.

I rotated 180 degrees from where the previous photograph was taken, and got this family portrait overlooking George’s River in the St George region of Sydney.

If you’re a parent, imagine having three children under five in a studio & trying to get natural & relaxed photographs. I think the photographs speak for themselves.

The blatant plug for my services, a link to my contact page if you’re interested in a Photographer that shoots family portraits in the great outdoors of Sydney.

As for my blog, shots highlighting my boys.

Hard to win the ball with your eyes closed

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us” Walt Emerson

Not in Australia

a bit of architecture

More pretty flowers

If you look carefully, you can see my son on the bridge looking at the fish.

One of the shops we came across.

Only a handful of the photos I took that day. All these were taken at the same location within walking distance of each other.

In Sydney, Australia, the Greek community celebrates it firstly with a remembrance ceremony held at Martin Place. It is then followed by a march down George St to the steps of the Sydney Opera House, where the day is celebrated with singing & dancing.

This photograph I liked because it highlights the contrast of the different uniforms. The ‘Greek Digger’, Army, Navy, Greek National costume.

The NSW State Premier Kristina Keneally, was there as well, very photogenic as usual.

All aspects of the Greek Community were represented, in this photo we have the principal & students from All Saints Grammar.

Many dressed in various interpretations of the Greek National Costume having a great time.

A sea of hats, proudly brought to you by All Saints Grammar

Students from St Euphemia, with the crowd sitting on the steps of the Sydney Opera House on the right, the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the background. If you look carefully on arch right next to the Greek flag, you can see the people on top of the bridge doing the ‘bridge climb‘.

Finally, the one that brought a smile to everyone’s face. This kid is so young he could barely walk, yet here he is in the Greek National Costume strutting his stuff.

ZHTO H ELLAS!

If you’re looking for a photographer for 2010, all I can suggest is don’t procrastinate. Within a week of getting back on line, enquiries have started to come in and the first few months of 2010 is starting to look quite busy.

I’m looking forward to a great Australian summer in Sydney, and should start posting pics & stories in the not too distant future.

Cheers.

If you are looking for another photographer, visit my contact page here:

http://kapaniris.com/contact.php

BIG thanks to those that have already sponsored my MO to GRO. As promised, picture update below.

Remember, I’m doing this to raise funds for two men’s health issues that don’t get enough exposure or funds: Prostate Cancer and Depression.
Sponsor my Mo by clicking this link

How can you help? Donate to my Mo by either:

Click this link and donate online using your credit card or PayPal account, or
Write a cheque payable to ‘Movember Foundation’, referencing my Registration Number 1408621 and mailing it to:
Movember Foundation
PO Box 292
Prahran VIC 3181

Remember, all donations over $2 are tax deductible.

The money raised by Movember is used to raise awareness of men’s health issues and donated to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and beyondblue – the national depression initiative. The PCFA and beyondblue will use the funds to fund research and increase support networks for those men who suffer from prostate cancer and depression.

Did you know:

Depression affects 1 in 6 men….most don’t seek help. Untreated depression is a leading risk factor for suicide.
Last year in Australia 18,700 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer and more than 2,900 died of prostate cancer – equivalent to the number of women who will die from breast cancer annually.

Update: 1st November:

Here is a “clean” shaven image I took this morning, stay tuned for updates.

Kapa

Full frame.

Cropped

It’s a shame I have to dumb down the images for the web, the amount of detail and colour in this image is amazing when viewed full screen. Although in this image you can see a bit of the bottle brush hanging of it’s beak.

One day in July, I went to the park with my nephew’s to grab some natural portraits of them. This candid is going to be my very quick entry for this month

Today’s entry hit the nail on the head.

I’m guilty…… since switching to digital my personal photo’s are spread on the harddrives on my laptop, desktop, external USB drives, and burnt to DVD’s. The kid’s photo albums haven’t been updated in a couple of years yet almost a week doesn’t go by without me taking a photo of them……… looks I’ll be playing catchup over the next few months.

When was the last time you printed photos from your digital camera, do you have a backup ?

http://whattheduck.net

Sebastian, had a studio session with him & his parents, gorgeous baby blues and yes, this one has been heavily post processed, playing around with different options to see how they look.

Now what month will go by without me shooting a christening or baptism. Young Diora making some great eye contact with the camera right at the crucial part of the service

Short and sweet this entry, hope you enjoyed it.

The young man looking happy & content.

Some back to basic framing, making use of negative space.

Finally, he had enough.

So, his parents stripped him & we got some nudies.

Check out my new photography website, or browse the boring old one here

Stage 2 is the difficult one, that’s updating the images and the gallery. Some of the images displayed on my website are more than seven years old, shot on film & scanned !!!!!! Can you spot them?

Now quite a bit of thought went into these cards, which I’m proud to say I designed myself using photoshop.

Front: I believe all photographers business cards should have an image on them, I mean why have just words, pictures of equipment, a strip of film or something like that, you’re a photographer so use this opportunity to show of your work. I used on of my favourite images and one I have received a lot of positive feedback on, not to mention becoming a finalist in a competition I had entered it in. I kept the information on the front to a minimum, the image actually takes up the entire card, some basic contact information is overlayed on top of the wall.

Rear: My original design included a list of the events I photograph, it listed: weddings, christenings, baptisms, event, families, portraiture, corporate, product, real estate, etc, etc. My final design as you can see omitted all these leaving white space or room for notes. This is just as important as the card itself. If you don’t believe me, just go through all the business cards you have kept and see how many have additional information written on them either by yourself or the person that gave it to you.

Many times there’s something additional I want to add when I meet someone and give them my card, writing down my suggestion for a digital camera, the web address of one of my regular haunts, one of my favourite restaurants, or even an on-the-fly quote.

Business cards are an inexpensive and very effective form of marketing, and here’s a few quick tips for you:
- always give 2 cards, one for them to keep (with the notes you wrote on them) and one they may pass onto someone they know (with notes of their own).
- give 4-5 cards to your clients with their final product. Since they’re happy with your work they’ll have no problems passing your contact information onto their family and friends.
- keep them in your wallet, camera bag, car, home, studio, lunch box. No matter where you are, make sure you never have to say “I don’t have one with me”.

A remote flash trigger, is used to fire a flash that is not connected to the camera. If anyone has seen me work, you will have noticed that I’m a fan of using and off camera flash, usually with a long cord. These remote triggers will allow me some more creativity, flexibility and options when shooting. Here are some examples of what I can achieve with these.

My wife, cooking a delicious dinner (and telling me to go play somewhere else). The foreground of this image is lit using the ambient light from the kitchen, a tad underexposed however it suits the picture. The flash is sitting on the bench top behind her, giving her a “rim light” around her body & hair.

With a remote trigger, you can also place the flash into objects & confined areas. This will give the illusion of a light source from somewhere unexpected. My young one looking into his backpack.

And of course, the very old trick of making it look like the light source is coming from the computer screen. In all images of someone working on a computer, you can guarantee that the glow coming from the computer screen was generated by a remote flash.

There was a couple of personal projects that just had to be done, I was on a very tight timetable with a lot to do. After a number of 15 hour days and help from family, finished on time.

There was also the Greek Festival of Sydney, which I wanted to attend. As luck would have it, never made it.

Inspired by a mate, New York Photographer Christos Hountas who updated his website recently, I have also started making changes to my website. They are still in “development” mode and I won’t make any promises as to when the new site will be on-line. What I can say is the colour scheme & layout will be very similar to my blog, however the look, feel & navigation will be similar to what I currently have. The website & blog will be more integrated, with links & references between the two seamless. More importantly for clients, I will be implementing a new on-line gallery as well as information & resource pages however these will be available some time after the new site is on-line. If you have any idea’s or suggestions, feel free to drop me an e-mail, use either the contact page from my main web-site or post a comment here.

Photography wise I have been busy as well. I have experimented with some high-key shots using multiple flash units, something I want to try with a bride however since the setup takes time (something which is usually scarce on a wedding day) I need to have the setup process down to a fine art otherwise it ain’t gonna happen. I even managed to shoot a couple Greek Orthodox Christenings, the first was twin boys, James & Peter (Dimitri & Panayi) followed by another boy, Jamie (Dimitri). One of the options I provide to clients is to provide them the images I shoot on CD/DVD that have been batch converted straight out of the camera, no additional editing or fine tuning on my behalf. This is great for parents as it allows them to pick & choose which pictures they want to print at their own leisure, and also saves them dollar$ as they don’t pay for my time to convert & print for them.

The drawback to this is that I find myself almost a month later I have not gone through the images in detail to pick, edit & post images for my blog. If you have followed my previous posts, I like to select about four to six images from each job, maybe stick to a theme, things I like, photographs that caught my eye, things that made me laugh, whatever.

Today, I have just done a very quick scan & picked just one picture. It’s one of the twins (James) in sitting in the baptismal Font.

I picked this one because this shot was actually quite difficult to get. If you have ever been to a Greek Orthodox Christening, at the time I took this photo, you have the Priest holding the child in the Font, the godparent is standing right next to him, next to the godparent you have the Priest’s assistant. To add to the chaos (apart from the fact it was a twin christening), I also had two over zealous paparazzi to deal with. I don’t have an issue with family & friends shooting around me, I’ll even help them out if I have time. To get this image I had to hold the camera over heads & shoot blind, relying on the autofocus to do it’s job & my experience to ensure I had the framing about right (hence the square crop .

Anyway, here is an extract of the e-mail she sent me:

St Nicholas Center, a non-profit with US tax-exempt status, exists solely to spread the word about St Nicholas and to help people understand who Santa Claus really is. We provide information about the saint, customs from around the world, and a large variety resources for churches, schools, and families to use to celebrate his feast day. There is also a section for children with on-line activities.

Carol has a simple request, if I had any photo’s of churches dedicated to St Nicholas and if she could use them on the website. Although I didn’t, I promised that when in the area I would take some for her.

Today, on the way home from a twin christening (more on that when I post process the images), I stopped to take a few quick shots.

The Greek Orthodox St Nicholas in Marrickville, Sydney, NSW.

Technically, this photo was taken at the wrong time of the day, next time I have to ensure I’m in the area first thing in the morning, however this will suffice until then.

On another note, I want to point out why I really hate power lines, apart from the fact they look ugly and people get killed on them, have a look at what they do to architecture pictures.

For those not familiar, it is where a service is held on the edge of the water, and at the time the water is blessed, a Cross is tossed into the water. This is the signal for males to jump into the water and be the first to attempt to retrieve the Cross.

In Sydney, the service is held at Yarra Bay, La-Perouse. It’s a great day which is celebrated as a festival with music, food & a great day out.

Those wishing to participate in retrieving the cross, swim out to a pontoon after registering for the event.

A fleet of boats were anchored nearby to witness the event from the water, some sporting the traditional Greek colours.

Waiting on the pontoon for the signal to begin.

They’re off

The victorious winner, by at least 4 lengths.

This is the first time I have even tried to photograph fireworks, so the above is the best of a bad bunch. The “squiggles” are supposed to be straight, it’s the result of hand-holding the camera instead of using a tripod for long exposures. I knew it wasn’t really going to work however I had my camera with me & wanted to give it a go anyway.

A big thanks to Nick & Irene, a couple friends with an beautiful apartment that overlooks Sydney Harbour right at The Rocks. They opened their doors to many people, were great hosts, & it was much appreciated. We so close we could smell the gunpowder, & the fireworks were literary right in front of us. The kids absolutely loved it.
New Years Resolutions, I actually made one many years ago I haven’t broken, and that was not to make any more New Years Resolutions so I’m not going to begin now.

I wish everyone all the best in 2007, & may it be filled with health, love & happyness.

Kapa