Pics or it didn’t happen!

japan trip - day zero

It has now been four months since I left on my trip to Japan. It was an amazing experience, full of all sorts of surprises that we would have never expected. This post details the prelude to the big trip. Some decided to stay at home and play the new WoW expansion, or at the very least recover from the big 21st party the previous night but a small group of intrepid adventurers decided to forget about sleep and instead head straight to Sydney the morning after.

I was one of those senseless individuals who decided to travel north into the only Australian city that foreigners could name. It was a very early start. Here’s a photo of me trying hard to not look tired.

View from the West Gate Bridge

For anyone who hasn’t had to use it, Avalon Airport is quite a dump. It’s far from everything (I don’t count the western suburbs) and there are no facilities there. But Jetstar flights are very cheap and so are train tickets from the nearby train station. However it does take longer to travel from Avalon to Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs than it does to get from Avalon to Sydney.

Eventually we arrived in Sin City where we waited to check in at the Swissotel. Given that it was about 11am, our room wasn’t ready yet. Waited in the fancy foyer for a while until the room became available. Why are hotel corridors always so tacky?

Our view mainly consisted of the base of the Sydney Tower.

Sydney sure uses a lot of sandstone or sandstone-coloured concrete.

After a short bit of recovery, we explored Sydney a bit. Everyone was still tired from the previous night so not much was achieved. It also explains the noticeable shortage of photographs as you have probably noticed by now.

George and Market Streets

Monorails are an epic fail when it comes to actually transporting people, but I guess they sounded like a cool idea back in the 1980s. We ended up walking around the immediate vicinity of the hotel such as the Queen Victoria Building which is quite like the Melbourne Central shopping centre.

QVB in HDR

Nothing of note really happened in these few hours. I really need to go back up to Sydney for a bit longer next time and with a local to show me around. We did find a pretty nice steakhouse though, which was to be the last big tasty steak for quite some time.

On the way, we got to make a token crossing of the coathanger on the way there and passed through Circular Quay which has one of the most picturesque railway stations in an urban environment in Australia.

Circular Quay station

Oh yeah, later that night, we visited a convenience store where a fight was about to break out because some drunk muzza was complaining about a mobile phone recharge card that didn’t work.

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Poor man’s studio

I originally wrote this post last November but for unknown reasons never published it. I might as well, because I couldn’t find any instructions for my setup on the internet. It’s extremely low cost and only uses a couple of flashes.

The setup basically involves my Nikon D80 with an SB-800 attached, plus a Sunpak 555 connected to the SB-800’s sync port. There is nothing else fancy about it. The white background is just a pile of A3 paper spread out over my desk.

The most confusing part is the Sunpak flash. Mine is second-hand and there is very little documentation regarding how to actually operate it and whether it plays nice with my other gear. Well, it does. It has two ways of syncing to a camera: it has a weird proprietary sync port which requires a cable that I can’t find anywhere, or via hot-shoe or a regular sync cable using the STD-1D module. That’s the cheapest module and is a lot cheaper than the various TTL modules.

Anyway, I point one flash at the subject and the other at the ceiling. Then it’s just a matter of trial and error to get the flash exposure right. After a few minutes, I was producing great quality product shots which I never thought would have been so simple. The only key is to overexpose the flash a bit so that the overlapping edges of the paper blow out and disappear while keeping the subject properly lit. Everything is in manual mode.

Here are some samples. Sorry, I’ll find some more interesting (and a greater variety of) subjects next time.

Calculating flash exposure

• Shutter speed is totally irrelevant because all light is coming from the flashes.
• Aperture can be freely used to adjust depth of field and overall exposure, no need to worry about background exposure because there is none.
• ISO - no need to explain that
• Flash exposures - normally I start at max for both and reduce them until I get a good balance. The direct (non-bounced) flash can be turned down a bit to reduce shadows.

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