Lameroo Reunion for 2016

The delightful little town of Lameroo is located in the Mallee region of South Australia around 200km east of Adelaide near the state border with Victoria.

Over time many people have left Lameroo for a variety of reasons. It may have been due to a desire to change careers, looking for work elsewhere, being in transient employment perhaps being a bank officer, nurse or school teacher. People come and go. Most if not all are very sad to leave. Very often though these people and the locals too have very fond memories of their time living in the town and surrounding area so it's really great catch up with each other.

So it is very much appreciated that two ex Lamerooites have arranged for expats and locals to meet, every two years at Kensington Park, Adelaide during the second weekend of February. Thanks heaps and heaps to Jill Skinner and Lynton Paul for all the work they do to make sure we are all advised of the reunion and that the event goes off really well.

Each time this event has been run it has been really hot, for some too hot, so it was a great relief that this year's reunion was with really beautiful weather. A delightful day especially in the magnificent gums and grounds of Kensington Park.

If you'd like to see some of the shots I took during the day jump over to this site, it's a gallery in my photographic site at www.boxflat.net. If you would like to download any or all of the shots simply click on the desired image until it comes up in a 'large' size. Right click on the image (or there is small menu upper left) to see an option to download. This is best done on a desktop or laptop rather than a tablet or mobile phone.

Note the images are quite large in size so downloading all images will mean around 750 MB all up. i.e don't do this on your mobile data account:)

Smaller images are also available on a Facebook group that Jill has setup, simply search for "Lameroo School Reunion".

I hope you enjoy them as much as I did taking them.

Pete



A great turn out of folk from Lameroo

Xcel Dance 2013

Thanks to Miss Leanne and her many helpers for a fantastic show for 2013. Simply magnificent. I honestly do not know how she does it.

Anyhow I was lucky enough to be able to take some shots of some of the dancers during their full dress rehearsals. You can find a gallery of the shots here. For obvious privacy reasons there is a password required to view the images. There is a 'hint' shown on the login page.

The shots are not posed so I apologise if you are not featured or if the shot is not ideal for you. It is simply not possible to take everyone's picture given the speed and positions of the dancers. I did however try to take as many pictures as I possibly could. It will take me a couple more weeks to finish the shots so please check back occasionally.

Given that each image is hand processed which has taken a considerable amount of time and that the secure hosting also has a cost involved I have to ask for a contribution if you wish to obtain a copy of an image or images. I hope you understand. Please see this site's contact details.

Pete Hayward (father of Claire Hayward .. featured above and below)

A couple of MWSOA panorama shots

This photo is made up from 12 images from the MWSOA convention held in the Hilton International Hotel, Adelaide. It was taken during the period the exhibition was open to the trade. A very large crowd attended during the public session making a shot of this nature too difficult.

This shot was taken in the centre of the exhibition area and is a full 360 degree view. It is made up of 25 images.

A better view is possible on a large monitor.

Malt Whisky Society of Australia 2013 Convention

The MWSOA held a fantastic weekend in Adelaide at the Hilton Hotel, showcasing Whisky's from Australia and around the world.

If you are interested in the photo's I took from the weekend I am currently uploading them here. They will take some time to load which may take a couple of evenings for the load to finish.

To download an image, hover over the image so that an information/ choice icon will appear. You may download that image or all of the originals from there. Note, when finished the download of all images will about 4 Gig so you'd have be very keen to download them all as each image is around 15 Meg to maximize the resolution available to you.

PS: All images are now loaded. I hope you like them :)

My D600 goes to the stage

I was lucky enough to be able to do a shoot of the dancers from Xcel Dance Studios at the Norwood town hall. The shots were taken during the last dress rehersal. The whole shoot is here and the password is the street name near where the dancers practice closest to the Library or email me if you can't find it:)

Claire (my daughter):

Bethany (with permission):

Experiencing my new D600

Ok it’s easy to take snap shots of cats with the D600 and ED class glass (see this shot). However what about action shots of sports with this cam?

My fiance’s son plays basketball in a local community stadium. He had his grand final last night. So off we went, fully charged D600 in hand.

Now this stadium has some very ordinary lighting, one court had some good light but of course the court we were on has lighting that really needs updating. Anyhow, ideal really, to push the high iso capability of the D600 perhaps...

One thing I learnt, the hard way, is to discover the various methods of setting focus tracking BEFORE one sets out on a session such as this. The experience is not like my D200.

With the conditions of this shoot, this was gunna be HARD and as it turns out it sure was. Hard lighting conditions and as it turned out no idea how to drive the cam. Good one Pete.

I have a number of DX and FX lenses. I have ordered a 24-70 in lieu of my 17-55 ED DX however it is still on back order. So the only FX lenses I have are a 60mm 2.8 macro Nikkor and my 70-200 VR1.

I tried the 60mm first then the 70-200. I had access to any area I wanted around the court. 

A few things I noted:

1.      Unfortunately the battery grip is still on order. The cam is great with just the 60mm lens but put on the 70-200 and the weight of the lens is immediately obvious. Seemingly more so than with my D200 with grip. The D600 grip for my long fingered hands is, I dunno, too small and perhaps ‘squarish’. After while I seemed to get sweaty hands. I’m sure it was because I had to grip harder than I do with the D200 with grip than the D600 without grip. Hopefully this will change when I get the D600 grip.

2.       As I had no idea how to change the focus method from ’39 point ‘auto’ (no manual and no time to read it anyhow). I looked and looked but it eluded me on how to do it. (30 seconds when I got home with the manual and I found it’s easy but the operation is nothing like the D200).

3.       Sport, fast action, hard light and cam on 39 point auto is NOT the ideal setting. The cam would take too long to focus or not focus at all. Often with back focussing. Bummer. Hopefully when I work out the best focusing options this will vastly improve. See this shot as an example. On the night I shot high res jpg only, I usually shoot raw only but the only SD card I had is a small 4gig job and the cam indicated only 77 shots available with RAW).

4.       It’s great not to have to fart arse around with Compact Flash cards and adapters etc. Most devices have SD card slots including my laptop, tablet etc. Great stuff.

5.       It's REALLY great to be able to use up to 6400 ISO. REALLY great. See here for examples.

I’ve a looong way to go :)

The Hayward household being "tech savvy"

Reviewing the new Sony Tablet S for cnet.com.au has been a very interesting and rewarding exercise for us. As the Sony Tablet utilises the Google “Android” operating system at version 3.2 or “Honeycomb” as Google likes to refer to it, and being open source, there is an amazing amount of information available for nerdy types (like me ... hhmnnn) to take advantage of.

I like to tinker in the programing side of things where possible. While digging around on the Net I found a cute little device put out by sparkfun.com and that I bought here in Australia from www.littlebirdelectronics.com called the IOIO (or pronounced “yoyo”).

To control the IOIO board I have had to load the Android SDK development environment on my Lenovo laptop. With this, Google have chosen to use the very powerful ‘Eclipse’ IDE.

Setting up the development environment is not as easy as say the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment for Windows however there are plenty of straight forward instructions available on the Net to guide you, especially if you are familiar at all with cross compiling development platforms.

My son Alex is very keen on his DJ setup that he has been creating, much to the annoyance of our neighbours I fear. Anyhow, with the Sony Tablet S and with Android operating system, there are a number of apps available that he plans to take avantage of including DJ studios, mixing consoles, spectrum analysers etc. One of the areas that DJs love to use is lighting and fog effects. We plan to use the Sony Tablet S, coupled with the IOIO board to control Alex's lights, fog machines etc directly with this little device coupled with an interfacing board we will be developing. Much fun to be had:)

The Android "Eclipse" environment running on my Lenovo laptop.
Click on the image for a larger view.

The Android development environment includes a development machine based based "emulator" where you can run up applications on your development machine rather than bothering with the upload process onto the Sony Tablet S, although doing this is not at all difficult. Your development machine can be either Linux, iMac or Windows. I have run mine up on my Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit Lenovo laptop. 

The obligatory "Hello, World" running on my Lenovo laptop.
Click on the image to get a larger view.

Having fun while reviewing the Sony Tablet S

We had heaps of fun recording a video to go with our review of the Sony Tablet S. Thanks heaps and heaps to Sony Australia and especially to the gang at cnet.com.au for enabling the opportunity for us to participate.

First, the "final" videos:

 

And Claire gets her own spot ...

... and the bloopers  (it does contain a language slip or two...sorry)

Reviewing the Sony Tablet S - Part 4 Networking

Reviewing the Sony Tablet S - Part 4 Networking

The Sony Tablet S has a variety of ways to interface with other devices and networks. I summarise these below.

Wireless: No device these days would be complete without at least some form of technology to connect to a network for Internet access and also to connect via TCP/IP to other devices. Connecting to a wireless network is a very simple task and vital to enable facilities such as installing “apps” and to install any available operating system or application software ‘updates’.

A couple of screen shots showing the Wireless facilities are shown below:

Infrared: A significant area of differentiation with other tablets is that the Sony has an infrared port. They have included a superb application that enables the control of devices such as television sets, hifi units etc that have infrared remote controls. This application includes two modes of operation, first by the typical on screen controls and also by the use of “gestures”. Neat. One disappointment though is that it seems that it is not possible to enable ‘macros’ to control more than one device simultaneously i.e to switch on or off all desired devices with one button or gesture. This is a bit of a pity, perhaps something like this will come later via an enhanced app from Sony or perhaps someone else may write one. This sort of thing is the real beauty of the Android world.

 

USB: The tablet has a micro USB 2 port. This enables easy connection to devices such as computers however only in ‘client’ or ‘slave’ mode. There is no USB host or “On The Go” capabilities i.e the tablet cannot take advantage of devices such as external hard drives. A real pity.

SD Card slot: Unlike the Apple iPad 2 or the Blackberry playbook, the Sony tablet S does have an SD card slot. This really is a major bonus point for me as this enables me to upload photos taken with my stills or video cameras in the field. A great way to check shots taken and also as a form of in the field backup.

DLNA: The Sony Tablet S is DLNA capable. This is one area that I am not all that familiar with. To be honest I had to look it up to find out more about it. The ability of the Sony Tablet S to “talk” or "throw" to my son’s Playstation and hopefully to his Bravia Sony TV should be an interesting area to explore with the Sony Tablet S.

In summary: Save for USB host capabilities, the Sony wants for little in the way of enabling communications with other devices.