This is one of my favourite photographs of Eva taken by my wife summertime of last year and this is

the HDR version. Move your mouse over the image to see the colour original.

With this next image I played around with the colour vibrance and saturation. As with any photography, its all subjective and what I like you may not, but there are plenty of controls to get your desired effect, so I suggest you play around until something catches your eye.

Once again, the image below is the HDR effected one and you
can move your mouse over the image to see the original.

I'm going to be spending more time over the next few months trying to get that classic black and white look that just oozes character. You know the kind, when you get totally lost in an old photo that just takes you back in time. Sure the composition plays a huge part, but perhaps combining this cool HDR Toning tool with a bucket-load of B&W pics might just give me what I'm looking for.

What say ye? Drop your comments below and leave me a link to any HDR images you've been playing around with, I'd love to see them.

I set up my camera (Canon 60D) using the stock 18-55mm lens on my sturdy Vinten tripod in the garage doorway and aimed it at the sky. All very technical here and very thorough. I set all the camera's controls to manual and took a few test shots to see how they looked. Everything appeared to look okay, so I set my intervalometer to take a snap every 5 seconds with 6 second intervals between shots.

With the sun about to cross the path of my camera, I checked back in on the camera every 30 to 60 mins or so to make sure I was still capturing decent looking images. I made a few adjustments along the way to improve colour and contrast, but pretty much left it alone every hour or so. The camera captured about 90 to 100 mins before the battery had to be charged and I only have one for this camera, so I had to get a little creative when putting all the images together to try and make it appear seemless. I decided to speed up a previous part of the time lapse and this covered quite nicely.

See if you can spot the strange single-frame red streak of light the zipped across the screen – freaky!

I decided to use the Vimeo video embed as the playback quality is far better than youtube or facebook.

I've had my eye on a wide-angle lens for some time now and have been flipping the coin between two lenses, the Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 and the Canon EFS 10-22mm USM f3.5-4.5. I opted for the Canon in the end as although the Tokina's lure was the wider 2.8 aperture, I mainly shoot in the studio with lots of available light, so the Canon slightly wider focal range was my most favoured choice. See it here on Canon's website – Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM

With that said, my first shots I took were outside and I've only had the chance to play around with it a couple of times and wanted to share these pics from the garden. I have a portrait photo shoot planned in the studio this week, so I'll post some shots from that later in the week.

I've cropped these down to 640 x 270 as I like the look and they fit my blog nicely.

The next shot below really shows the super-wide 10mm in action as my oval patio table now looks completely round.

I'll put up a comparison between my two new lenses (Canon 10-22mm and the Canon 70-300mm) against the stock 18-55mm lens as this is something I was looking for when researching what lenses to buy next and I think some may find it useful, more on that real soon.

Life Begins At 40, or so they used to say. I turned 40 the other day (8th Sept 2010) and a couple of people asked me what it's like now I've turned 40. It always makes me smile when people ask that on your birthday, as if you must feel so different from yesterday when you were 39 and about 364 days old

Apparently 50 is the new 40 anyway and some say 60 is the new 40. I'm not bothered either way as turning 40 isn't such a big deal – sure I'm going to celebrate turning 40 with a party next month, but that's just an excuse to socialize with so many friends I don't see that often. Turning 40 was no different to turning 30 or 39, it's just a number and I'm actually really enjoying it.

But turning 40 did make me take a close look at where I am right now in life and ask myself if I'm happy.

The answer is yes. Both kids are happy at school, Eva is in a new year growing up fast, she's 8 going on 18 and Oscar is loving his new venture at his new Grammar school. Katrina's at home helping me with articles and transcriptions of my guitar videos and now has a little extra time now to work on her books in hope of one day being published. So, yes I'm happy, because I realised that everything I do in life has one main goal – and that's to be happy. When my family are happy, I'm happy and regardless of workload, health and finances, we're happy and we cherish every minute we get to spend with each other – and to me, that is priceless.

So from this 40 year old fart, I encourage you to take a look around you and see if those who are important to you are happy. Times maybe a little tough right now for most of us and you may not be exactly where you want to be at the moment but, with the love and support of those you hold so dear, anything seems possible and business success and financial freedom (whilst both really nice) seem to pale in comparison to happiness.

Make sure you're striving for your goals for the right reasons and not just to please others, your happiness is extremely infectious, so make sure you get plenty of it and share it out the best you can. I hope to be saying exactly the same thing in another 40 years, so look out for my next post in 2050.

Other folks who celebrate the 8th of September.

Peter Sellers	Martin Freeman	Ann Diamond	Pink	Brook Burke

If you can play an instrument like drums, guitar, keyboards sax etc, etc, then we will likely have musical parts for you to play and would love you to be one of the players on the video. If on the other hand you are more comfortable in the singing department, then its your vocals we want. Even if you can’t do either of those but would still love to be in this years 30DC video, then we will be offering parts of the video where people can mime to the vocal and submit their video clip for use in the master theme song.

When the song has been written, you will be notified about every part that is available to either play along with, sing along with or mime to. The more people involved with this years song, the more successful the track will become and as we are giving all proceeds from the downloaded track to Kiva, we want all the help we can get, so don’t be shy, get involved.

You have until the end of June 2009 to let me know if you’re in the mix or not. Get on the list and I’ll keep you updated. Thanks guys, this is going to be loads of fun – more soon.

The new Canon EOS Rebel T1i is set to excite several new Indie film makers with its HD video capture facility. I personally use a Canon 350D for image capture and a Panasonic HVX200 for HD video capture and the prospect of being able to bolt on a wide spectrum of primes onto a 1080p and 720p capture device is quite exciting. Apparently Canon have crammed the $1500 50D’s sensor and 5D-Mark-II-like 1080p video capture into an $899 entry-level Rebel. 1080p is sadly only available at 20fps, yet a full 30fps is achievable with the 720p setting and should suit most people at this price range.

Canon T1i Specification:

• H.264 video capture @ 1080p/20fps and 720p/30fps with mono sound
• DIGIC 4 processor
• Nine-point autofocusing
• 3.4fps burst shooting for 170 JPEGs or 9 RAW files
• The 50D’s lens peripheral illumination correction
• Three-inch, 920,000-dot LCD (same as the 5D Mark II’s)
• Built-in sensor dust removal system
• Live view
• Canon’s "Creative Auto" mode for light exposure tweaks on full-auto
• Saves to SD/SDHC cards (class 6 or higher recommended)
• $899 with kit lens, $799 body only, available early May

No sign of UK prices at time of press.

A special thanks goes out to Gizmodo who have had the chance to play around with this camera and grabbed some footage in both 20fps and 30fps. You can see the original footage on their website. The footage below has been re-captured and compressed into an FLV file, but it gives you an idea of what the camera is capable of. You can see the original footage on the Gizmodo website.

After a couple of hours filming at the local Kung Fu Club, it was time to offload the P2 card into the PC. I thought I’d stick up a couple of screen grabs whilst I get stuck into the editing. I wanted to take some footage as my kids are learning Kung Fu here and it seemed like a good opportunity to add some interesting shapes for my showreel. I managed to grab some great slow motion combat footage right at the end which I’m looking forward to going through.

I’ll be doing a complete production on this video, whilst its most likely a bit rough in places, I only want to edit it down to something in region of 2 minutes. I’ll be writing an original  music score and maybe applying some sound effects, I have to play around to see what works well, but I’ll stick a clip up as soon as I have something I like.

For now, here’s a couple of sized down screen grabs from this evenings filming.

I just caught a glimpse of the garden from the back of the house and wondered if my faithful old Canon 350D SLR would let in enough light to capture the beautiful postcard image I was seeing. There was a wonderful warm glow of orange from a nearby wall light which cast some lovely rich shadows over the ferns, so I attempted to savor the moment. This is what I managed to grab.

I hope you enjoyed the photographs? Please leave any questions or comments below – thanks.

Wow, well here we are once again, at the beginning of August and its the grand opening of another Thirty Day Challenge. The 30 Day Challenge is the mastermind of two of the internets most highly-respected marketers – Ed Dale and Dan Raine and its designed to show you step-by-step, how to setup a rock-solid foundation for your new or existing online business. All the tools and all the techniques you could ever wish for are presented to you in crystal-clear video format – the best coaching program you're likely to see! Best of all, its all for free and anyone can join in at any time – Check it out here 30DC you'll be glad you did.

This means only one thing for me – time to write a new theme song and make a video to boot. Of course I've been working on this one for the last few months, a verse riff here and a middle 8 melody there, piece by piece the song has nicely come together, but not after several rewrites though. Some of the best songs have come from writing a phrase or melody only to realise that the piece you've just written is exactly what you don't want. I personally have no formula for writing songs and I don't really care which comes first – melody, riff or lyrics, it matters not to me, only that inspiration comes from one of them to inspire me for the rest – that'll do me nicely! I've written both songs to lyrics and put lyrics to tunes and neither seems any easier than the other. I think as a composer, you know when its right and if you're honest, you know when its not. Sometimes you really want a tune to work as you know it has a certain something to it and it may not be a bad tune, but perhaps it just doesn't work in that particular configuration and thats what needs to change. Talk about "pressure on" scooters man, it's like the infamous "second album" – can Phill do it again and write another catchy tune for this years 30 Day Challenge!! Thanks guys no pressure – phew! If you missed last years song – check it out here – Last years 30 Day Challenge Music Video.

I really like this song if I do say so myself, its simple and melodic. If I'm not confident of a melody or tune, I either rework it or trash it and start again, but this years 30DC theme tune melody is memorable – and thats what people like in a song, it also has an uplifting happy feel to help get people motivated for the challenge each day. Sure the track is perhaps a little cliché with a few prog-rock references at the end of the song, but its original, memorable and most of all fun – and that is the foundation of a good song. I try not to attach myself to my music too much as you do put your head on the chopping-block ready for any type of criticism and abuse people wish to throw at you. I know Ed and Dan are in the same boat for what they put together for the challenge – you can never make everyone happy, you just have to put your stuff out there for folks to use and abuse, but you do have to be prepared to accept some non-friendly comments about your efforts, thats what creative people have to deal with, here's my efforts – say what you will, its what I'm offering. I wouldn't change it for the world, I love it.

The video also contains some humorous references to this years "Ed Dale Mankini" joke in the style of a couple of video I released earlier last month. If you didn't catch them, you can see them here on Youtube; Thirty Day Challenge is Misunderstood – Mankini Style! Beechworth Daily News For The Thirty Day Challenge Finally, a huge thanks to my gorgeous little kids – Oscar and Eva who sang their hearts out and giggled a lot – bless em! A special thanks to the missus – Katrina Mason and best friend Emma Fisher who helped me Rock-Out at the end of this video – you're both absolute stars – thank you. Here is this years official Theme Song for the awesome Thirty Day Challenge – let me know what you think, your feedback is very much appreciated – thanks. Please allow the video some time to load. 

You can join in all the fun & awesomeness and find out more about the Thirty Day Challenge by visiting; http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com Post any questions you have here in the comments.

UPDATE! The Thirty Day Challenge is now know as "The Challenge".

My strongest asset – I don’t take myself too seriously!

I don’t ask for much and I don’t promise to be perfect, but I do promise to be the best I can be with what I have to offer.

Join in, we might just become best friends!