In the week leading up to Groovin The Moo 2008, Maitland had 260mm of rainfall and literally no sun at all. While setting up crews were working in rivers of water flowing all over the site. Paterson and other low lying areas of Maitland had already flooded in by Friday and if the rain didnt stop then Maitland could have possibly been flooded too! Things were looking pretty bleak to expect sunshine on Saturday. That sounds pretty dramatic, but I was watching the Groovin The Moo website all Friday and they said they would go ahead, rain, hail or shine.

I think all the punters who had bought tickets must have read the same post, because they all went out on Friday and bought every last pair of gumboots you could find between Maitland and Newcastle. Someone within the Groovin The Moo ranks though has done some really good deeds lately and must have had some really good karma stored up, enough for the sunshine gods to smile and turn it on so the show could go ahead. With 12,000 people converging on Maitland Showground all at once, it was instantly turned into a giant mud wrestling pit.

Although the rain had stopped, and the sun was shining, you just couldnt escape the mud. Organisers had done their best by spreading woodchip in the really bad ares, but without any drying time the ground didnt stand a chance. Some of the punters took advantage of the abundance of oozing mud, deciding that it was a good idea to start a WWF style mud wresting bonanza. All that was missing were the bikini clad round number girls. Affectionately the festival has been renamed Groovin The Mud, 2008.

After braving the writhing sexed up mud pit that was the King St Hotel Dance Tent to photograph the Potbelleez, I decided to make my way back to the Triple J Main Stage. It was on my way there that I was lucky enough to witness the mayhem you see all round this post. It was a tag team style WWF 2008, no rules, one in all in, scene of chaos. Bodies were being slammed and the recently outlawed manouvre ‘Arse in Face – Smell my Sphincter’ made an appearance as well. No one was spared from the flying mud, and not even the useless security guards could stop the fun, they didnt want to get dirty. The crowd LOVED it!!

My camera gear escaped unscathed but only just by a whisker. The poor girl I was standing beside though copped a mud pie to the face, and most of the crowd was sprayed by flying mud. Somehow it managed to miss me. The Photos were worth the risk!! Groovin The Mud will hopefully be a one off even and next year will return to Groovin The Moo with great weather and a dry arena!

a

Had the day off work today so I got up early this morning for a quick pre dawn shoot. I had planned on going to Nobby’s Beach but Merewether Ocean Baths just looked too good to go past on the way there. This photo is nothing special but I really like the mood of it. It was an interesting shoot watching the baths come to life as the sun came closer to rising. While I was in my own little world taking photo’s I turned around and people were everywhere, out for their morning swim. Its amazing how busy Merewether beach is that early in the morning. People are very dedicated to their fitness at that hour!

Usually of a weekend I dont bother to get up early as I get up at 5am to start work at 6 every day of the week. I love my weekend sleepins. But I think I might allocate Sunday mornings as my sunrise shoot day. I feel a weekly post coming on…. Sunday Sunrise Shoots. That should keep me motivated especially if people are banging on my door asking to see photos from the day. Hmmm Next weekend I will be in Muswellbrook, anyone know any good photo locations up in The Hunter Valley?

Stay tuned…I have more photos from this morning to come.

a

For the first time in about 10 years, I wasnt working at a gig, nor did I have a camera to my eye, so I went out partying for New Years Eve. My wife and I, plus a few friends decided to go to Newcastles Queens Wharf Brewery to see Grinspoon, The Butterfly Effect and Mammal play, and bring in the new year with our fellow Novocastrians. My finger itched all night kicking myself for not taking the camera but it was good just to be able to kick back for once, have a few drinks and let someone else worry about the photos of the show.

I didnt fully agree with the whole band choices for a New Years show, it was a very heavy night, and not just heavy music. The feeling from the crowd definitely wasn’t a party vibe. I only saw the last 3 bands and can’t comment on the first, but if it wasnt for Grinspoon and their lighter mainstream vibe, then the whole night possibly risked ending in fights. I have watched crowds for long enough to know when things arent going right, and observing the amount of injured meatheads coming out of the moshpit, we just missed a possible serious incident. Grinspoon saved the day. Dont get me wrong, I am a big fan of the three bands and love a good night of heavy music, bit it needs to be in the right situation. The majority of crowd were still having a great time, but I think the Breweery needs to bring back the party bands for New Years Eve. Lets dance and celebrate the coming of the new year instead of screaming and growling about it.

Phil Jameson, Grinspoon’s front man was looking good. Going clean was the best thing he could have done for his career. It takes alot of guts to crawl back from where he was and I respect him for his dedication to his fmaily, the music and his fans. He put on a  good show and it was a bit of a change for me not to see him obviously smashed on stage. The crowd really enjoyed their set, playing all the hits and coming back out on stage for a 4 song encore.

The Newcastle Herald reports today that there were about 30,000 people on the Newcastle Foreshore and a capacity crowd of 10,000 on the Stockton Foreshore. For a crowd of that size the pyro show was just plain embarrassing. I think Newcastle council needs to really take a good hard look at itself and reassess its commitment to the people of Newcastle and the Hunter Valley. There were countless families who lined the shores of Newcastle Harbour venturing out just for the fireworks. I am sure that there were alot of disappointed people going home.

From the brewery I watched waiting for the show to start let alone build to a grand finale. It never came. People all around me were just standing there saying ‘Is that it? Typical Newcastle’. The people around me weren’t real happy about it. As the largest regional centre outside a capital city, we as Novocastrians always seem to get second best from our council. If they arent fighting about bullshit in council meetings they are ripping us off with a second grade new years fireworks show.

Newcastle deserves better!! I hope that the council sees this and starts to do something about it. We deserve a real pyrotechnic display, with a real wow factor and no one saying ‘Is that it?’. The lack of actual pyrotechnics was obvious, and at all times the show just looked cheap. I urge you the general public to let the council know about it if you werent happy, email them and tell them about your disappointment.

After talking to friends today, who travelled all the way from Muswellbrook to see the Newcastle shows because Maitland was cancelled, I found out that after they saw the 9 oclock abomination they didnt even bother hanging around for the midnight show. That shouldnt happen in Newcastle!

To the average family the show was most probably okay, but no-one would have gone home saying it was good and compared to last years show off of Fort Scratchley, it just didnt come close. Why did it go back to Horseshoe Beach anyway? If Newcastle wants to try and bring tourism to the area they had better lift their game. Its about time that Novocastrians spoke up and made the people that run this city accountable. We have a brilliant city with an awesome, friendly population, its about time that we get what we deserve. New Years is a prime opportunity to show off our great city to people from outside the area, lets push for better next year.

Only 2 hours south from Newcastle we have THE BEST pyrotechnic stage in the world. Sydney Harbour is known across the globe for its spectacular fireworks shows and people travel from many countries just to spend New Years on Sydney Harbour. Having a reputation like that the investment of millions of dollars in a pyro show is well worth it. The amount of revenue that is generated from one nights fireworks, in tourism and advertising dollars, repays that to Sydney City many times over. To the people who say it is a waste of money, they dont know what they are talking about. Yes its a lot of money for a pyro show but it is so well worth it, and in worldwise advertising for Australia thats dirt cheap. More importantly, it brings so much joy to the millions of people crammed into every vantage point around the harbour. If you spread the cost out across all the people that see the show, thats about a dollar or 2 per person. Pretty good investment I say for the amount of happiness it spreads.

I have now seen the footage from the Sydney New Years Fireworks spectacular and I am impressed. Obviously there are major budget differences between Newcastle and Sydney, but Sydney put on a real show! The show moved, it built and relaxed then built again to a finale of impressive stature. I take my hat off to Foti’s Fireworks. They put alot of effort into their New Years Fireworks Show and once again will impress the world.

What do you think? Leave a comment and let me know what you thought about the Newcastle Fireworks Craptacular.

a

In no particular order some of my faves from the year are:

Redhead Beach Sharktower

Carrington

Eleebana

My absolute favourite Lightning Bolt photo (pity about the flyscreen)

Redhead Beach

Croudace Bay

Valentine

Warners Bay

Belmont Bay – Squid Ink Jetty

Eleebana Panorama

a

My band photography has been really quiet of late as I am really disheartened by the music industry as a whole at the moment. Its really hard to make any money shooting bands and you can only do things for the love of it for so long before you realise everyone is using you. So heres a few favourite photos of great bands I have shot across the year.

In no particular order they are:

Daniel Johns, Silverchair – Groovin The Moo, Maitland

True Live – Gumball, Pokolbin

Butterfly Effect – 007 Ball, Newcastle Uni Bar On The Hill

Blue King Brown, Cambridge Hotel

Amathyst, Cambridge Hotel

Seabellies, Northern Star Hotel

Wendy Icon, Support to 28 Days, Cambridge Hotel

28 Days, Last Ever Tour, Cambridge Hotel

Joel Plaskett Drummer, Great Escape Festival

Amy Vee, Northern Star Hotel

Stay tuned for part 2.

a

Fireworks are a universal symbol of celebration. Across every culture in the world, fireworks displays are used to signify some sort of momentus occasion. Whether it be the 4th of July in America, The Queens Birthday long weekend in Australia or New Years Eve everywhere across the globe, the lighting up of the sky with a myriad of colours and sounds, excites everyone young and old. I’ve had plenty of questions about How To Photograph Fireworks from friends and the blog community lately so I decided to put together a tutorial for you to read.

Photographing Fireworks with a digital camera is really easy if you know how. Just follow a few simple tips and you will be taking prize winning photos of fireworks in no time.

Being a keen pyrotechnician myself, my love of digtal photography and fireworks has always meant chasing fireworks shows across Newcastle and beyond. In this tutorial I hope to give you some helpful tips to enable you to develop your fireworks photography.

There are no hard and fast rules to photographing fireworks, just a few guidelines to get you on your way. The main thing to remember is to have fun and experiment with what works for you. I have shot many shows and it wasnt until my 2nd or 3rd fireworks spectacular that everything really started to come together and I got some decent shots, so dont be disheartened if the first fireworks show you photograph doesnt produce spectacular results.

I hope that I can pass on some of the mistakes I made so that you dont make them yourself. Practice, practice, practice and you will notice a massive improvement in no time at all.

Equipment For Fireworks Photography

• Camera – Preferably a SLR, either digital or film. The settings will be pretty well the same across both formats, but with film you wont be able to review your photos and adjust your settings straight away. Use a low ISO setting or film to keep noise to a minimum and your shots nice and sharp.
  If you have one of the more expensive point and shoot style digital cameras you may be able to set it to manual mode and fix your aperture and shutter speed. Have a play with its settings and give it a go, you may be surprised at what results you get. Alternatively the landscape mode may be really good as well as it fixes the focal length at infinity.
• Tripod – A tripod is very important when photographing fireworks to keep your camera sturdy. If you dont have a tripod then use anything that enables you to hold it still, like a table or fence post. For a different effect you may want to hand hold your camera but I dont encourage you to do it all the time.
  For point and shoot camera users you might want to look into The FOZI Tripod. Very handy, take anywhere foldaway tripod.
• Cable release or remote shutter release – older style cameras are able to use to cable releases to remotely fire your camera. With most digital cameras you can get a remote control to fire them wirelessly, completely detached from the unit. I recommend using some style of remote release to improve the sharpness of your photos. If you dont have any of these there is always the timer release function, you just have to be really good at anticipating the timing of the show.
• Memory Cards – and plenty of them. Dont be afraid to shoot plenty of frames as every part of the show is different. Learn how to change the cards quickly in the dark as you don’t want to miss anything while changing over. I now leave a spare card in my pocket after I got caught out mid show, having to search through my camera bag to find a spare card. Keep them handy and change them quick!
  If you are using film, have plenty of spare rolls and practice changing film in the dark.
  Update: I got a 4GB CF card for christmas and I am now able to fit a whole show shot in RAW on it whithout changing mid show. This would be the only situation I would recommend using larger memory cards. I wouldnt shoot anything like a wedding with that bigger sized card because if something goes wrong you’ve lost a whole lot of photos for an already stressed out bride. Smaller cards lessen the impact.

Focal Length

Depending on what you are trying to achieve you can use either a wide angle to capture the whole scene or a tight crop to just capture single shells. It will also be dependant on how close or far you are from the show. The closer you are, the wider you will need to shoot to capture the whole display.

Focal length is a personal preference that you will have to decide on on the night. Experiment with what works for you.

If you are in a location like Sydney Harbour on New Years Eve, where the show is spread out across multiple barges down the harbour, then a wide angle is going to suit the situation a lot better.

If you are shooting across water, then experiment with shooting as wide as you can, keeping the water in the foreground. You can get some really cool reflections doing this. Update: Check out my Australia Day Fireworks Photos from speers point shot across the water

Aperture

Fireworks against the dark night sky are very bright so an aperture between f8 to f16 is your best bet. If you use a larger aperture ( lower f stop number ) than f8 you will blow out your highlights very quickly and all the colours will become white. To maintain colour detail and sharpness of my images I usually sit on about f10 or f11. Remember that if colours from the fireworks are being washed out then use a smaller aperture (higher f stop number) to reduce the light hitting the sensor. Only use single stops at a time as each stop higher or lower either halves or doubles the amount of light you let in.

Shutter Speed

In photographic terms, fireworks are a very slow effect. That means that you need to use a relatively slow shutter speed, which is why a tripod is so important to keep your camera still. If you only want to catch single or a few bursts, then a shutter speed of around 1 second will be pretty good. For multiple burst I would recommend anywhere between 5 -10 seconds but pick the part of the show where to use longer exposures.

I try to use longer exposures from the beginning to the middle of the show, when everything is happening a little slower. I watch for the change in momentum when everything begins to build towards the finale, at this point I drop back my shutter speed to prevent the photos looking like a mashup of lines with no definition of bursts. Again this is a personal thing, you know what you want to achieve and it will take a few frames to see what works and what doesnt. I prefer the old saying “Less is more” and try to keep my shots fairly simple.

Every now and again I will do a longer 20 or 30 second exposure but I have never found one that I liked. The shot to the left is a longer exposure (only 10 seconds from memory) and is way too busy, all the ground effects just mash together. What I do like with this one is that it shows just how big some shells really are. The white dot at the bottom in the center, to the left of the launch area, is a Toyota Hilux Ute. It really gives a great persepective on the size of the show. Click on the photo to see it large at my Flickr account.

The most common shutter mode I use is the Bulb setting. For my old Nikon D70s digital camera I have an infrared remote control release. In bulb mode you can press the button once to open the shutter and press again to close it. I never have to touch the camera and all my shots are really sharp. The advantage of using this is that you can be standing there watching the show, and not have your eye to the camera, letting you watch what is happening outside of your frame.

Camera Mode

Its best to use your digital camera in manual mode for shooting fireworks so you can control shutter speeds and apertures, to save the camera from having to think. If you use shutter or aperture priority modes it is more than likely you will blow out all the colours as the camera tries to compensate for the darkness.

Once you get your settings right you will be able to just leave them as they are and concentrate more on your framing and timing. You should only have to tweak it every now and then.

I would recommend a manual focus as well so that your autofocus doesnt keep trying to fix on a focal point each frame and slow down your shooting. Try to set your focus to infinity and leave it there, check mid show and make sure it hasnt moved.

Location

Get there early and scope out the best shooting location. If there is still a little bit of light in the sky you can see what will be in your foregrounds when the fireworks light everything up. Another good idea if you are really serious about getting your framing right, then go to the location the night before so you can see what other lights might be in the area to save you having to relocate mid show due to massive blowout from lights nearby. Try to be upwind so your images dont get washed out by smoke.

I was caught out by this one year when I went to shoot the Speers Point Carols Fireworks from Teralba, which was upwind on the night, but I needed to move due to all the really bright street lights on the road below me, as well as power lines running straight through the frame. I ended up just zooming in and shooting higher for a tighter crop and shot single shell bursts higher in the sky to remove all the crap from my foreground. This photo above is the result of adjusting to suit. I would have liked more foreground but this turned out OK.

You dont have to be right on top of the show to get a good photo. I think that shooting form further away gives you the opportunity to get a better foreground as well as a better perspective on the size of the show.

Timing

Timing is fairly critical if you want to just get single shell bursts, for longer exposures it doesnt matter so much. To time the shell break right, watch the launch location and you will see a feint red glow launching into the sky. When it gets to a decent height (highly technical term there, but every shells size bursts at different heights so you will just have to watch a few and see where they go off. There is no guaranteed height to use) release your shutter. If you are in bulb mode wait until it fades out of the sky and close your shutter. Success with this method depends alot on the timing of the show. If it is a really fast paced full on fireworks show then you may not get a chance to just capture a single shell so just aim for a few. You will be able to tell whats coming up as you get better at tracking the launched shells before they go off.

Final tips:

• Use a long exposure of say 30 seconds and carry some black cardboard or a baseball cap and use it to cover your lens, only remove it long enough to expose selected shell bursts. Be careful though that you dont move the camera in the process and introduce camera shake. I have found this pretty hard to perfect and dont use it very often.
• Tight zooms on the smaller ground effects using a longish exposure creates a really interesting pattern for your shot.
• Know your camera controls inside out so that you can change aperture or shutter speed really quickly in the dark. The longer it takes to change settings the more of the show you will miss.
• Rules schmools, if you know the rules break them, if you dont then dont worry. Play experiment and have fun!
• Update: Make sure that the structure you are standing on is solid enough not to move with people jumping around on it. I found out the hard way when I shot the Australia Day Fireworks at Speers point and found out afterward that the solid looking jetty shuddered when people moved and introduced shake into all my photos.

These few tips should set you well on your way to getting some great results from photographing fireworks with your digital camera. If you have any questions about how to photograph fireworks then feel free to ask me questions and where I can, I will update the post. Good luck and share your results. Happy New Years!!

a

After heaps of websites with inflated printing costs, and ridiculous fees that basically charge you extra if you know how to use Photoshop and Illustrator, I came across VistaPrint. They only charged me an extra few bucks to supply my own design and was really simple to use. If you aren’t comfortable with doing it yourself then the online templates are really simple to use too.

I have ordered my business cards as well as some funky fridge magnets and nearly ordered all sorts of other cool stuff as well. The prices are great and really easy to get what you need. Cant wait till they turn up!

I ended up signing up as a referrer while I was there so follow the referral link below and get a discount on your first order.

http://www.vistaprint.com.au/frfau?frf=253099884786

a

Black suit and white shirt from Vinnies $5 Food Dye $3 Insanity at the Monkerai B&S – Priceless

Anthony Snape

Col Finley and his score of bras!

For those of you who have never been to a real B&S ball I highly recommend the Monkerai Springers. Its a great venue and always turns on a good show. The people are friendly, the bourbon and rum flow freely and everyone is there to have a great time. Theres nothing like good old country hospitality.

a

Green

Banksia

Sea Of Yellow

More to come soon. I will be continuously expanding this range.

a

If you would like to catch them once more they will be performing a final encore show in Maitland at the Clubhouse Hotel on the 28th July. Be there or you will kick your self that you missed it. If you dont manage to get there watch this space as I plan to go along.

Fortunately I was at the Cambridge Hotel last month to catch the show.

As you can see the fans are still the most important thing to the guys. The interaction between the band and the crowd is as energetic as it ever was. I remember going to see these guys when I was just starting to go to clubs and they were relatively new to the scene. I loved their music and energy then as much as I do now. It can be clearly seen above that the guys are still having fun, and I’m sure they will miss all of us as much as we will miss them. So I guess for the last time…….

28 DAYS CAN F^#K OFF!!!!!!

Wendy Icon

Wendy Icon provided support for the guys at the Cambridge. I arrived late so missed the other supports and the last thing I expected to see was a bad 80′s rock mullet clad band on stage. They are a lot of fun, and the crowd loves them but definitely something different.

a