This was the first time Lucas, our three year old, had seen the snow.  He really loved it. This is is first ever snowman, who he was very very sad to have to leave behind when we left…

This is another snowman I found, he was actually pretty tall, and was standing just off the side of the road near the observation deck.

Time for Portrait of the Week. Been a busy week, and a busy weekend, spent working on our back yard. This weeks POTW is a shot my little boy Lucas, who was being very helpful with the gardening.

Cremorne Beach, just out of Hobart

I love the soft dreamy, surreal look of the images from the crummy plastic lens on cameras like this and my Holga 120CFN.  The randomness of focus, composition and exposure -these cameras have no light meter and only basic exposure settings, though the Diana is somewhat more sophisticated than the Holga – the vignetting and the light leaks all add to the fun.

My little photography assistant, Lucas, at the West Hobart Train Park

I can run regular 35mm though the cameras but they are designed to use medium format film. If you use 35mm film,, you miss out on the wonderful vignetting and softness around the corners of the lens.

Bathurst St, Hobart

However the cost of this film and its associated developing and scanning mean using these cameras with this film can be a fairly expensive.  Each shot can work out to cost about $4 or $5, and you have to think twice about taking a shot, where as ideally you wouldn’t think about shooting with such a camera. Still, these cameras are great fun and a nice bit of relief from the seriousness of modern DSLR photography.

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The wedding ceremony was held at a church in Buckland, on the way to Tasmania’s East Coast from Hobart.  This little girl was sitting a few rows in front of us, and sat looking towards the back of the church most of the time.  I think she eventually had a little nap.

The reception was held at the Cascade Visitors Centre who put on some very nice food indeed, and of course, an ample supply of Tasmania’s finest brew.

Mel, Lucas and I would like to congratulate Jason and Libby for tying the knot, and well done for putting on a fantastic wedding.  Hope you enjoy the honeymoon and we are looking forward to catching up with you when you return.

Alex decided it would be fun to run, and then run, and then run some more. This evolved into a bit of a game of chase with Ant…

Lauren asked me what they should wear, so I suggested everyone should wear similar coloured clothing, but I did not expect the colour palette to extend to toe nails.  Needless to say I was impressed! 

Mum and Dad were exhausted, but Alex still had plenty of engergy!

I love this little park, the perfect place to sit and eat an ice cream on a hot summer Hobart day. For Antony and Lauren’s Queensland friends, that is our beautiful Mt Wellington in the background.

I think there may have been a dolphin in the water!!

I think this is probably my favourite shot of the day…

Thanks Ant, Lauren and Alex for letting me take your family photos, I had a great time, hope you did too!

My little boy Lucas just loves trains, no doubt thanks to Thomas and Friends on ABC.  So one day back in March 2008, just before his first birthday, I took him for a ride in the car on a mission to find a train for him to look at.  

Eventually I found a train parked on the side of the highway, just near the Hobart Cenotaph and the Gasworks Village.  I believe it is a place where they park the train to prepare it for its next trip, and to turn it around.  We were checking out the train and then the train driver came down to say hello, and gladly held Lucas for the photo.

This photo is taken with a Holga 120 CFN, on cheap Kodak 35mm film from the supermarket.  My wife Melissa bought me the Holga for Christmas.  If you dont know what a Hogla is, read on.

It is basically a toy plastic camera, that has come into vogue around the world of late, probably because there has been such a push for image quality, great lenses, and increasingly fancy digital cameras, and sometimes its nice to go back to the absolute basics.

The Holga features a plastic fixed focal length lens, which you can manually focus, though the distance guides on the lens are questionable and there is no through-the-lens focus, as the viewfinder is seperate.  You have to manually wind the film, and I dont mean one flick of a lever and you have your next frame… you have to turn the knob and count the clicks so you know you have turned it far enough.  There is a flash (mine also has three different coloured gels built in, but no hotshoe sadly) and two aperture settings, which actually appear to be the same anyhow!

The Holga takes medium format 120 film, though I have an adaptor that lets you put a roll of 35mm in, which is a whole lot easier and cheaper.  The downside is that you end out with a cropped image (APS-C dSLR sensor style!) which makes framing your shot harder, and you dont get the vignette effect that you do when using the 120.  I plan to run some 120 Velvia through it soon.

I have a few photos to put up on the blog, and I can do it now I finally got a scanner  Thanks go to the girl at the lab who developed this roll of film, who thought she might save some negative slips and roll them up and put them back in the canister, so they curled, and got scratched.  And dusty.  Joy.

This image was scanned and imported into Lightroom 2, vignette added and some colour correction and contrast boost done as well.  I am in two minds about doing the colour correction as it takes away some of the characteristics of the film.  I guess if it was decent film I would have left it alone.

Lucas has been trying to check out what is going on when we are washing up. He runs up to the kitchen and grabs our legs and tries to climb up. So today he finally got a chance to have a go! I think it will be a while before we let him loose with the good dinner set, and cutlery not made of plastic… but it would appear we might finally have a dishwasher before too long (yay!)

Canon 30D, EF 24-70 f/2.8 L USM, 580EXII bounced off ceiling, 1/250 @ f/5.0, ISO100, 24mm, Processed with DxO Optics Pro and exported with Lightroom 1.4.1

Took a couple of photos of Lucas in his bedroom today, we were seeing if his new “leather” jacket would fit but it is still a little too big to wear, but he sure looked cute