The Cool Change of 14th January 2016

One of the things I really love about Melbourne is how the hot weather in summer almost never lasts more than a few days at a time. Occasionally we get a prolonged heatwave that lasts up to a week or more, but more often than not they only last a few short days before a cool change comes through and makes things civilized again.

12-14 January 2016 was one of the more extreme episodes of this phenomenon in recent memory. The 12th was a reasonably mild summer's day (not even reaching 30 Celsius), but then the 13th saw temperatures rise to 41 or 42 degrees all across the Melbourne region! But luckily, a cool change was already on the way, and then the 14th was actually almost as cool as a typical winter's day around here! When I went for my photo walk in the afternoon, the temperature was around 14 degrees Celsius - almost 30 degrees cooler than the day before!

There's nothing particularly interesting about the photos I took today. They're just basic river and city scapes. It was nice to be walking around in the refreshing cool change conditions though!

Experimenting With Lightroom

I downloaded the trial version of Adobe Lightroom yesterday, and then went for a sunset walk around St Kilda and the city, to collect a bunch of photos to play with.

Verdict so far? Too early to say. I spent last night mostly just getting used to its quirks, as you do with any new non-trivial software when using it for the first time really. It's definitely faster than the software that came with my Olympus, and far more versatile than the basic photo editing software that comes with Windows 8.1, of course.

Most of what I did was simply twiddle a bit with the clarity and vibrance/saturation. Vibrance and saturation are typically the things that will be a little off with sunset shots, so I adjusted that to look less pale than it did raw.

The other "new" thing I did last with my photography was upping the ISO sensitivity and attempting to take some hand-held night shots in the city. The inspiration for this was simply that I didn't have my tripod with me - but then I thought it would be an interesting thing to try anyway. I maxed it out at ISO 2500, which isn't actually very high, but it was high enough to come up with some okay shots, and not too much noise.

So anyway, here's a sampling of shots from last night...

St Kilda Kite Surfers I

St Kilda Kite Surfers II

St Kilda Marina

St Kilda Pier Sunset I

St Kilda Pier Sunset II

St Kilda Sunset

Corner of Swanston and Flinders

Federation Square

Looking Up

Empty Carpark

Parliament House

Bourke Street