Behind the scenes: Animania Sydney 2010 Setup
I was out at Australian Technology Park today visiting an expo for work when I remembered that Animania Sydney is this weekend.
I remembered because I started to notice all the signage that was up. Then I realised that setup for the event starts two days in advance and that they were probably setting up! So I ducked over on my lunch break and took a few shots.
I think a lot of people take for granted the effort that goes in to setting up an event. There's a science to setting up an event in terms of logistics and scheduling. Things need to happen in parallel in order to make the most of the venue time - the in-house crews can't set up the lighting while the stage contractors build the stage.
The scheduling is pretty simple on paper, but if anyone gets it wrong, the consequence ripples and grows through the day.
The guys on the ground meanwhile are getting all the wiring gathered to connect everything together. Everything is labelled, tracked, connected, secured and then flown on the rigging.
This can take the entire day and typically the crew won't know if they've got it completely according to plan until the next day when they do a dry run and program the lighting board.
There's about 50 lights! All it takes is for one to be connected or labelled incorrectly and it can take ages to figure out what went wrong.
For most of the lights, gels are placed in front of them. Each one is cut by hand and placed in front of the appropriate lamp. They make pretty colours!
... and for sticking around, here's what the 2011 Animania Cosplay Calendar looks like!
Can't wait to see you all this weekend!
An evening in Brisbane
I was fortunate enough to be able to go to Brisbane this last week for work.
The only time I could find to take some of my own snaps was on the evening of one of the less active days, hence all the evening shots.
I think long exposures like this one (3.2s) really highlight the flaws in my 10-20mm. To be honest, I'm finding I'm liking it less and less as time goes on.
I tried to pack light for the trip and as I'm not a big fan of lugging tripods around, I didn't pack one. So in keeping with the usual "use what you can find" strategy, a long, heavy lens works pretty well propped up against a bridge railing.
In this shot, the ferris wheel stopped for long enough to get a shot, but it had to be timed between buses that were travelling across the bridge at the same time as they would introduce enough shake to throw my shot out. I wanted to get a relatively noise-free shot, a bit of shimmer in the water, but not have the wheel completely blurred. Needless to say, I ended up shooting a lot of frames.
Up close, I didn't stick around to wait for the wheel to stop again. There wasn't much to prop my camera against in this location, so I'm relatively happy with the .25s exposure hand-held.
Shooting back towards the city from Southbank, this was a 6s exposure from my 10-20mm. The camera was on a ledge with my strap propping it up to get the horizon relatively lower. If you're ever taking a shot like this, I wouldn't worry too much about getting everything level. Get your camera really steady, use a remote shutter release or timer and sort out the rotation and cropping in post. Just remember to leave enough on the sides and not to include whatever you're using to balance your camera.
Shooting from under the bridge on a cycle-way. I sure know how to pick 'em - this bridge kept wobbling when people walked past! I must've stood there for about 15 minutes taking shots in between people walking past. In retrospect, I wish I had a slightly longer exposure. This is on my 50mm at f/8.
A last shot at one of Brisbane's other bridges. I'm actually not very happy with this shot due to the bridge getting lost in the background and a poor choice of aperture. I think by this stage I was calling it quits.
One of the things I've realised about shooting alone is that I'm initially really uncomfortable with having the camera out and looking like the tourist. After a while though, it's not too bad. Perhaps it's Brisbane, but there are a lot of photographers around. That certainly puts me at ease when having a camera out and wandering about. There's probably no better way to get over it than to just get out there and get shooting.
Photo school & moonlight motorcycle muck-around
I'm heading over to Australian Technology Park tomorrow to run a small Photography 101 class.
Here's to hoping the weather stays great! It looks like it's going to be a fun day of running around with cameras.
I also messed around a bit with taking some photos of a friend's bike the other night.
It was a little windy and at one point one of my brollys attempted to sail away. Wasn't expecting too much out of these pics so I'm pretty happy with how they turned out.
And I also got a chance to pull out the ole wide angle.
I just wish I got a wider variety of angles. Oh well. There's always next time.
Still here!
Thought I might let you all know I'm still around. I'm just rather swamped with work at the moment.
I'll be travelling to Queensland on assignment next month and it looks like I'll be travelling cross-country quite a bit. I hope to get some great photos of the sunny state during that time.
I've also decided to break the bank and purchase a Canon EF 35mm 1.4 from the states while I can. Seems like it finally won out over my 24-70mm or 35mm debate and I'll likely continue to walk the path of primes.
So the 35 should arrive right in time for Animania Festival, where I'm tossing up between making the most of video or continuing to stick with what I know and shoot stills. Perhaps a bit of both might do the trick?
In the meantime, I'll still be writing up articles when I can. Don't worry, there'll be plenty of stuff coming up soon!
SMASH! 2010 Report – A (long) inside perspective
Inside the hallways of Sydney Town Hall, volunteers shuffle in line to sign on for the morning. There's a slight sense of uncertainty as vendors, volunteers and contractors look at each other knowing something is about to happen, but not knowing when it will start.
Some of them are restless with excitement, shifting their weight from foot to foot and warming themselves after the cold of the morning. Suddenly, someone runs in through the dinky loading dock.
"Those of you who are volunteers, I need you to drop your stuff and come with me now! Don't worry about your tags yet, just come with me!"
Everyone exchanges looks for a second before several volunteers shrug their bags off their shoulders, dumping them unceremoniously at their feet, and race off after the staff member who is already on his way out.
"Hi Mike!" I hear a familiar voice behind me. I spin around, as fast as a guy carrying 10-15kg of camera gear can, and am greeted by one of SMASH!'s board members Michael Camilleri.
He shakes my free hand warmly. "I'm so glad you could make it!"
Fighting from the backlines
My day job as a journalist and my weekend passion as a photographer sometimes collide.
So while reading about journalist Annabel Crabb on her (rather lengthy) post about "Everything you ever wanted to know about campaigning... but didn't", I was pretty pleased to read these few lines:
Time now to mention specifically the people who have it the toughest on any campaign trail - the people who supply the visuals.
Photographers and camera crews get up earlier than anyone else on the campaign, and go to bed later.
When you see footage of Tony Abbott riding at 5.30am through freezing Melbourne streets, it's because several people wielding back-breaking cameras and sound equipment have arisen at 4:00am, found a vehicle from which they can awkwardly dangle, and captured it for you.
When you see one brilliant campaign image that encapsulates the mood of the day, it's because a photographer has worked an 18-hour day, capturing and discarding tens of thousands of slightly inferior images to bring you that particular one.
In truth, these people are the most important people of the campaign, and the reason why the candidates even bother with a media contingent.
For all the questions, all the policy, all the daily battle, good pictures on the evening news beat everything, and that's what the campaign teams are after.
Perhaps because it fits in with my feeling that the ones deserving praise and recognition aren't always the ones in the front line and are most often forgotten.
You'll see a little bit more of this sentiment in my report on SMASH! 2010 when it comes out later this week.
Cross-lighting
I've had a set of Cactus V4s for a while now and while I was initially stoked to be free of cables, I didn't end up using them much due to their unreliability and my sheer laziness.
So I finally decided to get out and try my hand at cross-lighting using the setting sun as one light source and a 430EX on a tripod, camera right. I dragged my significant other into it as both cat and dog would probably have turned tail and Bosley, the modelling teddy bear, just isn't tall enough. Needless to say, I think she did a great job, but she'd call me biased.
The pics didn't turn out that great. I don't have any brollies, which I think would help get that wrap-around effect that I'm aiming for, so I had to make do. The V4s frustrated me to no end. I was barely 5-10m away from my flash and it would quite frequently not fire, or worse, fire after the shutter had closed. I ended up dropping my shutter speed down to give it a larger time-frame to fire, but strangely enough I would sometimes get a different exposure even though I hadn't changed any settings.
On the upside, I've put through an order for a 580EX II, which should allow me to fall back to Canon's wireless E-TTL system.
Oh and just for fun, here's also some monkeys.
An absence of two wheels
You may be wondering why I haven't posted much about the Spada (or bikes in general for that matter).
The Spada has been a bit hit and miss the past month or so. Basically, I did an oil change a little while back and cross threaded the drain bolt. I've been having a mini-BP everywhere I go. Not only is it embarrassing to have little patches of oil everywhere I park, but as it's just in front of the rear tyre it's downright dangerous to ride on.
So I've been riding quite carefully and it wasn't until a day or two ago that I finally got the darn thing plugged up. I just got my new riding boots also and I haven't had a chance to go up Old Road in the longest time.
Here's the thing - I'm probably going to quit riding for a while. When my rego comes up for renewal, or even earlier, I'm going to try and sell her. When I factor in the cost of insurance and registration, it's more economical to take public transport, and while that is a nightmare for me, time are getting pretty tough. (Incidentally, if you want to help out, I do get paid a tiny fraction of a dollar for each advert that is clicked on this site.)
So all in all I am in a bit of a love/hate relationship with my bike. I need her to work so I can get to work, and of course riding is a lot of fun, but at the same time she's costing me more than I need to. I'd much rather be putting that money towards camera equipment or alleviating debt.
Given that pouring money into a bike (Spada or an upgrade) doesn't generate any income, but photography work does, logically the best thing to do is to invest in something that will actually generate some sort of income rather than being a money sink-hole.
Out and about (and a new look)
So I ended up at the Australian International Design Awards the other night for work. I really wonder how they came up with the idea of shooting lasers at a girl covered in mirrors, and dancing in fog. Either way, it was an interesting night.
I found my new garage of cars, including Bumblebee from Transformers, and saw a couple of other interesting designs that night.
To be honest, one of the reasons I'm actually talking about this is because I've changed the layout of my site and have been wondering whether this is the way to go. These images are from my Flickr account and I've been considering whether to go Pro and host all my images there rather than on my (rather expensive) web host. I've been using a combination of Flickr, Picasa, Sendspace and own private hosting to do this, but I think it's about time to get everything into a central location.
With Lightroom 3 adding support for publishing straight out of the box and into Flickr, it's making more sense than what I used to do with exporting to JPG, uploading to Picasa, uploading to Flickr, uploading to my own webspace, and in the case of high-resolution files for clients, re-exporting and uploading to a private file server or Sendspace. It's all a bit redundant and I'd rather be worrying more about shooting.
So, hopefully with this format you'll see a few more images in my blog, with a link out to the full album on Flickr. Let's see how it goes. It seems that I can get this working without even having to link out to Flickr. Interesting. A bit fidgety, but it'll do for now.
First Bike Accident
So I finally had my first accident on the bike today.
I was turning left from a "turn left at any time with care" lane and was the second vehicle in the queue. I saw a car approaching at a pretty fast speed from the right, followed by no other traffic, so both the car in front and I waited. Then she (the car in front) started to move after it had passed. I did a last check down the road and set off... into the back of the car in front of me.
She'd hit the brakes because the car behind me had suddenly swerved out to overtake us both. I ran into the back of her at low speed, my front tyre bouncing off the back of her bumper and sending my crotch painfully into the tank. Then knowing what happens after you suddenly stop and unsettle a bike, I planted my feet down and caught the bike before it went over.
The bastard behind overtook us both.
As I sat there for a moment, my crotch burning and still slightly in shock that the other car was just driving off, I wondered if the person in front had even realised I'd run into them.
When they got out afterward, she had a look at the damage, sort of shrugged and then grinned, saying don't worry about it. The only damage to her car was a bit of paint that was missing from my tyre having rubbed it off. My bike looked completely fine and neither of us were hurt. I was pretty amazed that she didn't care too much. The car looked almost new and if it were me, I might've demanded some sort of compensation. She didn't take my details and now that I think about it, at no point would she have even seen my plates.
So we both went on our way.
Calendar
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Feb | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |||
Twitter (mukimu)
- Wheels down in Sydney an hour late. Thanks Jetstar. =P 1 day ago
- Looks like that Pebble Watch Kickstarter project has finally, err, kicked off. 1 day ago
- http://t.co/igPB3PbS @Stilgherrian thought we needed more snakes on a plane. 1 day ago
- Just witnessed @stilgherrian shoot a shouty impromptu video here at the airport. That's what happens when you strand journos. 1 day ago
- Flight delayed. Stuck at OOL. Could be worse, I guess 1 day ago
