Blog moved...

I've decided to move the blog to my website... and due to difficulty in moving the content across all the historical content will remain here, but everything new will be added here: http://www.t8photography.com/blog

So, please update your newsreader :)

New T8 Photography Blog
Web: http://www.t8photography.com/blog
RSS: http://www.t8photography.com/blog/feed

Aiman

I visited my new nephew on the weekend, Aiman. Here's some photos of the little guy with his proud parents :)

Panoramas at the coast

Had a great weekend at the coast, and some time to take some photos for me! I have recently upgraded one of the D300 bodies to a D700, so had a new camera to play with. And with the D700, I also needed a new FX lens to go with it, so I bought the 24-70 f/2.8 :)

One thing that I haven't done much of before was stitched panoramas.


Derelict wharf on the Moruya River. This was 6 shots stitched together and a few minor adjustments made in Lightroom first (like a bit of extra saturation and some graduated filter for the sky). Click the pic for a bigger image.


Broulee Beach. 10 shots stitched. Has some interesting details in the photo, like the woman on her bike looking at the beach, various people on the sand, and Broulee Island in the background. Pity it wasn't a nice sunny day...

Some more panos to follow.

Emma & Jeff

Congratulations to Emma and Jeffrey. Married on Saturday, 21st February 2009 at the Anglican Church in Queanbeyan.

Here is my favorite photo from the day:


I've also set up a page on my website for Emma & Jeff. This page has a small summary of their wedding as well as a link to the slideshow and an embedded video slideshow. I've also enabled comments on the bottom so friends and family can leave a message.

Canberra Wedding Expo

I exhibited at the Canberra Wedding Expo on the 1st of February. There was a huge turnout, I heard there was around 2000 people turn up. There were heaps of booths, especially photographers and everyone was pretty busy all day.

I created a stop-motion video of Brent and I setting up the booth, check it out here.

On the tables I had a range of Photobooks from previous weddings which were very popular. I also had brochures made up, a pull-up banner, logo on core-flute and of course the LCD TV with a rolling slideshow of images and marketing messages. On the wall I had my packages pricelist and a range of testimonials.

Was it worth it though? Always a hard question to answer. I do know that I have had a few bookings by people I saw on the day, so probably was worthwhile for me. On the other hand, the cost of a booth is a lot of clicks in Google... Also, it's hard to have an in depth conversation with people at the show because it's a very noisy environment and most people seem to be in a bit of a rush or a little overwhelmed.

I'm going to alter my booth setup for the next expo slightly, but overall I was pretty happy with how it all went.

Advertising

About November last year I stopped advertising on Google. Reason was that my website was in a mess, resulting in people coming to the website via the ad and then leaving straight away - ie. money down the drain. So, the task over xmas was to redo the website. Well, it took longer than expected, but it's done now. No done as in "completely finished". Websites evolve over time of course, but it was done in the sense that I was ready to start advertising again.

Advertising works - everyone knows that, but it's also working for me. A large percentage of hits to my website are via google ads, and while it's much more expensive than it was, say, 3 or 4 years ago, I suppose it's not too expensive. I've set my budget to around $5 a day, and bidding around $1 per click. So that's more expensive, but not too dissimilar to magazine advertising of about $1400 for a full page ad over a year. At least with the Google ad I know that I'll get hundreds of visitors - with the magazine ad it's very hard to measure.

One thing that caught my interest last night was Google Insights for Search. Typing in a search term shows how frequently that term was searched for over time and also broken down into geographic region. The main thing I learnt was that most people research for their wedding in the beginning of the year.



So, for me, when my website was in a mess and no advertising, I was missing out on the most popular time in the year for wedding planning (and therefore bookings). Whoops... won't make that mistake again :)

Another thing I found interesting was that of the top ten most popular search terms relating to wedding research, Wedding Photography doesn't rate a mention!



The above table/graph is for the Canberra region. The Australian wide set of top searches is very similar, but also includes the terms "wedding hire" and "wedding reception", and still no "wedding photographer"! No idea why this is, maybe it's because brides find it difficult to choose the right dress and have to keep searching for the perfect one... almost unbelievable! :)

New Years at Kangaroo Valley

This year we had New Years at a property called Yeola in Kangaroo Valley. Huge house. Four families. Lots to drink. Lots of fun. And a bit too short...



Photos here: Slideshow or Video

Goals for 2009

There's some stuff I don't want to be public information, but the stuff that I don't mind is:

• Book a lot more weddings (need to do more advertising)
• Get a new Mac (faster, more storage and bigger screen)
• Update the office furniture as the current stuff is pretty horrible
• Upgrade one body to full frame, probably a D700
• Add a couple more lenses to the collection, hopefully a 24-70mm f/2.8 to go with the D700
• Get a good portfolio of landscape and nature photos, and possibly have an exhibition
• Do some more camping and travelling
• And of course: keep regularly posting to the blog!

Photography Diploma

Today I got my Diploma in Photography from The Photography Institute.

Good stuff:
- taught me quite a bit of history and theory
- kept me motivated to learn
- has given me a Diploma (ummm, yay!?)

Not so good stuff:
- content was a bit light on
- assignments weren't challenging enough

Anyway, glad I did it and glad it's done!

Working on the beach

The xmas holidays this year for me were a bit different - I scored a job for Coca-Cola in Wollongong for 13 days taking photos of people having surfing lessons on the beach. Yep, it was a dream job :)



The campaign was run by Urban Media for Coke. The campaign was free beginner surfing lessons on the beaches of Australia. It was run on heaps of beaches Australia wide (probably around 20), with six lessons a day, for most of January. At each beach there were branded surf-boards, two surfing instructors, two admin staff, one photographer, Coke tent, and of course free Coca-Cola for the participants when the lesson finished. The photographer had to take photos of everyone learning to surf and having a good time - the photos were then uploaded to Facebook that evening and the participants could tag themselves in the photos to win prizes.



I used my 80-400mm lens for the shots of people in the surf, which, combined with the D300 and 3D live tracking turned on, was a fantastic combination. Hopefully they run this campaign again; I'll be definitely putting my hand up for the job!

Website Overhaul

Websites evolve over time, that's for sure. What I had before wasn't working for me though. I didn't like the way it looked and a few other issues. I tested out a whole bunch of Content Management Systems (CMS), and finally settled on Drupal. Some might say a CMS is a little overkill for a 5 or 6 page website, but once you use a CMS it's hard to go back! Drupal is not perfect (at least in my eyes) but I found a nice theme and some of the things I needed worked easily straight away. I don't quite like the concepts they use, and still much prefer the way DotNetNuke works, but at least with Drupal the modules are abundant and free.

T8 Photography website

I added a lot of content about a week ago as my deadline was the Wedding Fair (1st Feb '09), and I'm quite pleased with how it's working out.... but, if anyone out there is reading this, I'd love some feedback :)

The plan for the short term is to link in the Wedding Package pricing page and put in a gallery. There isn't yet a medium or long term plan...

Catch up

Well, it's been over two months since a post... so here's a catch-up post with the subjects I'll write about in more detail over the next few weeks:

• Shooting Social Pics for the Queanbeyan Age
• Photos for the Coca-cola Surf School
• Ryan and Kristine's Wedding
• Jody and Jye's Wedding
• Website overhaul
  
• CPS - winner of B Category aggregate competition
• Steve Parish - winner of Landscape photograph of the year
• Exhibiting at the Wedding Fair
• iPhone - yes, now I have one too
  
• New Year's at Kangaroo Valley
• Animoto - turn photos into movies
  
• Fredrick's Family Portraits in Wollongong
• Goals for 2009
  

That should keep me busy for a while - my goal is to cover one subject every day or two :)

Nicki & Chris

Long overdue post, so a belated congrats to Nicki and Chris who were married on 9th of October 2008.

This wedding was a little interesting... firstly the 1950's Rolls Royce that Nicki and her brother were chauffeured in from Gungahlin to Bungendore broke down. The driver had to make some quick repairs to the carby by the side of the road. Luckily they were only about half an hour late. During this time, I had plenty of time with Chris as we waited for his bride to arrive :)



Then, after Nicki has arrive, and just before she was going to walk down the isle, she realised that the celebrant wasn't around! A quick phone call and about 40mins later the celebrant arrived and performed the ceremony....



After the ceremony we did some shots in the lovely Carrington gardens, and then headed down to the Bungendore train station for some more shots.

People's Choice

I've got so much to blog about, but haven't had the time. Have done a couple more weddings recently which I'll add to the blog soonish I hope.

Last night was another competition night for the Canberra Photographic Society. What made this comp a bit different to normal was that as well as the judge giving comments and rating each photo, before the judging was a people's choice award. Everyone voted for their favorite 3 photos in B grade and A grade in a secret ballot. And I'm pleased to say that one of my photos was chosen as the joint winner in B grade.



I presented it as a small print with a black mat. It was taken near Mt Hotham in Victoria, right next to Dinner Plain Hut. I was walking around the hut taking photos from various positions and this little tree poking out of the snow caught my eye.

Syndey Harbour by Night

A few weeks ago (actually, maybe it was a month or two ago...) we were up in Sydney for the weekend. So, nothing like heading out and taking photos at night of the bay :)



Some more here.

Congratulations to Amy and Andy

I got the privilege of shooting Amy and Andy's wedding on the 27th September 2008. I was shooting Amy and the girls preparing, the ceremony and the posed group shots afterwards for Blurr Photographics. Although it was a pretty quick shoot for me, I think I got some great shots for the happy couple :)

Congratulations to Belinda and Dave!

Belinda and Dave were married on the 5th September 2008. Congratulations to them both! It was a great wedding in the Queanbeyan park with plenty of photo opportunities. The day got dark a bit earlier than I would have liked, but still got some great shots (and some very interesting ones too). I had the camera on auto ISO and this really helped a lot as I didn't have to keep fiddling things. Lots of shots were taken at ISO 1600 (@ f/2.8), which is a bit grainy, but it's better to get the shot than have hundreds of blurred photos IMHO.

Here follows some of my favorites:

New Job

I've given notice to my current job, and will be starting work at the Canberra Institute of Technology in the Photography section in the beginning of October. I'll be responsible for various IT systems, looking after the photography equipment and helping out teachers and students with technical photograhy stuff. Looking forward to it :)

Just another one of those amazing Canberra sunsets

Had I got the camera out just 5 mins before, the lines in the sky would have been a bit nicer (3 distinct lines instead of one fat one and one thin one). Spose I'll have to wait until tomorrow night :)

Congratulations to Gwen & Jason

Bit late with this post, but a big congrats to Gwen & Jason who tied the knot in Jindabyne on 10th August 2008. It was supposed to be a wedding in the snow, but due to blizzard conditions the ceremony location was changed to the trout hatchery just outside Jindabyne. And the amazing thing was that it actually snowed during the ceremony! I feel sorry for the bridesmaid who had a beautiful dress but not a warm one - she would have been freezing... everyone else was in thick ski jackets. Small selection of photos follow.