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Chasing the Solar Eclipse of 2012

Solar Eclipse 1999 – Source

In less than a week I fly to Cairns to watch and shoot the total solar eclipse. It will be my first time seeing one!!

I’ll be flying thousands of kilometres and spending hundreds of dollars to shoot five cameras at an event that lasts just two minutes and has about a 50% chance of being completely clouded out!

No pressure XD

In this post I’m going to talk briefly about what I’m planning to do with the different cameras I’m taking, and tell you how you can all (hopefully) watch the eclipse live with me!

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Blacklight Test Shoot

I’ve always loved glowy things. The bright colours, the cool other-worldly feel, the slightly 80’s vibe :D

Every time I see blacklight photography online I want to give it a try myself, but something I’ve noticed is that most of the time models are painted with very thick lines and simple dramatic designs. I am friends with a number of talented make up artists, and one in particular, Celina, loves to create bold experimental looks on a regular basis for her blog Fables in Fashion. It occurred to me that a collaboration with Celina on a blacklight photography could potentially yield some interesting and unique results.

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Shooting on Film – Southbank via TLR

I have been inspired by my friend and exceptionally talented photographer Brian Auer, and a growing number of other photographers, to try shooting film. Retro cameras are back in style, and I’ve been keen for a while to experiment with them. I asked Dad if I could borrow his Twin Lens Reflex cameras, which I photographed in another post. I thought that experiencing photography as it used to be – nothing auto, no preview, hand-held exposure meter – might help me learn more about photography.

Unfortunately, it took me a while to get around to shooting, and even longer to get the photos developed, but below you can see my first roll of medium format photography, taken on a short, solo photo walk along Melbourne’s South Bank. Eleven out of twelve photos worked out, not too bad for a first effort.

The Atrium, inside Crown Casino. Significant dust contamination on this negative and several others. I’m not sure what the source was.

Also inside the Crown Casino atrium, at exactly the same location as the last shot, but this time looking directly up. I really liked the circular lens flare that serendipitously appeared.

A large (approx 8-10m) metal sculpture, in front of Eureka tower, currently the tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere.

A deliberately slow shutter exposure of a carousel. This was under exposed, but scanning the film at 16bit (greyscale) gave me the latitude to recover the photo in Lightroom.

This is one of my favourites from the shoot. The geometric structures caught my eye, and I was impressed with the dynamic range in the 16bit greyscale scan.

A “busker” blows giant soap bubbles with detergent, rope and dowels, and sells the devices. One little boy was fascinated for many minutes.

I had to squeeze my way to the front row to get the angle I wanted for this shot, but I think it worked. I like how the audience watches on, and the volunteer’s head is cut off. Naomi thinks it would have been better with the face in shot. What do you think?

The arch of the iconic South Bank footbridge acts as a dynamic element to draw the eye into the composition.

I liked the symmetry of this starkly geometric, architectural photo of part of the South Bank mall.

Old and new stand side-by-side. Eureka tower in the background.

Looking down the covered walkway in front of the famous Flinders Street Station. By this time I was really enjoying myself and was disappointed when I realised that this was the last photo on the roll.

Rough as guts panorama of my desk

Tuesday, while at Mike’s place admiring his beautiful aquarium, I saw this cool photo collage he had on his wall, of a pretty seaside building made with many overlapping photos. I thought it was a very cool idea. Kind of like a rough panorama. Then yesterday browsing through one of the blogs I follow, I saw this post which reminded me I’d seen this kind of stuff online before.

Laurie linked to some of Heather Champ’s photos on Flickr as her inspiration, and these were so cool, that I just had to have a go myself.

It was late, the light was terrible, but I didn’t mind. I figured the rough, rushed look was part of what made these composites cool. So I grabbed my camera, stuck on the 50mm lens, set to f1.8 at 1/50th and ISO1600, and quickly and deliberately roughly took a couple dozen photos of my desk to stick together.

I couldn’t help myself but use the panorama stitching software to join them together. It made the alignment pretty simple, but it warped the photos to fit, as well as colour corrected and blended the photos. Normally you want this for a panorama, but the appeal of these photos is their inaccuracies.

Overall I’m happy with the result, but next time I’ll leave the camera on auto everything, including focus, and I’ll put them all together in photoshop, for that hand-made collage look.

Fisheye at Foot Level – P365 Mar13

I was inspired recently by posts of a couple of blogging friends to try a camera-on-a-stick approach. I’ve tried doing this before of course, but only hoisting the camera overhead. Their idea was to keep the camera very low, and to walk around with it. One comment they both made was that it was difficult to get a good shot, because the lenses they used weren’t as wide as they liked. I smelled another fun use for my favourite lens, the 8mm fisheye! So I stuck the camera, with fisheye and wireless shutter release on my monopod, and walked around outside with it dangerously close to the ground.




I’m very happy with the results of this experiment! I’m very keen to try this on an interesting subject, so I think I’m going to have to keep an eye open for possible interesting subjects. Thanks for the inspiration guys!

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