Competition time!

It's that time of year to start thinking about your Christmas presents!  (Hurrah, I hear you say.)    Over the next few weeks I'm taking bookings for family shoots for this very purpose.

I do a half hour to hour shoot of you beautiful people in a gorgeous outdoor location and then we choose and print your shots to send through to relatives, here and overseas.

I can create a DVD for your relatives to pop into their DVD player or computer with your Christmas message on.  These are especially good if your family live far away... We can even put your shots onto YouTube and send them through as a video link to family and friends.

Anyway, back to the competition.  I took this photograph at a wedding recently.  All you have to do is tell me what the little boy is saying to the little pink princess.

The best one will win a free family Christmas shoot, valued at $275 with a free DVD included and one 10x12 print.

To enter, you will have to live within the Blue Mountains area... so from Lithgow and down to the Penrith/Richmond areas inclusive.
The competition will run for one week to give you all a chance to get your entries in.  Closing date will be the 3rd November, 2010.

Get your thinking caps on and fill in the contact form on this blog.  It's that simple.
Have fun!

Think Local - Act Global

In the coming weeks, I'm going to be blogging about businesses that I'm connected with both here in the Blue Mountains and some further down towards the plains.  These businesses are ones that I know personally and recommend because they're the best at what they do. 

Amongst the businesses are celebrants, those in the beauty industry, web design, and graphic design so keep watching.
I'll also be focussing on some new businesses in Katoomba too, as well as taking some photographs along the way.

Enjoy the ride!

Elvis Festival Parkes, NSW

Some fun news this week.  Photographs that I've taken are being featured in the 2011 Elvis Festival Calendar.
If you've never been to the Elvis festival and you're a fan, or just curious, it's a great trip.
It takes place in Parkes, NSW, home of the radio telescope featured in the Australian hit movie 'The Dish'. 
Parkes and Forbes, the nearby towns, are historic wheat towns and as such have a large amount of industry on the outskirts. Drive in to both towns however, and you'll come across some sweet old houses and beautiful scenery.  Forbes, just ten minutes down the highway from Parkes has more old houses than Parkes, but Parkes is where it's all happening.The Elvis festival began one night as the brainchild of a couple of Elvis fans who owned a restaurant.  They held an Elvis theme night and the rest as they say, is history.
In 2010, enough visitors to the Elvis festival manage to double Parke's population and the festival is growing each year.  It's now held over 5 days and hosts over 140 events.

If you're a photographer it's a dream come true.  Some are there for the silly costumes but others take it all very seriously, with full 50's, 60's or 70's regalia and the classic cars are divine.

You can get the Elvis Express from Sydney if you don't want to go by car, and it's certainly an experience.   It's a Countrylink train which is loaded with Elvis impersonators, so your journey is somewhat interesting.  Thrown in to the price is the entertainment, some gigs at the festival and access to the festival shuttle bus which takes you from venue to venue.  Well worth it if you don't fancy walking for hours!
I try to go every year and it's a blast.  This year I may even be convinced to dress up.
Whilst I've had a lot of photographs published in the past, the Elvis Calendar is so far the coolest.  :D

Risks of the job...

Loving photography as much as I do, there are risks to it.

For example, never, ever, ever lie down on an ant's nest.
This basic bit of advice is for the photographer so consumed by what they see in front of them that they drop down to get that great angle, only to find after a few seconds that there's an unpleasant crawling and biting feeling...
And if you've ever tried to get hundreds of ants off you, you'll know it's tricky and involves removing items of clothing, running hysterically round in circles whirling said clothing above head and squealing.

Sitting for long periods at your desk can have physical repercussions too and this goes for any type of job where you spend long hours at your desk.

For some months I've been having foot pain, which turns out to be plantar faciitis.  I bet you're going to click on that because despite it being incredibly common, lots of people have never even heard of it.
Despite being common, PF is an incredibly painful and debilitating condition.
It can be bought on by any number of issues but sufferers end up with a painful tightening of the plantar at the base of the foot.  During sleep, the plantar tightens up and in the morning, stepping out of bed onto the foot is incredibly painful as micro tears occur with each painful step.
As a result, healing can take many months or even years.  Sometimes surgery is recommended if it doesn't clear up, though research indicates this isn't an ideal and can sometimes fail to bring relief.

Unless you're into sports injuries or physiotherapy, or perhaps weight lifting, you'll have never really heard of your Psoas either!
Well now you have.  And if you have any kind of desk job where you lean over a desk ... say spending hours editing photographs, like I do, then chances are, you're shortening your Psoas.
And when you shorten it, bad things happen.

 

Of course, it took me several weeks at a chiro and then weeks of googling searching through different articles until I finally found what I was looking for.
 I couldn't go running or play tennis or even walk properly without constant pain.  The chiro and I discussed that of course, everything was connected and the foot being the end of the body, something else must be causing all that tension and pulling.  It wasn't like I'd hurt my foot somewhere along the way...
After a few weeks of treatment with the chiro,  I then had a great discussion with a sports therapist (Thanks Daren) to figure out what was causing my foot pain.. and finally, after some detective work, turns out I shortened my Psoas and now I need to stretch that baby back to where it was... which is quite painful, ironically, because it's so tight, as are the surrounding muscles.  But of course, after a week or so of stretching, bingo!  Foot pain dissipating at quite a rapid rate of knots.
Obviously it will take some months to heal but I'm on the way.

I don't claim to have a cure for Plantar Faciitis, but I have a cure for me, and so hopefully someone else might stumble across this in their search for help, just as I did with other web pages.
There's some things that I found out which might help you too.

1. Wear good shoes.  If you've been wearing your running shoes for more than 6 months, chances are the support has gone.  Get rid of them and get a really good pair of walking shoes.  The better the support in your arch and for the rest of your foot, the better off you are.  Get lace up shoes and avoid velcro fastenings.  You want to be able to really tighten up the support around your foot and velcro gets lose after a while and may not work as effectively.  Ask at a good sports shop for advice.  Good fitting is essential.
If you buy your walking shoes from your local KMart, men's shoes often have better support than women's trainers - anyone who knows why, feel free to let me know.  They're also made more often of leather for some unknown reason, so better to get those if you're hard on your feet.  Look for Diadora or good cross trainers.

2.  Orthotics may or may not help you.  The only way to find out is to try.  There's a clinic in Sydney who seems to be able to cure just by giving you an orthotic for your shoes.  I don't know how true this is, but they seem to have good testimonials.  Saying that, who's going to put a bad testimonial on their site?  I'm not sure what makes their orthotics so different to shop bought orthotics, but check them out if you're in Sydney.  They claim a good cure rate.

3.  Ice is good.  Rest your foot on ice a few times a day.  Bag of peas from the freezer is just fine.  Ten minutes a few times a day will remove the inflammation.

4. You can get ibuprofen based cream to rub in, which may help.  However, you've got to locate what's pulling on your muscles to cause this in the first place.  Any tightness in your back?  Any previous injury?  Any pain in your shoulders?  Remember, everything is connected.

5.  My chiro put me on the road to recovery but it was only by talking with a qualified sports therapist who actually helped me.  His mention of tightness in the glutes was right on and it was that which helped me work out what was going on.  Google was my friend!

6.  Remember this takes a while to heal.  My chiro said I'd done the same as banging my thumb with a hammer and was still thinking I could continue to use it.  Inflammation and all these micro tears in the Plantar Fascia will take a while to go away.

7.  Really good, professional deep tissue massage will help.   I don't mean a beauty massage, I mean the 'as much as you can bear' sort of massage, along with lymphatic drainage.  These deep tissue massage will help you loosen up the muscles which are tight.  In fact, I wish I'd done the deep tissue massage in the first place.  It would have saved me a lot of money and pain!

8.  There's a guy who tells the story of how practising swimming with flippers on actually helped cure him.   This may be because he strengthened up the muscles in his lower back and this cured him.  Either way, it's a good thing to try.

9.  Pain in your foot makes you not want to exercise.  BUT the last thing you should do is STOP exercising as you'll put on weight and be miserable.   So you can swim and you can also ride a bike or spin in a low gear.  Don't be ramping up your speed by changing gears - it's not about speed, it's about exercise.  Exercise biking might help you too if you have one.  That's the thing in your bedroom which you put your clothes on.  ;-)

10.  Stretching the calf muscles actually makes things worse.  Whilst many sites tell you to stretch your calf and foot, this can cause more inflammation.  For me, it wasn't remotely helpful.  No tennis balls under the arch either.   What was useful was this study I found, which showed that an actual plantar stretch was the most beneficial.

11.  PF can be caused by many things so it's important to locate what it is that's bugging you.  Your foot's at the end of the chain, so the problem is not in your foot in my opinion, it's somewhere else.
Mine was to do with the Psoas, so my stretches have been glute, hip and psoas stretches... you might try these and see if it helps you.
If your muscles feel tight, stretch!

12. Certain vitamins can help you to support the ligament and also reduce inflammation.   Try Omega 3's in fish oil for example for its anti inflammatory qualities.


Either way, it's so important to remember your posture whatever job you're doing.  If you're sitting for long periods, get up and stretch.  Don't lean forward into your desk and sit right back in your chair when you are sitting down.  Make sure your screen is high enough to look at without slouching and sit up straight.


I'd love to hear from anyone who's had this foot thing too.  How did you make it go away or are you still struggling with it?

School photography

I absolutely love school portraits.  I've recently done some for a local school in the Blue Mountains and I'll share some more of those with you over the coming weeks. 

School shoots, well, any shoot is a very physical experience for a photographer.   What's possibly strenuous about photography I hear you ask....
There's a lot of bending and stretching.. and sometimes climbing equipment such as ladders or play equipment.  You're on your feet for hours, you may not get a break or a drink and possibly, you're working outside.  Not only that, but for every shot, you want to get that person doing something... and in the case of school photography, that's to get kids to relax and be themselves.
Doing this job you come to realise that you are part comedian, part actor, part children's entertainer.

Some kids don't want to smile.  They're there to test you out, like all kids do, as we know!  They see you as a person with a camera whom they're going to have a bit of fun with, but they rarely think that the photographer is actually going to have a bit of fun with them.  HA!

I love my job, I love kids.  I have three of my own so of course, it goes with the territory.  You have got to be slightly masochistic, I suspect, to work with children, because darn it, some of them are hard work!
But for me, there's a unique pleasure in getting that child to sit there, straighten up a bit, look down the lens at me and then grin.
If you think about it, we're often telling our kids to take care of themselves, to not talk to people they don't know, to trust their instincts on people, so to ask a child you've just met to relax and give it their best shot is hard for the child too!
Not only that, but as the photographer I have to very quickly assess that child's personality and match my approach to getting the best from them.  This can swing wildly to having a total giggle with one child through to trying to coax the most reserved of children out of their shell long enough in time to capture something special... all doing that whilst holding a camera whilst hanging from a ladder, thinking about light, shutter speed and depth of field, whilst the sweat drips into my eyes and I can feel my calf muscle going into a spasm!
Most school photographers usually take one shot and that's what you get.  I shoot rapidly, taking 4-10 shots of each child and this way, I can get the best from each one.  Some are determined not to smile ever, others aren't sure until we have a laugh and a joke, and then others just look you in the lens and just grin.
I love it all but by gosh, it's hard physical and mental labour.

So you see, it's not glam being a photographer.  It's hard work, but the rewards... seeing that grin, that look which means I've just connected with the child sitting there in front of me and the photograph is going to be amazing...  well the rewards keep me doing what I love and being able to share that with you.

What Camera Do You Recommend?

Without fail I am ALWAYS being asked what camera do I recommend?

And my answer without fail, is 'How long is a piece of string?'

There are so many cameras out there... so many brands, from the cheapest to the best... Nikon, Canon, Leica, Lumix, Sony, Casio, Fujifilm, Olympus, Pentax, Richo, Panasonic, Pentax, Sigma...  shall I go on?
Even Lego has a camera... 

And under each brand there will be small digital with fixed lenses through to digital SLR makes, each with amazing functions that can now do the work of a small PC.

My first camera was a Nikon film camera, which I then upgraded to a Nikon D80 and then, I got a Nikon D700 .... I still use the D80 as a spare and sometimes as a lighter camera if I'm shooting on my feet all night at an event.  The D700 is heavier.
I also take the two camera bodies with me when I'm shooting a wedding or large event.  I can have two different lenses on and pick up and put down as I like.  Or, sometimes I'll just use the one camera with a versatile lens on it which covers wide angle and some zoom.   I also have a little point and shoot Nikon which is the size of a mobile telephone and I slip this into my bag or pocket when ever I go out.


By this point, you'll have realised I'm a Nikon user. 

And if I'm a Nikon user, I know a lot about Nikon and not that much about any other camera!  Nikon users are die-hard Nikon users, who rarely emigrate EVER to any other brand, unless something quite extreme happens -  ie Nikon go out of business.
The same can be said for Canon users.  In fact, between the two brands, there's friendly rivalry and mickey-taking between Canon and Nikon users.
'Poor you', we Nikon users say... 'Fancy having to use a Canon' ...
and vice versa.

Point and shoots are great cameras to start learning on because they don't typically have all the bells and whistles an SLR camera has. You can master basic photography techniques without getting bogged down in the technical specifics of your camera. And they're great on trips where a bulkier camera might be more of a hindrance than a help.

With digital cameras, the amount of megapixels is only half the story.  Whilst it might be amazing to have 14mps, the other side of the equation is the sort of sensor the camera has.  Point and shoot cameras usually always have a smaller sensor.  SLR cameras generally have a bigger one which leads to quality and how much light that sensor can process and how well it does it. 


Things to think about when you're looking for a camera...

Do you want something small and light that will fit into a bag?
Do you want a 'point and shoot' camera with hardly any of those 'confusing' settings on?
Do you want to move from point and shoot into SLR territory?
What is it you're shooting and will you need a tripod?
How big are your hands?
Got chunky fingers?  Can you reach the buttons?
Do you want to sell your photographs or print and frame them at home?
Are you wanting to take snaps, or become a professional photographer?
Do you want to take videos with your camera too?
How much can you spend on lenses?
How much are accessories, such as flash?
Can the camera take any other lens made by another company?

I would always recommend you talk to someone in a camera shop before buying your camera.  You need to see how the camera feels in your hands, how accessible the buttons are, whether the manual is in readable English or bad 'Engrish'

The truth is that you can take great photographs with a lousy camera and lousy photographs with a great camera... partially it is about the end user - which is YOU!

The bottom line is that telling someone what camera to get is nigh on impossible.  The honest answer is 'I don't know but I can maybe help point the way'.


For a great camera review, I always visit Ken Rockwell.  And if you like what Ken says, you can always give him a few dollars to show your appreciation. :D

The importance of Creativity

Creativity comes in spurts. It's never continuous, and sometimes goes completely, a condition a little like writer's block. When this happens, I do something that makes me happy, waiting for it to return as it always does.

My creativity hasn't been away anywhere, but I've been so busy working recently (and also partying for my 40th birthday the other week) that I almost forgot to be creative, so today I had a play around with my Nikon prime lens and a petal.

Work does that to you sometimes. It's good to take a breath, wander the garden with your camera and catch something simple ...
Simple ideas always work the best.
Without creativity, some of the best people are lost out there.  Stuck in a rut or a job which takes all their energy, they have no time for creativity. 

Barthold Georg Niebuhr said 
'It is better to create than to be learned, creating is the true essence of life'

And I totally agree with him. 

Take a few minutes to step off the hamster wheel and create something beautiful just for the sheer joy of it, for yourself.