Cracks in Buildings

We spotted some interesting cracks in buildings (legacy of the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes) as we were cycling the other day, and went back the next day to grab some photos. Generally I haven’t bothered taking photos of earthquake damage – thousands of keen photographers have wandered the city since day one. However, these made some interesting compositions, and many were rather ephemeral as they were marked by paint but the walls they were on hadn’t been repainted yet.

A nice blue and white pattern. This is a composition of five photos but the vertical joins aren’t an artifact of that, but actual joins on the building.

Another nice and contrasty building.

A couple more with interesting patterns, but which hadn’t been highlighted with paint, alas.

I liked the way this palm tree was set off by the pair of vertical cracks.

There were some other interesting photo opportunities as well, like this towering pile of containers.

A tangle of pipes around the LPG filling depot.

And my favourite, a nice example of machinery repair the end-user way. It was a big fan, about 3 feet across, and those are tarpaulins stuffed into it.

Evening Clouds

Composition practice

A hot summer’s day and I decided composition practice (aka wandering around with a camera seeing what was on offer) was called for. This was a short walk in the reserve near my house.

• A view from inside a tree.

• Powerlines stretching away.

• The houses on the hill and across the estuary, some boats on the water, and nesting places in the bird sanctuary.

• A footpath stretching away – viewed from a foot above the ground.

• A different view through a tree.

• A newly trimmed hedge, viewed from the end and up a few inches.

• A footpath curving away with the Port Hills in the background and Toi-Toi bushes to the side.

Xmas lights

A stroll down the street found three brightly-lit houses within 100m of our house.

30 minutes after sunset and five minutes from home

• A still night and lights from Mount Pleasant reflecting on the water.

A particularly calm evening sent me out for a short drive to where I suspected there might be some nice reflections. I’ve often seen these lights reflecting when I’m on the way home so I guessed they’d make a good show. I’ve rather taken to the lighting effects when there’s still a bit of light in the sky, rather than inky blackness, with 20 second exposures which makes for nice effects on the water. You can’t see them but there were actually swans swimming to and fro through the streams of light.

• 20 second exposure, F/11, ISO 800

• Still 20 seconds, but stopped down to F/14 which makes the background darker.

• And a view the other way at an industrial plant.

After Sunset

• F13, 20 second exposure, ISO 800

Some more experiments with long exposures after sunset, but while there’s still light in the sky. I like the way the different coloured streetlights illuminate the hillside.

• F5.6, 20 second exposure, ISO 800

• F11, 20 second exposure, ISO 800

• F9, 20 second exposure, ISO 800

• F11, 20 second exposure, ISO 800

Big Diggers

One thing about living in post-earthquake Christchurch – there’s always plenty of excavators around. I did a quick expedition to collect some reference photos of excavators (particularly the track linkages and suspension). Five minutes away I found a couple sleeping and snapped some photos. A mechanic was working on the (smaller) one above and let me wander round taking photos, before it went back to work. The larger machine – and it was pretty damn big – was behind some fences but I got a few useful photos of that one as well.

• A larger machine, from across the street to see the whole profile.

• Back to work.

• The tracks on the big machine were massive.

• Lots of supporting rollers.

• And this was what I wanted reference photos for. It’s eventually going to be part of an illustration for a science fiction robot.

Moonrise over Water

The ephemeris told me that moonrise last night would be AFTER sunset. Keen to make up for some uninspiring photos from the previous attempt, we looked around for a good viewing spot. It turned out that Monk’s Bay (about 5 minutes drive away) would see the moon rising above the entrance to the estuary, with South Shore on the left and the hills to the right. I must have driven past that point at least a hundred times in the years I’ve lived in Christchurch, but never looked over the wall to see a suprisingly pretty little area.

There was a fair bit of cloud out to sea, but the moon showed up nice and bright, casting an impressive path across the water. Exposure times were probably a bit too long – the moon ended up quite lopsided in some shots because it was moving too far while the shutter was open – but I quite liked the look of it, and the smoothed out sea.

• You can see the distortion in the moon in this shot, but I don’t care!

• We kept taking photos until nearly an hour after sunset, by which time it was getting quite dark, though the moon kept getting brighter.

• This shot was taken after sunset, but before moonrise. It was actually fairly dark but the long exposure made it look brighter.

Away in the Distance

While trying (and failing) to get some good photos of the moonrise tonight, I snapped a shot or two of the Seaward Kaikoura range way off in the distance – 170km (just over 100 miles) across the sweep of Pegasus Bay.

 

 

Troubles with RAW

In theory, saving images in RAW format and converting them to jpg / png format on the computer should let you get a better result than letting the camera do the conversion. In practice, I haven’t been able to get my converted images to look as good as the camera gets. Even the image browser I’m using (IrfanView) displays the RAW images better than my conversions. Most annoying.

• Sunset image (RAW) as viewed by IrfanView

• Converted to .png using UFRaw

For the moment, I think I’ll go back to using jpegs and bracketing my exposures. Apart from anything else, it saves a lot of time.