Been on a bit of a landscape binge lately. Like many photographers landscapes (or seascapes as is the case here) were one of the first subjects I ever photographed and are still one of the things I love photographing the most. It’s a kind of therapy. The nature of landscape photography forces you to slow down and be patient, waiting for just the right light and think through how to set up your shot. It’s a great change from the rapid pace of street photography where your subjects are generally moving and “the moment” happens and is gone in the blink of an eye. In landscape photography, “the moment” tends to happen much slower. It’s the ten minutes it takes for the sun to break through the clouds, or the moon to rise. Often you are the only person there and this can make you feel like the piece of land or beach or lake you are photographing truly belongs to you. (Did I go a bit overboard there? Yeah, I thought so too)

I was all set to go on a landscape photography weekend last week, when our dog Rosie, in a display of exquisite timing, decided to escape the yard and explore the neighbourhood. She must have eaten something she shouldn’t have because for the next few days she lost her appetite and wasn’t her usual-bouncing-off-the-wall self so we had to take her to the emergency vet, meaning we had to cancel our weekend away.

Not to be discouraged, I decided to visit some of my favourite locations, Swan Bay and Point Lonsdale. These are places where I learned and practiced many photographic skills and techniques and so have fond memories of. These are a few images from the shoot. Comparing these to early images from these locations It is satisfying to see I have grown somewhat in skill level. It also reinforced the advantage of knowing your location. I had an idea of where the sun or the moon would rise and what kind of light they would cast when they did, so I could set up a shot accordingly. If I didn’t already know these locations, I may have needed to come back several times before getting the shots I really wanted. The best landscape photographers will visit a location many times before finally making the image they have envisioned. So its important not to be discouraged if first results are a little less spectacular than hoped for. Possibly the greatest skill a landscape photographer can have is patience.

For a modern, fast moving metropolos with an abundance of shopping malls and supermarkets, the people of Hong Kong still shop predominantly at its many street markets. Throughout the city, narrow streets are lined with stalls where you can purchase anything and everything from cheap clothing, to pets to fresh fruit and vegetables to trinkets and souvenirs and flowers and where any marked prices are merely a suggestion and a starting point for negotiations.

One of the best known markets are Temple Street Night Market (also kown as the men’s market) where you can find all manner of souvenirs, cheap clothing, pirated CD’s and outdoor resteraunts. You can also have your fortune read by one of the many street side fortune tellers.

Tung Choi Street Market (the ladies market) offers more cheap clothing and accessories and is crammed with pushy sales people and suffocating crowds, giving a true market experience.

Other markets include the Goldfish market, a street lined with shops selling fish, tanks and all the accessories. Some of the more exotic and rarer fish can fetch some exorbitant prices. Yuen Po Street Bird Market is a meeting place for people (mostly old men) to gather and chat and air their birds who have long been a favoured pet of the Chinese. The market is lined with cages of birds and the noises and smells are not for the faint hearted.

Amongst these, each neighbourhood has its own wet market where people come to buy their fresh meat, fruit and vegetables. Due to the density of living in Hong Kong, there is not much room for storing and refridgerating food, so people tend to go each day to the market and buy only what they need.

Browse any of Hong Kong’s neighbourhoods and you will be sure to come across one or more of these street markets which give a unique insight into the way life is lived here.

Haven’t done a gear post in a while so I thought it was time to nerd out and post some thoughts on a backup and file management device I have been using for a while.

I have been carrying Digital Foci’s Picture Porter 35 around with me for some time now as a method of backing up while on the road if I’m not travelling with a laptop, or to store an additional copy of images for a bit of extra security. I have found it a handy tool overall and while it does have some drawbacks, these aren’t such a big disadvantage for the way I use the device.

First the basic techy stuff:

• Picture Porter 35 comes in 2 hard drive sizes, 250GB and 500GB with the 500GB version coming in at $399 from the Digital Foci website. Also check out prices on Amazon, but don’t tell them I said that).
• 3.5″ screen to review images (320 x 240 pixels)
• Image formats supported: RAW, JPEG (baseline), TIFF (1 & 8 bits Grayscale, 8, 16, & 24 bits color), BMP (Monochrome, 8 bits color), GIF
• Memory cards supported: CF and also MultiMedia Card, RS-MMC, SD Card, SDHC card, miniSD, Memory Stick, MS PRO, MS Duo, xD-Picture card

These are the main features, but if you’re interested, check out the full specs on the Digital Foci website.

Image review screen

The good bits

As well as storing images, the Picture Porter 35 allows you to manage and organise your files by renaming, sorting into folders and deleting unwanted files. It also allows you to review your images by zooming, panning, rotating, viewing EXIF data and historgram allowing you to edit your shoot on the road to save disk space and also time later in uploading. You can also add voice notes, which I have found useful for adding details of locations and things that may be useful for keywording later. The device can also store music and video files and act as an mp3 player, however I found this redundant since a) everyone has an ipod or smartphone these days that can do the same thing, and b) it takes up valuable space that could be used for storing more images.

The not so good bits

Firstly navigation. This is done using a wheel and 4 other buttons on the side of the device and can be a little difficult to get used to. File naming for example requires you to scroll through the alphabet and press select on each letter to create a word. Maybe its because we’re now in the age of tablets and touchscreens, but I find the navigation to be a bit clunky and slow. The screen, while large enough isn’t of a high enough quality to allow you to review images properly. Zooming to check for sharpness is difficult as the resolution just isn’t high enough. The device is a little chunkier than I’d like, measuring in at 5.4” (L) x 3.8” (W) x 1.2” (H) or 13.7cm (L) x 9.7cm (W) x 3cm (H), but only weighs in at 14oz or 400g including battery so is not too difficult to carry. Even though I leave the drive locked in a hotel safe while out shooting so that I have the additional file copies in a different location if something was to happen to my CF cards.

Uploading speed is kind of slow if you want to be picky, however I don’t really find this to be a drawback since I usually start the upload and go off and do something else. Exporting to computer is via USB 2.0  although depends more on the computer speed as once the Picture Porter 35 is connected it acts as an external hard drive.

I tend to rename the files in camera and not use too many of the file management features, so am not too disturbed by the controls. My big gripe, however is the battery life. I found that the battery usually only lasts around 2 days of uploading cards from a full day of shooting (around an 8GB card each day for me), so needed to recharge every second day. If you’re in a hotel with easy access to electricity this isn’t really an issue, however if you are away from electricity access for more than 2 days you could easily find yourself without a backup system. The only solution for this really is to buy an additional battery or two, adding to the expense of the device.

Conclusion

Overall, I have found the Picture Porter 35 to be value for money compared to some of it’s competitors, and works well as an extra hard drive and security method for getting your photos home safely. However it does have a couple of drawbacks and does include some useless features for which Digital Foci charges a premium.

When creating a photograph it is all too easy to get caught up in your subject at the expense of something equally as important: the background. So many times we are frustrated by unwanted elements only noticed after loading the image onto our computer to begin post processing.

Being aware of your background allows you to control it and make use of it however you see fit. When we drill down to it, there are really two things that we can do with the background of an image. Try to reduce it’s impact or remove it from the image entirely, or the opposite and bring the eye to it to enhance the image and help tell our story

Personally I’m a believer that if an element does not add anything to your story, then it shouldn’t be in the photo. Often these elements distract the eye from the actual subject and do nothing else but diminish the effect of the image. One such occasion may be a portrait where we want to focus on the subject’s face and expression and remove anything from the frame that would draw the eye away from this, such as a tree sticking out of the top of their head (yep, that’d do it). We can do this either by using a shallow depth of field to blur the background, zooming or repositioning ourselves or our subject so that the tree is out of the frame.

There are times when we want to include the background to set the scene for our story. Such as a particular location. With the image below, this was done by setting the apeture at a depth of field that would define enough of the background to show the location without it being so sharp as to take away from the traffic in the foreground. Now, rather than the image being of a busy road, it is about people travelling on the Champs Elysees in Paris. If the background were to be fully in focus, the Arc de Triomphe then becomes the subject of the image. You can use depth of field to define your subject and then allow your background to enhance it by filling details of the story that would otherwise be left to the viewer to guess.

Of course these techniques are open to your own vision and what works for one person may not work for another. If you think the tree out of the person’s head works, go for it. What I love about photography is that there is no right or wrong despite what some may say, however thinking about the whole frame rather than just your subject will help you realise your vision.

I’ve managed to pass through Singapore on quite a few occasions without ever actually leaving the airport, but on a recent trip to Hong Kong (more about that soon) I had an overnight layover so decided to try to make the most of a short time in the city to explore a little.

Arriving late at night and flying again at 3pm, there was essentially a half day to shoot so I decided to use the time as a bit of a scouting trip that I can refer back to the next time I’m in Singapore. This basically meant running around like a crazy person to try to cover as much ground as possible. Luckily Singapore is a compact, well planned city with an excellent train system.

The day started before dawn at Marina Bay, taking in the skyline along the waterfront including the nothing if not distinctive Marina Bay Sands hotel which is designed as a ship on three stilts, and the Merlion, which is culturally significant to Singapore as a nod to its heritage as a fishing village.

From there it was on to Chinatown and the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple and Sri Marianman Hindu Temple (doesn’t every Chinatown need a Hindu temple?) before catching the SMTR over to the cacophonous chaos that is Little India. This left just enough time to slurp some Singapore noodles before running (literally) back to the airport and barely making the flight.

Photographically speaking, my first stay in Singapore was too short to really get under the skin of the place and make some meaningful photographs, but I did get the chance to get a feel for this culturaly diverse city and an idea of how to capture the spirit of the place next time.

Singapore is more than the stopover on the way to another destination, it is a rich melting pot of ethnicities and cultures and deserving of a visit in it’s own right.

Click the image below to take a look at a small gallery.

Nothing conveys the bustle and energy of a big city quite like putting the camera on a tripod and setting the exposure to 10 seconds or longer. People merge together in crowds, car headlights stretch urgently across the scene,  backgrounds blur against a speeding vehicle. In a still image, it is movement that provides energy, emotion and intensity.

Movement doesn’t necissarily mean the rush of a metropolis. It could be the tranquil drift of a stream or lapping waves. It can make an image calming or exilirating. It can relax you or get your adrenalin pumping. Once mastered, it is an essential tool for the photographer to convey the essence of a location.

I wrote a little while ago about capturing the sense of a place when photographing on location, and for me, using motion is one of the most effective ways of doing this.

It takes a fair amount of practice but there are essentially 2 rules to follow in orde to capture movement. 1. Choose a focal point that will allow you to keep your background or point of interest sharp, and 2. Choose a shutter speed that will allow you to blur the movement you wish to capture. It takes a bit of practice to understand what sort of exposure length you may need in a certain situation, but with a little experience you will be able to estimate and then bracket your exposures from there to create the desired amount of blur.

Alternatively you could try panning to keep your subject in focus and blur the background. Again, this is a technique that can be tricky to master (my biggest challenge is getting enough of the subject in the frame and central), but is well worthwhile practising on as the results can be amazing.

I’ve been hankering (yes, that’s right, hankering) to visit Vietnam for a while now. I’ve even made some loose plans and done a bit of research into things to see and shoot. As part of this reseach I recently came across Raphael Nguyen’s series Daily Life in Vietnam, which only served to stoke the wanderlust even more.

Raphael is a French-Vietnamese photographer based on Hoi An and his images wondefully capture the intense colours and textures of the country. As is almost always the case, it is the images of life in the streets and environmental portraits of local people that speak the loudest and give an insight into the character of the Vietnamese, rather than scenes of well known landmarks. Raphael’s images are beautifully crafted in his own distinctive style that speaks to a raw and very traditional way of life.

Click HERE to visit.

Sometimes we all get stuck. We get into a bit of a rut, we start to feel a bit stale and have trouble finding a subject to inspire us and get our creativity flowing again. Often the solution is looking at images by other photographers, however there are other sources of inspiration to kick start our creativity.

Books are a great source of inspiration. Not photography books, but novels, historical texts, biographies or any other genre can provide ideas to get you photographing again. I often find myself drawing ideas from descriptions of places or people in a novel. Often a writer will treat a city as a character in their work and so describe it’s smells, sights and atmosphere in such a way that it makes you want to try to recreate that.

Movies and TV shows can provide as much inspiration as still images, as the creators of these are trying to achieve the same thing as a still photographer: to instill a certain feeling or atmosphere into the scene to assist their story.

Often the best way to find inspiration is simply to go for a walk. Leave the camera at home and take a walk, or even a drive, to a nearby park, beach, or around your own town or neighbourhood and take note of the things that you would normally pass by. Are there any landmarks? Are your neighbours mostly families with young children or professional types. Are there cafe’s with character. What about the architecture? Are houses modern in style or old and full of charm? Amongst all of this, you’re bound to find something that interests you close to home. Once you do, come back with your camera and make it into a personal project. Hopefully this will lead you to bigger ideas.

It is usually only one little spark that is needed to put us back in a creative frame of mind and once you get that first idea, they just keep flowing. Mostly its just a matter of keeping an open mind to new sources of inspiration.

In an effort to constantly improve myself, I often try to analyze an image and understand what makes it work. There are a few techniques I’ve discovered work best to simplify compositions and give them more impact.

Crop. Often I find myself being drawn to an object or person, and cropping the image down so that no background is seen and the subject fills the frame. Of course if you are going to do this, you need to have a strong subject to begin with. An image like this often works best in a series where other images can provide a context.

Shallow depth of field. This helps to isolate your subject and make it pop against a background that gives context but doesn’t take over from the subject.

Repeat. Repetitive patterns in an image help to emphasize the subject, giving it size.

Of course there are times when what works best is the complete opposite of these techniques. It is possible to spend so much time trying to get stuff out of the way of your subject, that you forget to think about putting stuff in the way. Such as the image below. Here context is added through the blurred foreground of wheat stalks giving the feeling of the water tower being on a farm rather than open countryside.

A while ago I mentioned starting an ongoing series about the stories behind some my own images that I have liked in the past, and I’ve just never continued on with it. So now is as good a time to make up for that as any.

This image of Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca, Morocco is incidentially from the same trip. We only had one afternoon and evening in Casablanca on our way from Marrakech to Fes. It was a gray afternoon which turned into a drizzly evening and by the time we found our hotel and checked in, we really only had a few hours before we had to catch some sleep and be up early and back on the train.

We decided to limit our exploring to Casablanca’s main (and one of it’s only) attractions. Since Casablanca is not know for it’s public transport, we had to walk from the hotel to the Mosque, which took around half an hour. Once we got there though the rain set in immediately and we had to take shelter under one of the huge arches. (Mother nature’s sense of timing is really impressive sometimes).

While we were waiting we were approached by a young Moroccan man who had spotted us and, seeing that we weren’t from around there, wanted to practice his English. He asked us where we were from and hearing that we were Australian wanted to know all about Kangaroos and Koalas. He was also fascinated to learn that the population of Australia was around 10 million less than Morocco in a land mass about 17 times the size. Mahmud was one of the friendliest and most polite people we had encountered on our whole journey and the short amount of time we spent waiting out the rain was a pleasure.

Eventually the rain cleared and we were able to start photograhing the Mosque before darkness really set in. Mahmud offered some suggestions on the best views, including the one in the photograph above that I managed to make while people were flocking to the mosque during the call to prayer.