Reunited with my Cokin filters!

The bag of vintage camera gear my parents recently dragged out of their garage contained my two old Pentax film cameras as well as a forgotten stash of Cokin filters. Whoohoo! It was like opening a little treasure chest from the past.

In the days before I'd even heard of Photoshop, I used Cokin filters to overlay all sorts of effects to my photos. The plastic plates slotted into a bracket that screwed in to the end of the lens. There were coloured filters, neutral density filters, graduated filters to make skies really blue, and my favourite - the starburst filter!

I remember taking hundreds of pictures back then, testing out the various filters in different lighting conditions, and on many unsuspecting suspects. Picture fruit bowls in sepia. And orange. And graduated blue. Noice!

The Cokin bracket is too small to fit on to any of my current Canon lenses, but the filters work fine when I hand hold them in front of the G12...

Check out the starburst below! This opens up a whole new world of opportunities for the G12. Happy days! Or shouuld that be rose coloured glasses?


15 days in and loving the 365 Challenge!

15 days in, and I'm loving getting back into the challenge of taking a photo a day. It's a great way to learn all of the (many) functions of the G12. What a snazzy little camera! Talk about the perfect present for me!

Here are some of the photos from the second week of my 365 of 40 challenge. The week started last Sunday at Byron Bay, where I got to test out the Miniature filter. It basically keeps a horizontal slit across the middle of the image sharp, and blurs the top and bottom, to give a tilt-shift effect. Apparently looking down on subjects provides the best results....


In this photo, I tried out the macro function, which I'm loving! I'm still stalking the Canon 100mm f/2.8 L macro lens for my SLR bodies, but the in-camera macro feature on the G12 is pretty damn good for a compact camera. Hand-made Italian bickies, anyone??


More macro fun, as I reminisced about Thai food and this model of a Thai food cart we bought in Bangkok over Christmas. Love the detail in the photo considering it was all about 10cm tall.


Trying out a bit of food photography, with a *very* tasty hot chocolate from our local Italian gelato bar. Hot chocolate so thick you could stand the spoon up in it...loving the fact that the G12 is small enough to fit in my handbag, and whip out at restaurants :)


I think there's a theme starting to develop here....more macro food photography, with the hand-made gnocchi created by Michael. The only real issue with this shot was that the steam from the pasta kept fogging up the glass. Fabulous gnocci though!


Here I played around with some wilting birthday roses. The G12 has in-camera post-processing options, like overlaying colour filters. Here, I photographed the roses in colour and converted them to sepia in camera. I also used the iContrast feature to bump up the contrast. There are other filters like B/W, vivid colour, selective colour. All the more reason to keep going with this camera...I haven't yet used them all!


And finally today's shot - having a bit of fun with some film I found in the back of two of my old film cameras my parents had retrieved from their garage and decided to finally lay rest at my place. More macro photography - the camera was just a couple of centimetres away from the film.


Feel free to follow the challenge each day on my Facebook page or my Flickr stream :)

Loving the G12! Is it as good as the 7D for still life images?

It was *yet* another wet weekend in Brisbane, and I had a bit of time to photograph some of the beautiful flowers I received for my birthday last weekend.

I thought I'd experiment and shoot the same flower set up...with the G12 vs the 7D + 24-70mm L lens. We're talking about a $2,400 difference in the cost of the gear taking the photo here...

Here are the two images....obviously the composition is slightly different, but both were shot hand held in a light tent to give this high key effect....for the image shot with the 7D, I used an off-camera flash. For the image with the G12, there was no flash, I just over-exposed the image by two stops.

Can you pick which image was shot with which camera?






In case you wondering, I shot the first image with the G12 and the second inage with the 7D. For a little compact camera, the G12 and all its manual capabilities is pretty damn impressive, don't you think!