Death!

No, come back! It's not going to be gruesome or morbid. It might be a bit sad, but I hope it'll be interesting.

The other day I took a little walk up to Maddingley General Cemetery, which is not too far from my place. I put the link to the map because Google will tell you that the cemetery is in the middle of town! That is a shop, an optician from memory, which is also the registered office of the cemetery's trustees.

Anyhoo. I put together some gear and went for a stroll on an usually sunny late May morning.

The gear that I took with me was:-

• Nikon D90 - gotta have a camera for this sort of thing!
• Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 lens - given the crop sensor on the D90, this is my 'nifty fifty'.
• Tamron 60mm f/2 lens - my macro lens (it's also a great portrait lens, I love this baby!)
• Nikon SB600 flash - in case I needed some fill light
• Orbis Ringflash adapter - great for macro work.

I didn't take a bag, just slung the Orbis on my shoulder, Tamron 60mm in one pocket of my shooting vest (yes, shooting vest. Don't judge me), flash in the other and off I went.

When I got there, it looked just like your average small country town's general cemetery, with different sections for Catholics and Protestants. I didn't see any sections for non-Christians though. I don't know if the cemetery is still in use. I didn't see any fresh plots, but the latest dates I noticed were only from last year so it probably is. There's certainly plenty of spare space.

I had a look around some of the more modern areas. There are some large mausoleum-type burials, mostly with Italian and some Greek names representing Bacchus Marsh's more recent history as a market gardening centre.

Most of the 'recent' burials looked to be well tended and most had full grave layouts and marble or granite headstones.

This one was a bit more on the 'budget' side.

I had actually thought that this was just a temporary placeholder while the monumental masons were making up the actual headstone, but the date of death is from 1986, so I guess not.

Another nearby grave was not quite so well tended.

Maybe the Connors were just a prickly bunch.

Then I made my way back to the older area where there are burials from the pioneer days. Now we're getting interesting!

Some of the burials were not tended at all and had no headstones or other markers.

Where there were markers, the thing that stands out is how many children died very young in the late 1800s. Life must have been tough for those early pioneering types.

Even if you made it through childhood, you weren't guaranteed a long life. Poor Nellie was only 18 but I imagine that in the late 1800s she'd have been "husband high" and living her own life. Sadly, her grave marker shows no indication of a husband, nor does is say who erected the stone for her. There is a large area of blank space as if there would be other burials in the same plot, but there the story ends.

Here's an interesting one. Alexander Murdoch, an immigrant from Scotland like me, seems to have been remembered quite recently. He has a very modern headstone compared to the others who died in the nineteenth century.

Another family who lost young children were the Andersons. This one, though, stood out for me because of Mr Anderson's unusual middle name. He would have been born around 1826; I wonder if he was born here.

Moving into the 20th century, we find the a grave marker, the side of which commemorates Charles Lyle who died 2½ years after he took part in the landing at Gallipoli. Did he make it home from the war or is this a memorial marker? I don't know, but I salute him.

As I headed out of the older section of the cemetery, I discovered that some people had apparently chosen to be interred in what looks like a wood-fired pizza oven! I have no idea of the significance of this monument. If you know, please tell me in the comments.

One last look back at the more modern area. I believe these are headstones marking cremations. I like the tension between the curve of the line of markers and the straight line of the boundary hedge.

An interesting postscript: As I was leaving, just outside the cemetery fence I found a little teddy bear lying in the grass. He was all mildewed and mouldy and covered in dirt, but he was wearing a white coat with some sort of health provider's logo. Perhaps he was a comfort bear given to a small child at a hospital or hospice. I wonder if the loss of the bear caused more tears than attending a funeral may have caused for this hypothetical child. We shall probably never know.

My friend Allan Saw (Flickr, Twitter) was moved by the fate of this poor teddy bear and used his wonderful photographic and post production skills to create this image of a Teddy Bear Wake.

(Note that this image is © Allan Saw and may not be used for any purpose without his permission)

I think that the concept of the wake, even the funeral, are important. Not for the dead, but for the living. It is necessary for the living to grieve, to celebrate the life of the dead person so that they can move on with their own lives.

I'd appreciate your thoughts on life, death and photography in the comments.

Good light.

Werribee Impressions

JC-110820-13, originally uploaded by justjimwilldo.

A late night, hand held, high ISO, 1 second exposure that came out of the camera just like this (well, except for the copyright).

This is my current favourite image of mine. You may see it around in a few different places!

Cricket photography.

Nothing to do with the insects...

...although this is actually a cicada, not a cricket!

I love the game of cricket. I'll watch any game in any format I can find. On TV or live at the ground.

I particularly love test cricket. This is the form of the game where a match can, and ideally should, last for five days, and even after that time it is possible to not get a result. Although it is increasingly infrequent, test match cricket can end in a draw. Note that a draw is not the same as a tie. There have only been two tied test matches, one in Brisbane in 1960 and one in Chennai in 1986. This is a very rare result; the two thousandth test match will commence at Lord's tomorrow (July 21, 2011).

Over the past four years I have been a non-playing* member at the Darley cricket club in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria and I'm just about to start my second season as a committee member.

For the first two seasons I was the official scorer for the First XI side but for the last two seasons I have been attending matches as a photographer. Hence, finally, the reason for this blog post!

Now cricket is played on a large, oval shaped ground and most of the action takes place near the centre of that ground. What we need here is some long glass. I use the Tamron SP AF 200-500mm f/5.3-6.3 usually in the range of 300-400mm. Note that I use a Nikon D90 so the smaller sensor gives some extra telephoto advantage, but that's a story for another post.

You will see that, given the range of aperture of this lens, I am going to struggle to suck in light in low light situations, and to get a nice shallow depth of field to isolate the action from the background. Fortunately cricket is a bit of a fair weather game and is usually played in good light conditions. It does pay to keep shooting when the play stops though.


For the second problem, one of our grounds is on the side of a hill. No, the ground is level, but shooting from one side means that there is nothing on the other side for miles.


So what do you shoot? I have tended to shoot everything. Three to five shots at 4.5fps of almost every delivery, the same or more of catches and run outs, a couple of shots of fielding to make sure I get at least something of every team member.

This is too much! It is a huge amount of wear and tear on my shutter and makes the job of culling prior to editing simply unbearable! I must learn to ease back a little.

I also tend to watch most of the game through the lens. Some people say that cricket is a slow game, but when the action happens, it happens quickly.

And there is plenty to shoot. There is the batting. Sometimes the batsman gets the better of the bowler and scores runs.


Sometimes the bowler wins that contest.


There are catches.


Appeals (I love the triple symmetry in this one).


And the one the bowlers all love to see, wickets with the bails flying in the air.


Don't forget the crowd, they like to get involved as well.

(Edit: Ok, maybe "crowd" is a slight exaggeration.)

And then there are the "What the ...?" moments. A batsman and the fielders should always keep their eye on the ball. Sometimes you get distracted by a flying, broken bat though! Psst! The ball's on this side, guys.


For those that love both cricket and photography, it is a wonderful way to spend an afternoon. Of course there are the after-match beers, which always taste better when washing down a victory.


So, do you shoot cricket? What about other sports? Leave a comment with a link to your favourite sports shot.

Special thanks to my Twitter friend Sarah for encouraging me and keeping me supplied with cricketing photos during the Australian off-season. Sarah is the official photographer for Kent County Cricket Club. Check out her work here, or follow her on Twitter.

*For all my love of watching cricket, I have never played the game apart from school-yard lunchtime knocks.

Good Light.

Clarity

Nothing to do with Darren Clarke winning the Claret Jug trophy at the British Open golf tournament in Sandwich, Kent!

This is about the clarity slider in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.4.1 (hereafter called LR3).

The clarity slider has been available in Lightroom since version 1.1 and as a brush setting since LR3 (I think).

Clarity has been called the “make your photo better” slider by Adobe and NAPP resident expert Matt Kloskowski and many, many photographers have used it as a brush setting (small brush, clarity at about -50) as a skin smoothing tool in portrait shots.

But what happens when you crank it up the other way? Turn the knob to 11, as it were.

Well clarity is all about lines and edges so when I took this shot of beautifully patterned tree bark, I knew it was a candidate for some extreme clarity setting.



So I cranked the clarity up to 100 over the entire image, did the same with contrast and added a slight vignette to hide the boring bits direct the viewers eye to the centre of the image, and here's what I ended up with.



Do you use the clarity slider in LR3? Leave links to your favourite shot in the comments and let me know what you did, why you did it and why you like the results.

Good Light.

SilverShoes

SilverShoes, originally uploaded by justjimwilldo.

Bee In Flight

BeeInFlight_01, originally uploaded by justjimwilldo.

I like this. A lot. It has some technical problems but I like the look and feel of it.

Water Drops on Agapanthus Leaf

LeafWaterDrops, originally uploaded by justjimwilldo.

I got a new lens the other day. Tamron 60mm f2 macro. I'm loving it so far. It can tend to 'seek' a bit on autofocus, but once it finds focus I can tweek it with the focus ring without taking it off of AF. Neat.

It has, as you'd expect, a very shallow DoF at f2 and I'll have to sit down and take some calibration shots of my steel rulers so that I know what to expect.

As you can see, it also provides nice bokeh both in front of and behind the plane of focus.