New Photos

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Are you looking for someone to photograph your family or your product, your child's birthday party or your wedding, or even your house? Take a look at my updated photo galleries.

Portrait Gallery Update

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Portrait gallery gets some new faces.

If you're a local and would like some photos of your family, etc, I'd be keen to hear from you.

Stiched Up Gallery Updated

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It's been a long long time away from the blog, but the making tools have been busy regardless.  I am hoping to finally put an end to this digital neglect and regularly add new content.  The Stitched Up sewing gallery now features many more examples of my textile work, and the other galleries will also get updated.

Updated Photo Gallery

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My beloved camera has been getting a fair work out in the last few months, so I have finally updated the Photography page.

Summer of Weddings

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Long time - no post is no indication of idleness, or so I'd like to think.  The poor excuse for a summer that we had is long long gone, and now that we're back off daylight savings time, the lack of afternoon photography light is depressing.  I have been frantically sewing, photographing and incubating, although I'm not convinced that the latter can be executed "frantically", especially since that process is responsible for a noticeable and incredibly exasperating drop in my productivity.

Anyway, I photographed a few lovely weddings this summer.  An extension of this visual snippet can be found in the Chromatophobic wedding gallery.

The Beach wedding

 

 

The Island wedding

The Barn wedding

 

 

bic wedding gallery.

How to Print a Photo Book on the Cheap

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As the saying goes, you get what you pay for, so don't expect a glorious photographic masterpiece when using an online printing service.  Fortunately, there are a few steps you can take to get a result that won't make you recoil in disgust.  Not using Comic Sans is a given, but there are other tricks.

To commemorate Zaika's first year of life I decided to print a book of the year's photos and digitised keepsakes.  Back in the analogue days these were called "scrap books" and contained everything from photos to hair clippings to hand prints to possibly dried smears of stool samples.

Nearly a hundred pages, three hundred photos and over two hundred hours of image processing later I had a print ready tome.  It should not have taken nearly four months to complete, but I'm an overzealous pedant when it comes to a balance of chronology and visual flow, and the book was like an all consuming gigantic puzzle that threatened my precarious sanity.

Back cover: one year of damned formula spoons

If I wasn't a bum with no income and could afford to use a professional printing service, all those hours of digital toil would have resulted in a lovely InDesign document where all the images were precisely formatted and aligned with beautifully positioned text in a tidy inoffensive font.  I would be able to use this lovely InDesign document to print numerous copies of the book for the grandparents.  And if our house burnt down, I would reprint the book from my  precious offsite back up hard drive.  The print quality would be excellent, with superb detail, vibrant, true to file colour and crisp text.

Alas, because I am a bum with pretty much no income, the above "if" is wishful thinking.  Instead I had to settle for a daily deal for an online printing service at about a third of the price of a traditional book.  After all, beggars can't be choosers.  I've printed this way on a couple of prior occasions, and I was aware that the layout software offered by these online services is pretty limited, the text is basic, and that the prints come out nearly 1/2 stop darker.  I processed all images to optimise the workflow taking into account these software limitations.  The pedantic pixel management that this required took a hell of a lot of time.  Then I uploaded the processed photos to discover that the software has been "updated" to even shittier functionality.  I swore a lot and proceeded to work around this mess.

How to make the most of the deficient online book printing services after the jump:

A Week of Food Photography

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If you are what you eat, then I am either a vegetable or a fruit.  Possibly an onion or a kiwifruit.  I eat a lot of those.

Eight days of before/after breakfasts, lunches and dinners of a 10 month old. 

A few months ago I decided to document Zaika's meals.  In part, I thought that it would be an interesting visual study, and in part because my mild OCD directed me to chronicle Zaika's eating preferences for future reference.  As many a great artist, I was inspired by feelings of dejection.  I would present carefully cut pieces of fruit and vegetables, lovingly assembled sandwiches; and I would be presented back with a pile of half chewed, multi-coloured mush, some of it smeared into my hair.  I spent several weeks photographing Zaika's food before and after meal times and eventually extracted just over a week's worth of chronologically accurate images.

I would love to repeat the experiment again, now that Zaika is older and has a better appetite and a much more varied pallette.  However, the level of dedication that this challenge presents is pretty daunting.  Three times a day for several weeks is a commitment.  Firstly I have to be very organised with the meals because we all eat together, and it's tricky to time everything perfectly.  Also, Zaika finds the contents of my plate to be more palatable than the identical culinary presentation on her tray, so a portion of her many a meal comes off my serving.  Lastly, the gastronomic envy bounces in both directions, and I frequently find myself finishing off Zaika's leftovers.  I'm like a family dog, crawling under the high chair, eating stray chickpeas off the drop cloth.  Exceptionally dignified.

Nom nom nom mmmm pasta

Undustrial II

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Keller Kinder playtime:

Tony - the happy birthday boy

 

 

 NUTE:

  

from adorable  ...AWWW

to aggressive ..ARGHH

 

Hello My Sweetness

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Earlier this year I finally started making jam after coming across some neglected plum trees and dense blackberry bushes.  JamOff inspired even more experimentation, so now the only obstacle between me and jam making is jar shortage...

Wedding drums

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Last few years have been wedding intense, and there are still a few in planning.  This one took place in a Wairarapa vineyard.