Yes, that is a gold-tipped, bright red, high-heel shoe on top of a train carriage at Southern Cross Station around 9am on Thursday morning.
Hopefully there was a fun story to go along with this!
Random tangent (blog)
Ameel Khan's personal blog. This is a blog about life, technology, the internet, science, skepticism, feminism, books, film, music, and whatever other random stuff I come across or happen to be interested in today.
Yes, that is a gold-tipped, bright red, high-heel shoe on top of a train carriage at Southern Cross Station around 9am on Thursday morning.
Hopefully there was a fun story to go along with this!
On this week’s photo walk I decided to use only my long lens (50-230mm APSC, which is 77-352mm full-frame). This let me really zoom-in and isolate my subjects in the frame, which can be challenging, but is fun to do.
Nadia and I took three weeks off to go visit friends and family in Pakistan. Naturally I took several photos as we travelled from one place to the next :)
We had an almost-10pm flight out of Melbourne, so we had dinner at Melbourne Airport right after we checked-in.
Neither of us minds having seats near the bathroom and neither of us minds sitting right at the back of the plane, so we picked seats in the second-last row of this Boeing 777 since that row has just two seats on the window side :)
Abu Dhabi Airport’s brand new Terminal A is quite roomy (having been built for future growth) and is a surprisingly comfortable place to hang out for a ten-hour layover.
Yay Karachi!
It took us almost forty hours to get back from Islamabad to Melbourne (via Karachi and Abu Dhabi). This was the start of our first leg.
This was the start of our second leg, waiting in the international departure lounge.
This is towards the end of our twelve hour layover in Abu Dhabi.
We’re making sure to stretch our legs and stand as much as we can before our non-stop, thirteen hour flight to Melbourne.
All aboard and ready to boogie (aka sleep) on this lovely Boeing 787 (yay!).
We hadn’t been back to Pakistan since late 2019, so this trip was very much overdue and it was a great way to start the year.
Since moving to Australia in 2006, this is only the second time that Pakistan has played Australia in the Boxing Day Test at the MCG.
Nadia and I attended day three of the last test match, back in 2016.
This year I attended day one of the match with a bunch of family friends.
Here are some of the photos I took while I was there.
It’s week two of shooting at only 27mm (which is 18mm on my mirrorless APS-C sensor camera). Like I predicted last week, this focal length works much better when you’re walking through a city centre where everything is closer together. You can make the most of the wide-angle view to capture the scene/vibe and it is easier to get closer to people and objects.
Next week I move on to shooting at only 35mm, which I think I’ll find more challenging. I’m used to loosely composing my frame at 27mm and then zooming in or cropping a little in post to get the photo I actually want. From next week I’ll have to do all that before I take the photo. I’m looking forward to seeing how I go :)
Also, two things have changed since I started on this ‘one focal length at a time’ experiment:
I’m going to add the 4omm focal length into the mix (in addition to 35, 55, and 85mm). This is because Fujifilm have an excellent 27mm pancake lens I would love to have, and that translates to a 41mm focal length on my camera. If I find 40mm-ish works well for me, that might be the first prime lens I get.
I’m considering investing in only weather-sealed lenses and, in the future, only in weather-sealed camera bodies. I live in Melbourne, Australia where it rains 139 days a year. And because neither my current camera body nor my current lenses are weather sealed, I can’t go out and take photos when it’s raining.
In the short term I plan to buy a rain cover for my camera, so this isn’t something I need to address straight away. But if I am going to be buying a new lens in the next few months, I might as well try to buy one that’s weather sealed and, therefore, something I can keep long term.
(Assuming this is within my budget, of course, since sometimes it’s only the more professional versions of Fujifilm’s lenses that are weather sealed. That 27mm pancake lens I mentioned above is both decently priced and weather sealed, by the way, which is why it’s one of my front runners.)
I guess we’ll see which way I’m leaning by the end of this experiment.
But for now it’s time to say goodbye to 27mm and move on to 35mm. Let’s go!
The last time I walked along Harbour Esplanade in Docklands to take photos it was a cold, overcast day. But this time the sun was out and, by the end, I was walking around in a t-shirt.
The other thing different from last time is that all this week (and also next week) I am restricting myself to taking photos at only a 27mm focal length (which is 18mm on my mirrorless APSC camera).
Why?
I think you can be more creative, and also learn a great deal, when you impose restrictions or limitations on yourself
I’m considering buying a prime lens but I don’t know which one I want to get first so, over the next eight weeks, I’ll be forcing myself to shoot at only one focal length every fortnight (27mm, 35mm, 55mm, and 85mm, respectively)
The good thing is that I’m very comfortable shooting at 27mm. That’s because the main (prime) lens on pretty much all smartphone cameras is 27-28mm. So I have years of experience composing photos at this focal length.
Which I presume is why, even though I have the whole 27-85mm focal length range at my fingertips these days, 31% of my share-worthy photos from my main lens are at 27mm.
When I look through my Capture One library, though, many of the photos I’ve taken at 18mm, I’ve ended up cropping just a little.
That suggests two things:
The 31% of photos I’ve taken at 27mm should probably be lower, given I likely crop many of my photos to 35mm.
Years of smartphone photography have made me lazy when it comes to composing my photos [1]. Instead of zooming in a little with my lens or stepping closer to my subject (ie zooming in with my feet), I do a relatively loose composition because I know I’m going to crop the photo when I edit it.
When I walked along Harbour Esplanade this time, I was more deliberate with my compositions. As a result, I did either no cropping or only some thoughtful cropping of my photos this time (like ones I cropped to square).
Basically, by imposing these limitations, I’m already upping my composition game. So even if I don’t end up buying a prime lens at the end of this eight week exercise, I expect I’ll have improved as a photographer.
Anyway, enough with the talking. Here are the photos. They’re not all that good, to be honest. And at least three of them were crying out for a longer focal length composition. Oh well. This is how you learn.
WTF is MPavillion? Find out.
This photo would have worked so much better with, say, an 85mm lens that I could have used to isolate the subject better from the background (which would have also been blurry).
This photo would have worked better with a longer focal length lens too. I didn’t want to get closer to the woman (for obvious reasons) and I didn’t want the seagull to fly off either. So we’re stuck with lots of empty space around the subjects, instead of a tighter composition.
Learn more about Cow Up a Tree, if you’re interested.
This another photo that could have done with a zoom-in. I wanted to focus on the delivery driver and the yellow insulated box she had on her motorcycle.
When it comes to street photography (which is what I mostly do) the 27mm focal length is more about context-setting and showing off the vibe of the place. Unless you get really close (or you’re already in a tighter space) you can’t get much subject isolation. And it’s challenging to focus on details – or at least arrange the composition such that the viewer’s eyes are drawn to the detail.
While I like shooting in 27mm, I think I’m going to really enjoy shooting in 35mm. But I have to wait a couple of weeks before I get there.
Next week I’ll be walking through the middle of the city on a Friday afternoon, and I think the 27mm focal length will work much better there. I’m looking forward to that.
[1] Yes, high-end modern smartphone cameras now have secondary lenses with a longer focal length. Most of these are still not as high quality as the main lens though. So it’s still often better to take a higher quality photo with the main lens and then crop, instead of taking a lesser quality photo with the secondary (zoom) lens.
We celebrated a friend’s birthday with a picnic at Kingsford Smith Ulm Reserve in Glenroy.
I haven’t looked up the history of this place, but given it is located just north of Essendon Fields Airport in Melbourne, I’m guessing they named it after pioneering Australian aviators Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm.
Here are some of the photos I took while I was there.
I guess it’s particularly appropriate to be publishing a photo of two singing magpies, given the Collingwood Magpies won the 2023 AFL Grand Final today :)
Nadia and I went for a picnic to Coburg Lake Reserve so, naturally, I took some photos :)
Following on from my previous post, the other half of the fun of watching a live sporting event is (obviously) watching the match itself :)
Half the fun of attending any live sporting event is getting to attend it with thousands of people.
This FIFA Women’s World Cup (football) was held in Australia and New Zealand this year, and I attended two of the round-of-sixteen matches held in Melbourne. (I did have tickets to two other matches, but work got in the way and I wasn’t able to attend those.)
One of my favourite things to do at large events like this is to document the behind-the-scenes stuff that goes on. I am a producer / events organiser / behind-the-scenes person at heart, and I do enjoy seeing – and, evidently, photographically documenting! – how things are run.
Nadia’s publication, the Australian Multilingual Writers Project, was invited to present a session at the 2023 Emerging Writers’ Festival in Melbourne.
I went along and took a few photos :)
9.5 degrees; feels like 0.5. This is why we wear a coat.
Every Friday after work I walk through the Melbourne city centre so I can take some photos. I took these ones on a walk along the Yarra River.
Photo of a red-and-gold helicopter (an Airbus EC130) seconds away from landing on a helipad build in a pontoon on a wide river in the middle of a city. A sign on the side of the pontoon reads ‘Microflite Melbourne Helipad’. In the background of the photo are several tall and short buildings, as well as a bridge across the river.
Here are some photos of buildings and cranes that I’ve taken over the last few days.
Here’s a bunch of transport-related photos I’ve taken over the last few days.
It hit 41 degrees Celsius in Melbourne on Friday. So, to avoid commuting during the evening peak, I went home early. But, before I got on the train, I walked around the Southern Cross Station and took a few photos :)
This is personal website of Nadia Niaz and Ameel Zia Khan. Here we document our lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia