GeoffLawrence.com

Here comes The Sun

honez — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:17:57 -0500

by: honez

Description: This is a sunrise shot from North Stradbroke Island, in Moreton Bay, just off the coast of Brisbane. This was literally seconds before the sun peeked out from behind that cloud, and although I wanted one with the sun just emerging, that didn't have quite the impact I thought it might, and I couldn't quite get the balance right between the shadow and highlights right with the sun in the frame. Although this doesn't have quite the same vibrancy as the Straddie Rocks shot, I like the compositional balance of this with the wave receding on the sand, the wave behind it and the splash breaking on the distant rock. What do you think?

1 comment

Straddie Rocks

honez — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:17:56 -0500

by: honez

Description: This is a pre-sunrise shot from North Stradbroke Island, in Moreton Bay, just off the coast of Brisbane. This was probably about 10-15 mins before sunrise. I really like this shot, what do you think of it? I'm keen on some feedback.

8 comments

Straddie Rockpool

honez — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:17:53 -0500

by: honez

Description: A sunrise shot from North Stradbroke Island, in Moreton Bay, just off the coast of Brisbane. It was very blustery, and unfortunately the clouds obscured the actual sunrise. I quite like this shot though as it turned out a lot better than I feared at the time. I was a bit concerned about the blustery wind moving the camera on the tripod and some of the softness shows, but it's not quite as bad as I thought it would be. I'd love to see your thoughts on this.

5 comments

Sunrise Thunderstorm

honez — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 06:44:53 -0500

by: honez

Description: Got up early to capture a beach sunrise, but it was overwhelmed by an approaching thunderstorm. I got soaked... :-/ This was taken from Point Lookout on North Stradbroke Island (if you're interested), one of the large sand islands in Moreton Bay, just off the coast of Brisbane.

2 comments

Moonlit Lake

honez — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 16:22:28 -0500

by: honez

Description: Trying something different the other night, I decided to get some long exposure shots of a local lake late at night, lit only by the light of the full moon. I was quite surprised how they turned out, almost as if it was during daytime. This is a three minute exposure, f/8 at ISO 400. Obviously the clouds moved quite a bit and you can see some small star trails. See it on Flickr here, [url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/_honez/6233581566/]Lake Samsonvale by Moonlight[/url] by [url=http://www.flickr.com/people/_honez/]_honez[/url]

6 comments

Moonlit Lake

honez — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 16:22:27 -0500

by: honez

Description: Trying something different the other night, I decided to get some long exposure shots of a local lake late at night, lit only by the light of the full moon. I was quite surprised how they turned out, almost as if it was during daytime. This was a 20 second exposure, f/8 at ISO 4000. The shorter exposure on this shows the stars as points, rather than trails. See it on Flickr here, [url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/_honez/6233581558/]Lake Samsonvale Stars[/url] by [url=http://www.flickr.com/people/_honez/]_honez[/url]

6 comments

Rose Tinted Glass

honez — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:33:19 -0500

by: honez

Description: A standout rat rod from the 2011 Greazefest show. Vehicle is HDR tonemapped, but the grass and background are layer masked from the EV -2 shot so it still looks natural in the environment, not overly cartoonish like some HDRs can be. I loved the rose-red of the glass on this Rat.

2 comments

Bug Eyed

honez — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:33:19 -0500

by: honez

Description: A very subtle HDR tone mapping treatment for this custom VW Beetle, taken at the 2011 Greazefest show. The background is from the EV -2 shot, layer masked and mirrored on both sides to get rid of some background distractions that were present and unavoidable of the left side of the image. Still not 100% happy with the sky haloing, but it's getting close to how I want the finished product.

2 comments

Old Skool

honez — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:33:18 -0500

by: honez

Description: Cool looking Rat Rod at the 2011 Greazefest show. Vehicle processed as HDR tone mapped from three exposures, the foreground and grass was layer masked from the EV 0 shot, and the sky/sun was from the EV -3 shot. The tone mapping of the vehicle still retains the shadow detail, even though this was taken into the harsh sun, and has retained the grungy/over the top look that these kind of rat rods deserve. I've been very, very busy of late, so I haven't had the time to contribute to the site as much as I'd like, so apologies for that, but I'll be dropping in from time to time. Looking forward to catching up on what's been going on.

3 comments

FJ Holdens

honez — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 06:30:48 -0500

by: honez

Description: Here's another car shot that used the same workflow I described in my Humber Super Snipe shot. Basically HDR tonemapped cars on a normal background, minor cloning to get rid of a couple of distractions and some post-work to clean things up. Probably about one hour from start to finish for this one.

7 comments

Humber Super Snipe

honez — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 22:53:47 -0500

by: honez

Description: A really w-i-d-e angle view of the business end of a vintage 1950's Humber Super Snipe. They're not nearly as "wheel-archy" and low-headroom as it looks, but they should be : -) Some cloning on one side of the car to remove another show vehicle and a cut and paste job on one wheel arch/ mirroring it off the other side to get rid of glare and unwanted/unfixable reflections.

14 comments

Old Holden

honez — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 22:31:05 -0500

by: honez

Description: Trying my hand at a spot of minimalism here. Trying to bring out the "old" in H[old]en which is the local variant of General Motors here in Aus. The focus and composition was deliberate to try to emphasise the old and underline the brand. The question is, did it work?

7 comments

Peeking Sun

honez — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 01:16:02 -0500

by: honez

Description: The setting sun peeking out through the stonework of St John the Baptist's Church in Chester, UK. I quite like the pigeon settling in for the night up in the top left.

9 comments

Church Gates

honez — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 01:12:26 -0500

by: honez

Description: The iron gates at the entrance to the (St Giles) Wrexham Parish Church. Burial place of Elihu Yale (of US "Yale" College fame) and an all-round pretty impressive and photogenic place.

The Royal Hotel

honez — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 01:06:18 -0500

by: honez

Description: The Royal Hotel on the River Dee in Llangollen, North Wales. Taken at dusk, combining 15, 30 & 60 second exposures to capture the dynamic range of the whole scene. Pretty near impossible with one exposure.

2 comments

River Dee window view

honez — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 23:33:24 -0500

by: honez

Description: Sorry I've been away for a while, but I hope to remedy that shortly with some more time on here to provide feedback. Welcome any new kids on the block I've missed. This is a tripod-mounted HDR shot out of the window of a restaurant I stopped at for a cuppa in Llangollen in North Wales. The river Dee was swollen due to snow melt and made quite a pleasant outlook. I wanted to give this shot a go to try to capture the internal "still life" exposure and still get a nice flowing long exposure for the river outside. It hasn't quite worked 100% as there are still some blowouts in the whites of the water, but all in all, I'm quite (but not absolutely) happy with the end result. ...and yes, I know there could be some perspective correction done here (you should have seen it before post) but I quite like it as it is.

2 comments

Llanberis Pass, North Wales

honez — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 23:28:46 -0500

by: honez

Description: Sorry I've been away for a while, but I hope to remedy that shortly with some more time on here to provide feedback. Welcome any new kids on the block I've missed. This is a Three-shot HDR (can ya tell? ;-) ) taken in pretty awful weather hiking down the the Llanberis Pass in Snowdonia in the Mountains of North Wales. This didn't quite go to plan, as I wanted a much smaller aperture to get a better focal depth to the shots. In the end I had to take it with larger apertures just so I could get a clean shot without getting the front of the lense covered in rain. This shot is the best of a bad bunch because of all the rain, so it'll have to do. Having said that, I do like the composition on this one.

9 comments

Moon and Jupiter at Sunset

honez — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 23:28:32 -0500

by: honez

Description: Sorry I've been away for a while, but I hope to remedy that shortly with some more time on here to provide feedback. Welcome any new kids on the block I've missed. This is a hand-held fading light shot I took when I was over in the UK recently. I quite like the way it's come out and the lack of noise is pretty astounding. This shot was taken in Chester, looking over the banks of the River Dee after we took a good long walk along the Roman City walls. Light was fading fast by the time we got here, so this was the last shot of the day.

Ford Hotrod v2

honez — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 19:26:17 -0600

by: honez

Description: Updated as per comments (ignoring Kev, of course) and some minor other tweaks.

5 comments

Ford Hotrod

honez — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 07:45:27 -0600

by: honez

Description: This one *is* HDR. 3 shots just 1 EV apart. I did a fair bit of post-processing on this one too. I'll post the original baseline shot to give you an idea what the extra dynamic range and tonemapping gave over the base shot. You can also seee why I did the masking/cloning on the background too.

10 comments

'32 Ford Three Window Coupe

honez — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 17:54:42 -0600

by: honez

Description: One of the many great-looking cars at the 2010 Gold Coast Hot Rod Show. This is a '32 vintage Ford three window Coupe with red leather trim. Engine is a V8 327 Chev.

9 comments

Into the dark

honez — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 08:47:20 -0600

by: honez

Description: Mucking around with photoshop plugins again. I took the original source photos of the fish at Underwater World at Mooloolabah on Queensland's Sunshine Coast.

2 comments

Spiky Lion Fish

honez — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 08:47:18 -0600

by: honez

Description: Mucking around with photoshop plugins again. I took the original source photos of the fish at Underwater World at Mooloolabah on Queensland's Sunshine Coast.

5 comments

Sand, Surf, Sun & Rocks

honez — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 09:09:21 -0500

by: honez

Description: Another beach sunrise shot. I processed the RAW file for this twice, once for the sky and then again once more for the foreground. Masked the sky in photoshop and painted it back in with a soft brush. Also applied a colour fill gradient for the foreground rock/sand with soft light blending to give it some colour. Levels, curves, resized and sharpened for JPEG. I had to really stop down to f22 as the sun was a bit bright and I didn't have any ND Grads.

10 comments

Ol' Stripey

honez — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 10:54:42 -0500

by: honez

Description: Took this at a recent visit to an aquarium. The fish doesn't look too impressed about me taking its photo. Handheld single exposure f2.8 at 1/30 sec and ISO 2,000 to get enough light in the dark surroundings.

2 comments

Pincushion Is. Sunrise 2

honez — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 09:14:29 -0500

by: honez

Description: Another shot of the sunrise from Pincushion Island looking out to the Coral Sea. I'm quite pleased with how this one's turned out after post-processing. Incidentally, I processed the Raw file twice for this, once for the sky and again for the foreground up to the horizon. I liked the warmer tones of the rocks, but I didn't want to lose that lovely blue hue in the sky.

8 comments

Rockpool Sunrise

honez — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 21:04:53 -0500

by: honez

Description: Another shot from when I got up before sunrise on our recent beach holiday. Played around a bit in P/S with the colour depth and think I got too carried away on reflection. doesn't look quite as saturated in its original form.

2 comments

Sunset on the Maroochy River

honez — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 09:41:45 -0500

by: honez

Description: Almost sunset on the north shore of the Maroochy River. This was an interesting-looking tree that caught my attention. I couldn't get an angle on it without the branch and grasses intruding from the right, and they're much too much work to get rid of in P/Shop. The area was pretty swampy and I was being eaten alive by midges, so I didn't hang around for the post-sunset afterglow.

4 comments

Coral Sea Sunrise

honez — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 06:30:30 -0500

by: honez

Description: 2 minute exposure about 20 mins before sunrise over the Coral Sea, looking out from Pincussion Island towards Alexandra Headland and Mooloolaba, on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland. Minimal post-processing as I'm on holiday with my laptop. Got lots of shots to play around with on my real machine and software once I get home.

2 comments

Story Bridge by Night

honez — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 08:20:00 -0500

by: honez

Description: Decided to catch a night shot of the Story Bridge and Brisbane River on my way home from work

7 comments

'32 Ford Two-Window Coupe

honez — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 10:24:58 -0500

by: honez

Description: I found this lurking in an old folder from a car show I went to back in May 2009. I didn't do much with it then because it had lots of people milling around in the background. My masking is a lot better these days, so I decided to do some post work and clean it up.

17 comments

Soylent Green

honez — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 05:45:05 -0500

by: honez

Description: I've gotta stop buying cheap produce from the Chernobyl Fruit Markets. Playing around with Photoshop again -- not that you could tell...

3 comments

Blue Hotrod 'shopped

honez — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:59:49 -0500

by: honez

Description: Mucking around in photoshop again with some old Car pics

1 comment

Old Red 'shopped

honez — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:25:41 -0500

by: honez

Description: Just mucking aoround with Photoshop to create an abstract of an old HDR photo of mine of a Red FJ Holden Ute

6 comments

Southern Sky

honez — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 10:03:24 -0500

by: honez

Description: Went on a night sky shooting session tonight. This one turned out pretty well I think. This is the Milky Way with the Southern Cross next to the tree (if you know where to look). It was a lovely clear but cold night. The glow on the horizon is light pollution from Brisbane about 40k away. I did some light painting on the tree with a torch in another shot, but I exposed too long and the stars moved too much. I'll have to put that one down to experience I thin and try again next time.

4 comments

Tiny Beasts

honez — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:12:31 -0500

by: honez

Description: I ventured out into the back yard with my macro lens shortly after a rain shower to see what tiny beasts were about. I think this is a St Andrew's Cross Spider. This was a tripod shot, using a handheld, off camera flash diffused with a sheet of white A4 paper.

1 comment

Tiny Beasts

honez — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:12:30 -0500

by: honez

Description: I ventured out into the back yard with my macro lens shortly after a rain shower to see what tiny beasts were about. This dragonfly was just sitting on a twig, waiting for the rain to pass. This was a tripod shot, using a handheld, off camera flash diffused with a sheet of white A4 paper.

2 comments

Tiny Beasts

honez — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:12:29 -0500

Sunny Day in Sydney Photoshopped

honez — Tue, 18 May 2010 10:43:10 -0500

by: honez

Description: Disappointed with my first edit of this, I've gone to town with Photoshop on the image. In the end I did manage to remove the sun and get the sky looking natural again, fixed the perspective on the bridge (and cheated a bit making it a little bigger) and while I was at it, decided to get rid of the curving walkway that bothered me in the bottom right. So this is really isn't a photo any more, it's a three image HDR stack, heavily edited. Kev won't be able to sleep for a week after this.

7 comments

Sunny Day in Sydney

honez — Fri, 14 May 2010 08:13:46 -0500

by: honez

Description: On a recent trip to Sydney I snuck out at lunchtime for a couple of touristy grab shots. The light was awful as it was completely the wrong time of day, the light was far too bright and flat. The best I could get was this shot across the harbour which I've tried to rescue as best I could with HDR. This was a a three shot handheld grab in very windy condtions, so everything was conspiring against me. I think it turned out okay though given the circumstances.

3 comments

Jus' lookin'

honez — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 17:36:37 -0500

by: honez

Description: Macro shot of a small jumping spider sitting on a leaf on a bush in my backyard. I completely stuffed up this shot, way overexposed, wrong ISO but managed to recover the details in ACR. I cleaned up a lot of the noise in post-processing and the end image doesn't look too bad, but it really makes me want to try this again thinking the process through to get the right setup, using a tripod and cable release and some kind of snoot setup to direct and diffuse the speedlight output. I need to be careful with this though, as I can see these tiny beast shots getting kind of addictive.

2 comments

Too big for noms?

honez — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 07:39:17 -0500

by: honez

Description: I followed the progress of this jumping spider for a while to see if he came across something to eat. He thought for a while and decided against trying to tackle the bigger spider before he left to look for something more suitable for dinner. Handheld, High ISO large aperture shot, hence the noise. Next time I venture out into the backyard I'm taking my tripod, 'cause I was pleasantly surprised at how many tiny beasts there were to photograph.

Spider Thread

honez — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 06:35:13 -0500

by: honez

Description: Another handheld semi macro shot of the wildlife in my backyard.

3 comments

Spiderweb

honez — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 05:56:59 -0500

by: honez

Description: Handheld semimacro shot in my backyard. It was a really dull overcast day, and I couldn't get the shutterspeed quick enough handheld with a smaller apperture, hence the wide-open apperture, high ISO and very small DoF. It doesn't look quite as noisy in the larger size. Any C&C more than welcome.

2 comments

Reflection

honez — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 09:16:43 -0500

by: honez

Description: I wanted to get a shot of the blue car, but this super shiny red one was in the way. So...

4 comments

Norton Commando

honez — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 09:16:42 -0500

by: honez

Description: A classic Norton Commando stands out of the crowd. Post processed and HDR tonemapped a fair bit.

4 comments

Cute little Austin A30

honez — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 09:16:41 -0500

by: honez

Description: Low wide angle shot of the cutest little Austin A30. Plenty of P/P and HDR tonemapping.

1 comment

Australian Icon

honez — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:26:47 -0600

by: honez

Description: Just heard back from the good folk at http://www.photoartgallery.com and they've selected this picture I took of an old Holden (an Australian motoring icon) at a car show on Australia Day this year, and they're going to include it in a photo book they're going to publish. It's one of 30 images they've selected for a book about how people celebrated Australia Day and what it means to them. As you can imagine I'm pretty happy about that. :-) The photo is a wide angle, three shot HDR +/- 3 EV, post processed in Photoshop.

Vote for me!

honez — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 01:40:55 -0600

by: honez

Description: This photo is my entry in an Australian photo comp to win an Olympus PEN E-PL1 camera, and I NEED VOTES! Please go to http://testdrive.olympusimaging.com.au and look for my Hot rod photo on Page 63. Give me 5 stars and please leave a comment (more comments means I'm in with a chance of the people's choice award, so please, please, please leave one.) :-) Oh, and any comments and feedback here would be good too. Many thanks. h.

6 comments

Cedar Creek Flowing Water

honez — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:58:25 -0600

by: honez

Description: Just trying out my new ND Fader filter on running water with long exposures

2 comments