Wildlife Portraits Project – An Aussie Icon at Healsville

Posted in Australia, News and Updates, Photographs, Travel Photography, Uncategorized, Wildlife PhotographsLeave a comment

I am used to seeing wildlife along the Yarra River when I am out riding my mountain bike through the bush at dusk. Its usually Kangaroos and Tiger snakes (in the summer months), with the occasional Echidna and the usual assortment of native birds such as Kookaburras. I almost never have my camera with me  unfortunately, so am unable to photograph them (mountain biking with a 300mm lens strapped to my back doesn’t sound like fun!) . This time however I left the bike at home and went out specifically to photograph wildlife at Healesville. This very co-operative baby Koala proceeded to pose for me whilst I rattled off a dozen or so frames. Light levels were quite low so I had to punch up the ISO to 800 to get a 1/200th of a second shutter speed at f3.2 handheld with the 300mm F2.8L IS.

Aussie Icon

Photoshop CS5 – Advanced Masking Demo

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Martin Evening – Co-Author with Jeff Schewe of the most excellent book ‘Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers, The Ultimate Workshop‘ has posted a really good video example of the new masking tools available in Photoshop CS5. I rarely do this kind of high level post production work to my photographs – both because it has been somewhat time consuming without a dedicated plugin and because its generally just not my style. However, this video shows just how easy it has become to achieve really high quality professional masking results in CS5. Most impressive.

I cant embed the video as WordPress does not support the format – but here is the direct link to the Video.

Cape Woolamai – The Pinnacles : The Odd One Out

Posted in Australia, Landscape Photographs, News and Updates, Photographs, Travel Photography, UncategorizedLeave a comment

This is the third and final photograph I am going to post from the recent trip to the Pinnacles at Cape Woolamai in Victoria. I rarely do black and white images; I just see the world in colour and its colour that usually catches my eye and appeals to me in a photograph. It’s not that I don’t appreciate a really good black and white image – because I certainly do; and I am very glad there are photographers out there who specialise in this classic medium (and very glad of publications such as LensWork). That said, I new this image would be black and white before I even released the shutter. I was clambering over the boulders waiting for the light to improve when I spied one boulder that was much lighter in colour than all of those around it – the odd one out. It just screamed black and white to me and as I have learned it is usually best to go with my first instinct for a photograph. So, I framed it, shot it and converted it to greyscale in Lightroom and set about some minimal dodging and burning. I have also applied a very subtle tint to the final photograph. The shot works in colour as well, but its the black and white tones that simplify and enhance this photograph for me.

The Odd One Out

Site Changes and Maintainence

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My Blog is undergoing some site changes, revisions and maintenance over the next few days to bring the overall look and feel of the blog more in line with my primary gallery website at www.jholko.com. There may be some older posts that require some re-formatting and/or other parts of the site that don’t look or work quite right during this period. Apologies in advance for any such problems – they should be rectified shortly. A big thank you to Luke Hall who has undertaken the development of the custom CSS for the Blog. Luke your print will soon be in the mail!

Camera Raw 6 and Lightroom 3 Lens Correction Features

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Adobe Lightroom’s Product Manager Tom Hogarty has very kindly posted a You Tube video of some of the new Lens Correction features in Adobe’s Camera RAW 6 and the yet to be released full version of Lightroom 3. These new capabilities are very exciting and I am eagerly looking forward to Lightroom 3.0’s official release. Unfortunately there is still no word on wether Soft-proofing will be included in Lightroom 3 (But I have my fingers crossed!)