1. The culture
2. The SHOPPING
3. The buildings

New York does have some pretty amazing architecture, but so does Melbourne!

This was taken down just one of the many alleyways here. I love cobblestone, I wish there was more of it because it looks great in photos but I know that it’s not so great for women in heals, so I’ll forgive Melbourne for not having more.

If you’re after art-deco buildings then look no further than the corner of Elizabeth and Lonsdale! Mitchell House is one of the coolest throwbacks in town!

If, like all my friends, you’re curious about flights to new york then click that link and start planning your trip! Happy travels partner!

Got a thing for taxi’s? We have those too! Sure, not as many and they have in New York, but you know…the more isn’t always the merrier…

Or maybe you just love seeing the sun set reflecting off all the windows and steel of the city. It a picture of poetry that you don’t have to fly to the other side of the world to see…

Oh who am I kidding? You can’t compete with New York. The city is iconic! Every movie that revolves around fashion is shot there. They have Time Square, Central Park, Grand central station, Madison Square gardens, The Chrysler building, the Empire State building, the UN and the Statue of Liberty! How can anyone compete with that? And it’s not just the amazing buildings, the museums like the metropolitan museum of art, the museum of natural history, you can go ice skating in rockefeller centre, go see the animals in the bronx zoo, the shopping on fifth avenue or even better on madison avenue. Catch a game at Citi field or time your trip right to catch the macy’s day parade. If anything there is too much to do in New York, that’s right, I said it, there is too much to do. So there.

The first video is about how the hair and makeup was created and can be seen here:

The second video will be the photoshoot it’s self with lighting diagrams and the third is about post production and how to clean up skin. If this sounds like something you’re into, then subscribe to my youtube channel to be kept in the loop!

Back on topic, Man VS Food to plan your trip around america. highly recommended. We plan on having a food tour of the states when we go. Food and shopping, but we can’t spend toooo much because Japan is on the way back from our fictional world tour. Hopefully we can fund our trip by buying items for people while we’re over there. Shopping services do quite well over there since you can’t get ANYTHING here in Australia. It would be great if we can do this though because I could get some GREAT photos. Speaking of photos, some of my more recent photos!

I’ve seen a few way to make cinemagraphs and a few of them involve copying and pasting individual video frames into seperate layers and just doing things in really round about ways. Photoshop CAN work with video now, you just need to import and then export it in a specific format and it’s MUCH faster. So enjoy this video on how to make this cinemagraph!

So Violet had a photoshoot and interview for an upcoming project and once again we got flown to sydney. Trip from hell. Storms, both flights were delayed, planes stuck on the runway, HUGE taxi rank lines, took nearly 2 hours to get from the hotel lobby to our room at 2 am and then had to be up at 6am, no breakfast etc. etc. Typical for us, every time we got to sydney it’s a disaster. Something about that city really hates us. But the BEST part of the trip was the photoshoot!

Full production number with MUA’s, hair stylists, set dressers, wardrobe people, the works! It was like heaven for me, everyone was incredibly nice and didn’t seem to mind me getting in the way. I shot a lot of video so I’m going to edit it together sometime soon, but after the shoot we had 8 hours to kill and nowhere to be so we went to The Galeries in town to grab some lunch and visit Kinokuniya. Unfortunately that only took all of about two hours, leaving us with 6 hours and nothing to do. Violet wanted to meet up with a friend who may or may not have been awake, so we sent out a text message and waited at a table for an hour. During this time I was so pumped from the photoshoot that I decided to set myself a challenge:

Take as many different kinds of photos as I could without moving from my seat using only my 50mm lens. 

Started with the obvious: my favorite person to photograph!

This guy couldn’t keep his eyes open

I was hoping to capture these people looking alone and then again when they finally met up with whoever they were waiting for, but they never came.

Violet couldn’t keep her eyes open either. If you haven’t tried it already, put your camera in B&W mode and try taking black and white specific photos.

For this one I switched back in to colour and set the exposure for 1.6 seconds, held it as still as I could for a second, then pointed the camera at the lights above and swirled it a bit for .6 seconds.

Some structural shots.

A new self portrait.

This one is only set to 1/3rd of a second and rested on the table to keep a sharp background.

And we end on a split toned B&W.

All of those taken from my seat, I took some images pointing directly upwards but the sky wasn’t particularly interesting. I also wanted to do some HDR stuff, but with no tripod it’s harder to do. Next time you’re stuck somewhere, take a look around and see what you can photograph!

When you go on vacation, you want to take as much gear with you as possible. But then your wife/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend/life partner/significant other/puppy starts yelling at you because  you took THEIR shoes out of the suitcase to put in YOUR backup tripod and you’re like, seriously Violet, you’re taking like…TWO pairs of shoes!!!! Why do you need more than the ones you’re already wearing!?!?! Then you duck the first shoe thrown at your head and feeling pretty cocky about your cat like reflexes you gloat with your eyes closed, only to remember in a very painful manner that shoes come in twos as the second one hit you square in the nuts. It’s a story as old as time, but no more!!! I give you the bottle top tripod!!!

The clever little diagram I made is fairly self explanitory, but all you need is:

• 1x 1/4″ Bolt about an inch long
• 1x 1/4″ Nut
• 2x Washers
• 1x Softdrink bottle lid

Step 1 – drill a 1/4″ hole in the top of the lid of a softdrink bottle. The lids for the tops of softdrink bottles are usually interchangeable and there is rarely a time when there isn’t a bottle of coke or pepsi or whatever available, so that’s why this is perfect for this.

Step 2 – Put it together in the order of blot, washer, lid, washer, nut. Tighten it up.

Step 3 – Make her open the box (just kidding, but if you get this reference then a digital hi-five for you)

That’s about it. It’s about an inch and a half long so you can always have it with you and when you need a tripod just find a bottle, switch the lid for yours and attach your camera. Make sure the bottle has some kind of liquid, sand or ballast of some sort so it doesn’t fall over. Also, I wouldn’t suggest you attach a DSLR to this one, simply because a long heavy lens might topple it over, so keep this one for the point and shoots/mirrorless cameras or micro 4/3rds.

Speaking of holidays, if you’re looking for the Best Deals On Hotels, click that link! Thanks for reading!

Hi everyone! This year I decided to do more on YouTube. I’m going to start off with a Review and then do some how to’s and I’m thinking of doing a series called “Start-To-Finish” in where I show you how I go about planning a shoot, the make up and styling, the lighting and photography, then finally the post production over a few videos. But first the review! This is a review of the Phottix BGD7000 which is a third party battery grip for the Nikon D7000. It’s awesome and hopefully the video does it justice. This is my first time being infront of the camera with a script since university. It didn’t go well then and I was pretty damn nervous now, but I’m getting better at it! Anyway, enjoy!!

I’ve always seen advertisements for the Suzuki Night Markets on facebook, at the Queen Victoria Markets, in Melbourne brochures all over the place actually, but I’ve never thought to actually go until a friend of mine went and said the food was great. Being a lover of food I thought to myself, “Hey self, we gotta get in on that”. We missed it last week because…I forget, but last night we finally made it! I was also recently given a bunch of issues of Black And White Photography magazine by Violets’ dad and was really inspired by Christophe Agou’s work in the New York subway to go out and get my black and white on!

You might not know this but if you have a Nikon DSLR (probably works with other brands too) you can set your shooting mode to black and white. If you shoot in RAW then the images appear in black and white on the back of your camera and in most photo software but all the colour information is still recorded, so you’ll never say “great photo, wish I had shot this in colour though =(” You might not say the sad face, but you’ll think it. Actually you wont, because like I said you won’t be saying that…is that right? I think so. Anyway, I set my camera to shoot in black and white in RAW, took some test shots around the house and then we set off to the markets! If you’re looking for a way to round out your photography, I DEFINITELY suggest you give this a go!

A little bomb figurine from Mario. It’s full of candy, yum! But this photo actually sums up Violet pretty well, you can see her art work at the bottom, her blogging diary in the middle and sweetness on top!

You might not think this is black and white, but it technically is. This was done using a process called split toning and it involves taking a black and white photo and assigning one color to the shadows (I chose a red-ish pink) and another to the highlights (I went with yellow). Mixed together it came out a little green, but still looks good!

Melbourne’s old trams. I was hoping that by using a slower shutter speed (I think I used 1/15th) I could have a sharp location with a bit more motion blur from the tram, but it wasn’t going fast enough. Now I wished I had used a faster shutter speed and gotten EVERYTHING in sharp.

I always love to look down tram lines and without color to distract you, form and shape become much more interesting!

This photo was shot literally from the hip. Violet wanted a photo of the puppy, but didn’t want to make it obvious so I rested the strap on my shoulder, hit the shutter twice and hoped for the best!

I love to photograph musicians but typically we got there just as he started packing up.

I had no idea there would be this many people. It was like the entire city had decided to show up!

Another split-toned image, this one is in yellow and blue but I kept the saturation much lower. I figured it’s be perfect for Australia day!

Even though we were under very open air pavilions the air was thick with smoke from all the food stalls, so thick that you could see the light beams cutting through.

I had to squat down for aaaages to get this shot and copped a knee to the head a couple of times becuase, well you saw how packed it was, but this is the shot I set out to get and I got it, so I was happy. Besides, i’ve been hit in the head so many times I don’t even feel it anymore.

And from the other side, this food looked and smelled sooooo good!

Try putting your model (in this case the love of my life) between you and a strong light source. This makes a nice ring/hair light and can yield some cool results when the bare light just peaks around the side of your model.

Well that’s all from me today, hope you enjoyed my adventure to the Suzuki Night Market and my adventure into black and white! All these photos and more are available for purchase from my online store, just click the photo you like to be taken to the gallery, thanks for reading!

This is a sponsored post, I don’t really have any policies on sponsored posts, if I did then I would link you to them, but in the mean time If you want to pay me to write something or provide a link then sure, I’ll do it provided it’s not for porn or mass puppy genocide or something like that. So there you go, I suppose that’s a policy. If you are against me writing for money, then YOU can pay me NOT to put these sponsored posts on MY website and it will remain an ad free area. Enjoy.

If you’ve ever wanted to visit Spain and you live in the UK, then you might really enjoy this post, if not then this might be for you, so I’ll put in some pretty pictures. I’ve been to spain and really enoyed it. We spent most the time In Barcelona, but I quickly googled Alicante and it looks stunning. Much more cultural and that makes for much better travel photos. Resorts and capitol cities kind of look the same these days, so people tend to be more interested in “the beaten track” or “the road less travelled”. In my opinion there are two reasons for this:

a) They are interested in going to the area so they are looking for information and great photo locations.

or the more likely

b) They like to look at cultural areas and feel adventurous, but prefer to spend their time sitting on a beach sipping cold drinks with little umbrellas and so much fruit in them that it could be classified as a watery salad.

Either way, why not spend some time over the sea in Alicante!

As promised, here are some pretty travel pictures that I took.

This is a sponsored post, I don’t really have any policies on sponsored posts, if I did then I would link you to them, but in the mean time If you want to pay me to write something or provide a link then sure, I’ll do it provided it’s not for porn or mass puppy genocide or something like that. So there you go, I suppose that’s a policy. If you are against me writing for money, then YOU can pay me NOT to put these sponsored posts on MY website and it will remain an ad free area. Enjoy.

I used to travel all the time. At one point I had to get a new passport because the pages were full and there wasn’t any space for new stamps. Not even kidding. Since I moved to Australia I haven’t done all that much traveling at all but last year It started up again when we started getting jobs in Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane. On the last Brisbane trip I took SOOOOO many photos that it got me interested in travel photography again, so I might start posting some travel photo stuff on here. Of course it’s no secret who my favorite travel photographer is, Trey Ratcliff is freaking awesome, you can find his stuff at Stuck In Customs or in my own gushing post Inspiration Monday – Trey Ratcliff. But I’d like to know who YOUR favorite travel photographers are. I need to feel the inspiration flowing through me!

Here are a couple of photos I’ve taken while traveling…

In the mean time If you’re looking to do some travelling, more specifically looking for cheap flights to orlando then make sure to click that link!