While I do love shooting early in the morning, it’s always such a close competition between getting up and sleeping in.

 

Hopefully, this is me getting back to regular blogging. It’s been pretty patchy since May, but I have good excuses. Packing up house and moving around the world to Melbourne, Australia takes a bit of effort.

Sorting, purging and selling started in May and got serious in June. As of June 28, we were officially homeless and our lives were either packed up in suitcases or in a big metal box. We took the suitcases with us and wished the big metal box an uneventful 10-week trip across the Pacific. We then set off on a six-week tour of Canada, visiting friends family on the west coast, camping through the beautiful Rocky Mountains, visiting more family in Southern Ontario, invading the homes of friends in Ottawa and then back to Vancouver again.

The image above is the city of Vancouver as seen from Stanley Park during our visit to the west coast of Canada.

On August 19th, exactly one month ago, we arrived in Melbourne with very little organised beyond a hotel and a hire car. Given the low starting point, we’ve accomplished a lot in one month. We moved into a house (shipment delivery day was very exciting!), we bought a car, we bought appliances and furniture, the kids are back in school, the older one has high school sorted, we’ve caught up with a few friends, and I’m back to full-time (non-photographic) work.

Although we’ve been away from Melbourne for two years, everything is so familiar that it seems like it was just a blink.

…that I’m a little preoccupied lately? I suppose that might be evident from the blog. I haven’t posted in three weeks! While I’ve had the camera out a bit, it has almost entirely been either for work purposes (teaching photo workshops at my daughter’s school), practical purposes (photographing many of my worldly possessions so I can post them online and sell them), or documentary purposes (photographing graduation and going away parties). I have not shot for fun at all in these past three weeks.

Instead of photography, I’ve been downsizing our household, sorting out plane tickets, and organising movers because we’re moving again. If you’ve followed this blog for a long time, you’d know that we’re a bit nomadic. We’ve lived in several cities in Canada including Ottawa, Fredericton, Toronto, Vancouver, and Edmonton. We’ve also lived in New Zealand and in Australia. We’ve never tried the same city twice until now. In three days, we’re putting our lives in a shipping container and sending it back down under.

Before we go, we’re going to do a bit of a cross-country tour going as far west as Vancouver and Salt Spring Island and as far east as Ottawa with lots of stops in between. When we’re well and truly exhausted, we’ll board our flight to Melbourne on August 17.

With us flipping our lives upside down this summer, you’re not going to hear from me very often, but hopefully, I’ll have lots of stories and lots of pictures to share once we get settled in late August.

 

Back in January, I had a series of “Reflections” photos; images that I’d taken and reflected one or more times in Photoshop. Here’s one I tried using an image from Upper Antelope Canyon. Take any one quadrant and that’s the original image. I liked this one for the lines and textures, especially the dark waves around the outside. As usual, with these reflections, I see a face. How about you? What do you see?

This is what you get when you drop a single drop of water on a dry mirror. Light source is a single, off-camera flash bouncing off a white background. How much simpler can you get?

Sometimes I see things in my pictures that just call out for a little reflection abstraction. While this is #7 in the Drip series, it didn’t seem quite right to just call it Drip VII as the image seems a bit more open to interpretation this time. The deep red tones come from light bounced off the inside of a red plastic mixing bowl. The deep blacks come from back lighting the splash of water. The lack of obvious clarity is a result of my extracting the reflection of the water drop rather than the actual splash. I’ve then mirrored it in PS (plus some curves adjustments) to produce this final result.

Taking the drips and cranking up the colours.

I haven’t posted a crown yet, so here’s a fresh one from about 30 minutes ago. I’m still working on my set up. I’ve now acquired a handy glass box (aka an aquarium) on the cheap to help contain the liquids, but also to help reduce that pesky edge in the background.

More fun with reflections. This one is another camp fire.

Sorry about the sporadic posting, I’ve been finishing up processing images from a recent portrait session.

I love the patterns you can find in a simple camp fire. I created this image by blending multiple overlapping reflections (horizontal and vertical flips) of a fragment of a camp fire.

I liked yesterday’s reflections so much, I decided some more were required. Here’s one that I prepared earlier. You may recognize it from my Gravatar icon.