Woohoo!
We finally got here!

This week, Shelton discusses his latest trip to Rockhampton to teach real estate salespeople how to more effectively shoot their properties,
more on off-camera flash,
and the John Bertrand shoot (pic 1, pic 2).

Bruce is planning on using My Reflections to print his photobook of his recent U.S. trip.

This week, we heard from John Bell who has put together a very informative video on how to prepare for an aerial photography expedition.
Even if you don’t plan on doing an aerial shoot, this is well worth watching. Thanks John.
And of course, there’s the landscape competition.
Shelton came up with a corker of a prize!

A Cokin “Landscape filter pack” comprising:

Grey grad soft
Grey grad hard
Blue yellow polarizer
Standard polarizer

Nice!

And the winner?
Mr Tom Nevesley, come on down!

There were also some honourable mentions (in no particular order):

Congratualtions Tom!
And thanks one and all for your submissions.

Merry Christmas one and all.
We’ll be back mid-January.
Take care.
Cheers,
Bruce.

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In the absense of episode 100, I thought I’d share this.
Approximately 6 hours of CPU time (Intel Core2 Duo with 2GB RAM), 24 x 10MB RAW files, 27 layers at 16 bit…. phew!
And the result?
A 360 degree panorama of Seattle from the Space Needle (taken the day before Thanksgiving).
Enjoy.

Sorry gang!
Shelton got a last minute call to go to Rockhampton to conduct another photography seminar thingy, which means that we weren’t able to record episode 100 this week.
All things being equal, we will get to record it this Thursday and post it next weekend.
Call it an early Christmas present!
Cheers,
Bruce.

We’re back!
This week (as you’d expect), quite a long discussion on my trip to the States, plus Shelton’s golf club shoot, the new Nikon D3 and D300, Shelton’s air conditioner shoot (true!… see below), plus remote flash.

Here’s the shot of the tree (mentioned in the podcast):

To see more of my trip, check out my Flickr stream.

Shelton’s pics:

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Hi all,
International air travel sucks.
There, I said it.
By the time we got to bed last night, we’d been up for about 40 hours… if you ignore the 4 hours of “sleep” we got on the plane. I put sleep in inverted commas, because it was FAR from restful. It may have rested my eyes, but that was about the extent of it’s usefulness.
On top of that, the in-flight entertainment system for the 3 seats that we had together just happened to be semi-functional (which is a generous description). Sometimes, you’d load a movie and it would start playing, but it would be all pixelated and crappy, but then 15 mins into it, it would just reset itself, and then when you tried to restart it, you’d get a screen which would say “we are unable to deliver your requested movie at this time”.
Oh joy.
So, we got to Aukland at 6:30 yesterday morning, and had a 3 hours stop over. Can you believe in this day and age that there are international departure lounges which do not have playgrounds to entertain kids? Who designs these freakin’ airports? 50 year old spinsters? Jesus H.
And so then we jump on our Aukland-Sydney flight which wasn’t too bad, although by that stage, I think most of my senseswere shutting down anyway.
Jaded as I may be with Qantas (who WILL be receiving a letter from me this week… believe me, there were more issues than just the ones I’ve mentioned), we had an awesome time in the States, absolutely fell in love with San Francisco (and have vowed to return there for a holiday at some point in the future), met some really lovely people (and missed meeting some too… my apologies, Michael L!)… yeah, all in all, I’d have to say that it was the best holiday I’ve ever had…. at least in the sense of getting to see lots of different stuff. Probably not so in terms of “restful” holidays, because it most certainly was not that! But, that is my fault and mine alone. We always knew it was going to be that way. As I said to folks we met along the way, “When you travel half a planet away, you have to make the most of your time and cram as much in as possible”. And that’s what we did.
So, there you have it.
Two weeks of madness crammed into a thousand words of blog entries.
Thanks for those who’ve followed along and left comments.
Thanks also to all the folks who wrote to me with suggestions for things to see and do at the various stages along our route. Some we were able to take up, and some we just had to pass by. I think if we had done all the things that people wrote and suggested, we’d have an extra 2 week holiday!
And now, it’s time to get back to work.
Podcast listeners rejoice… 3 new eps coming your way this weekened!
Cheers,
Bruce.

Well, I don’t know if it was a case of being spoiled by DIsneyland, or the fact that I’m coming down with a cold, but Universal Studios was a complete let down.
Max enjoyed it, but both Cath and I felt that it really lacked… something.
One thing I instantly noticed was that at Disneyand, they seem to have done a really good job of limiting acoustic spill between rides/attractios. In other words, when you walk away from one attraction, you’re not being bombarded by the music/dialogue from that attraction as you approach the next ride down the street.
But at Universal Studios, there didn’t appear to be anywhere near the same level of acoustic isolation. So, you were constantly bombarded with a mish-mash of noises and music from various attractions all at once.
Also, Disneyland have done a great job of incorporating lots of preliminary “stuff” to keep you engaged/informed WHILE you’re waiting to get on the ride.
But Universal Studios just have these vacant areas where you’re just standing in line with nothign to read, or to look at, or whatever.
Like I said, maybe we were just spoiled by Disneyland.
I’ve been to my fair share of theme parks in my life, and Disneyland is definitely the pick of the bunch. Australia’s theme parks could learn a lot from DL.
And then this morning, we woke up to rain in Los Angeles.
Apparently, this is quite a rare event.
So, we went off a spent a couple of hours in a Westfield shopping centre.
Then, we headed off to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA. I had a personal invitation for a behind-the-scenes tour of the facility, which I found really interesting. Unfortunately, no photos from there!
And right now, I’m sitting in the departure lounge at LAX waiting a boarding call.
Those 2 weeks went way too fast.
Cheers,
Bruce.