbrellas along with some superclamps. Needless to say I'm trying to hold onto as much money as possible to afford such a setup (without wireless triggers I'm still looking about $400-$500). This rather annoyingly means I've yet to really go out anywhere these holidays with the exception of photography. This means turning down fun yet expensive trips out with freinds, but I guess thats what it takes to finnaly get a decent lighting setup...

Just to add a final piece of selfless advertising. One of the coolest photographers out there today recently released some rater cool stuff.



Chase Jarvis coined the phrase "The best camera is the one thats with you" about 6 months back and I think scoring a book deal with nothing but photos taken on a iPhone really shows that. The iPhone app is a pretty snappy photo editor that is linked into a photo sharing website [link] that works through the app. I myself will defiantly be getting a copy of the book. Though I was a little confused when Jarvis announced he would give away a free iPhone to the best pic in the first week of the launch, it seems odd to give away an iPhone, in a comp where to enter you have to allreay own an iPhone.

Hi a folk, lots has been going on and it's been quite some time since my last update. Most importantly is the arrival of a new laptop that I received from my folks as a birthday present. It's a Dell Studio 15. 2 GHz 3 g ram and 512 graphics card. This thing has a metric ton of awesome and seeing as I only have one license to Photoshop I’m running the laptop just for Photography and Design work for the time being. Now I’m just waiting on its bag to arrive from DevWear which UPS appears to have royally screwed up. Deliver time was 5-10days and it has now been 6 weeks.

Some people out there may have noticed quite a bit of talk from Nikon photographers as of late. It would appear someone has 'leaked' a roadmap of the yet unreleased Nikon cameras including new pro bodies along with new lenses. The supposed D4 and D4x look very interesting but for now it is still just a rumour.

Other news, I attended a photo course last week at the CCP (contemporary centre for photography). Course was interesting but quite basic. Unfortunately due to lack of interest the longer, 3 day version of the course could not run and I think that would have been much not interesting. Plus I was the only one not shooting a Canon

Just rounding up the last few days of my holidays, got plenty of work to keep me busy but it's much less than last terms. Now I’m just waiting on my semester 1 result that the school decided to give us three weeks later than normal. I know for my exams I did fairly average with the exception of Studio and VCD scoring A's for both. That wraps it up folks, stay tuned for some more upadates and photos.

Earlier this week Nikon released the D5000 (they ran out of numbers between 10-100). Seems like a nice little camera for beginners, their approach of giving it to children to test out is very different from the normal DSLR promotion but it seems to have payed off. [link]

Seems a little out of proportion to me, but the flip down screen is a good idea. Comes with all the usual specs; 13.3mp, live view, 4fps and video which seems to be the current 'must have' on a still camera.

Another interesting thing I came across this week was Casio's high-speed cameras. How they have pushed 1000 frames per second from a little point is shoot is a mystery to me, but I still want one. The re sure isn’t anything special but $500 is still 200 times cheaper than a Vision Research camera.

Well I've been on holidays for the past two weeks, spent a large chunk of it doing homework. My VCD teacher gave me 5 design tasks to complete let alone the work from other classes. Really wished I could have gone out and done more photography but didn't really have the chance to. I'm considering just heading into the city again and just wandering but I want to try out some new locations.

Other than that I picked up a battery grip for my Pentax, they’re damn expensive what is essentially some plastic and buttons, but I think it’s worth it. Give the camera some extra grip and vertical controls.

There are a few drawbacks in it's deign, for example the tripod mount is no longer in the focal plane of the lens, it's shifted to accommodate the battery in the grip. The grip itself only holds one battery meaning the grip has to be removed to access the one in the camera. But setting the camera battery priority means I'll rarely have to remove it.

That about wraps is up, Hopefully will have some new photos up in the next week or so.

Got a new toy from Dell last week, finally replacing my dinosaur-era CRT monitor with a 19" LCD. The res is a bit smaller than the CRT seeing as this one actually has pixels I'm not able to max it out like the CRT but that's a small price to pay to get rid of that old thing. Picked it up for about $170AUD on special. The plan is to eventually get a second one when money is more abundant.



Also, as some may have noticed I'm now on Twitter [link] pass on youre user name to me if your on there too. Starting to get the hang of it and it's actually quite useful. A point proved by Chase Jarvis and his ability to summon private jets simply by tweeting.

In the world of photography, did a pinhole photography workshop last week and I've got a few pieces going on display at a gallery. Sixty Nine Smith Street Gallery in Fitzroy for those in Melbourne, exhibition opens this Saturday. And I may have pieces going up in a local cafe/restaurant, but more on that after nailing down the details with the owner.

First off, if you haven't seen Zack Arias: Transform then it's well worth watching. It has been rippling through the photography world the past few days and appearing on Pro photographer's blogs, DA forums and news sections. Truly saying what it is to be a photographer and the truth that it is far from "point and click".




Most of you photographers will have had similar experiences with you work. We fail, we get back up again, that is the way of the artist.





Changing the subject, after three long years attempting to shoot the Melbourne International Motor show I've finally pulled off some good shots. The new Pentax is really helping and is finally giving me the creative power I've been waiting for.