Reality is, you won’t care one little bit. The only thing you will notice is that excitations.com.au will not be available for a short time. during the transition, and the look of our site when it gets back up and running will be different. This won’t be the new site we have be hoping for but a halfway house so to speak. A transitional period while we still figure out how to get our new format to work for all of you. Looks great works well but if you have a dodgy internet connection, well lets just say, it’s designed for people with a good fast internet connection.

So our temporary site will be just that. This blog will be incorporated into the temporary site as well so if you have this page bookmarked…. Sorry but you’ll have to change your bookmark.

Funny, real estate photography is one of those areas of photography that hasn’t until recently been very popular. Now of course it has been discovered and everyone is into it.  There is a bit of an art to it and it isn’t always as easy as it looks. And to be honest, real estate photography isn’t, and has never been a big deal here at excitations. For years we have photographed a few houses for a small handful of clients.  We’ve never advertised the fact that we do real estate photography. For good reason too. While we quite enjoy doing something a bit different from portrait and people photography from time to time.  Real estate photography like everything other form of photography, to do it properly you have to spend time. Time that we often don’t have.

Luckily, there are lots of other photographers shooting houses. Some doing the job really well…… Others… just doing the job. We have a fixed charge of $200 to photograph a house, prepare both print ready files and web ready files. Naturally we also correct perspective, and retouch where needed to make the property look as good as it can, without creating misleading images. We spend about 4-6 hours on every job by the time it is finished and delivered. Occasionally a property needs a second visit due to weather or access issues. We don’t charge for that but should. People wanting less expensive alternatives should hit the phones. I’m told the current best price is $75 cash. Again if you haggle you’ll most likely be able to get a better deal than that. As with most things you get what you pay for. Just saying if you want it cheap, you can get it cheap.

The real reason I mention real estate photography, isn’t to drum up more work. But to sort of slide into telling you about a real estate shoot we did earlier this year. Pretty straight forward job for an existing good client. She had a house, just completed and wanted a series of photos of it. Not  a for sale shoot. Just photograph my place, cos I want some pictures and the builder would like some, as would the guy who did the floors and the pool guy. So off we went and shot a really nice house. Interestingly designed, clever features and it goes without saying well executed. Delivered the finished files as usual, promptly moved on to another job. All to soon the shoot and the house faded from our memories.

That is until the other day. A message on our answering machine from builder, Greg Barila reminded us of our photo session.. Greg called to thank us for the beautiful pictures we created for  his winning entry in  the regional building awards. It was really good to get a call like that. Because mostly we do a job and move on. Never knowing whether the project was a success or not. In this case it clearly was so, congratulations Greg and everyone else who spent many hours dreaming up concepts and designs and of course implementing all those ideas.

I was taken by the design of this home and use of different elements. Especially liked the way the outdoor living area almost comes right on into the house. Great use of contrasting materials, with polished concrete floor, stained timber and sliding aluminium  and glass doors. Interesting and well thought out design ideas always make for good interior photos.

As if we weren’t busy enough lately. Excitations stock photography blog had a small issue with a corrupted data base. Rather than waste time trying to fix it. We’ve started a new stock blog. Now I know you guys couldn’t care less about stock photography. But just in case you have nothing better to do, and want to take a squiz. You’ll find the blog right here. We’re just starting to populate it with some older stories first. But will be updating it on a more regular basis. From now on, instead of posting the odd random stock picture. New material will be theme based. Very short stories if you like about something we’ve photographed for our stock photography business.

One of the first stories on the new stock photography blog, tells of flying across Lake Eyre in a hot air balloon. The portrait above is from that series. Pilot and adventurer, Kiff Saunders, back in the air for the first time after a near fatal road accident. Months of rehab, a positive attitude and a desire to make the first flight and epic adventure. TV cameras rolling, 4000ft above the lowest point of Australia. Watching the amazing  Lake Eyre drifting gently past.

Clicking on this image, just as clicking on any image on the excitations stock photography blog, takes you straight to the picture in excitations stock archive. Where it can be licensed for a variety of electronic or print media usage, 24/7. Better still the high res file can be downloaded immediately for use. Gotta love modern technology. the only gripe I have with this system is the quality of the imbedded images in the blog. Not as good as the original. We can use Flash, for the links and get a much better looking image into the blog. However, and it is a big however, the images are then not visible to uses of i-phone and i-pad’s. Hopefully we’ll get around that soon. Image quality of the original remains high regardless of the embedding method. Its just the pics in the blog that look a little off.

You see the thing that really stood out to me was the number of items that where selling above there true value. For instance last night I watched the end of an auction for a couple of camera cases. I happen to know the new value because I’ve just bought the exact same model. To my surprise they both went for more than new price. And yes they may have been in great condition but one sold for $70 more than you can by it new for. Another piece of gear auctioned as faulty, to the sellers credit he described the fault in detail. It finally sold at a low price, but if you add the cost of repairs (and I do know about cost of repairs) it will cost more than new price to get it going.

Then there is the stuff from Hong Kong. Nothing wrong with that. But why on earth would you buy something from overseas when the exact same thing sells for $65 less here in Australia. Complete with an Aussie guarantee.

Sometimes I think we take our search for bargains a little bit to far. My dad use to tell me, to always know the value of something before you start bidding and always have a pull out price. Seems like good advice still.

I should point out that I’m not talking about copying works of art. Art reproduction is the process of creating  a high resolution digital file of a work of art, which will be used to produce, calendars, greeting cards or books. We’re most often commissioned by the artist themselves. Whether the piece of art is a large sculpture or a simple watercolour. It matters not. The aim is to reproduce a high resolution image with as much detail of texture, shape and colour as is possible.

Since introducing medium format digital capture into excitations working environment. Our ability to produce  art reproductions with amazing amounts of detail , clarity and faithfulness to the original has magnified many times over. Put simply there is nothing that comes close to the quality of art reproduction work created with medium format digital equipment. Now I know all that sounds like we’re out chasing repro work. However, that’s not really the case. We have a couple of regulars and a couple more would probably be nice. We certainly don’t want  to do to much art reproduction work, because that would cut into our portrait photography time. And after all we are portrait photographers first and foremost.

Love the outfits, not so sure about the under nourished models. Maybe they should pay them more so that they can afford to eat. Fantastic minimalist set as well. Beautiful use of white. If you have a free 10 minutes do check out the latest from Vera Wang.

The great part of having a growing studio garden. Most weeks a new photo location will appear. Some you see coming months in advance. Others just jump up and bite you when you’re not looking. Such was the case while we were photographing Aidan.

We’ve been photographing a few kids near a patch of lavender in our studio driveway. Lavender being a good height for small children to interact with. The soothing aroma of the lavender doesn’t hurt our cause either. But the real reason for working near the lavender is the beautiful way light plays over the neatly formed bushes. Making for one very nice out of focus background. However on this photo session with Aidan,  we tried changing things up a bit by changing camera angles. Instead of making the row of lemon scented gum trees our background. We convinced Aidan he should explore around the base of one of the trees.

We got a whole series of delightful little portraits here in our brand new photo location. Aidan’s great little outfit certainly helped pull the whole setting together. Now I can tell you we won’t be using this angle all that much. Because to be totally honest you have to be of a certain stature for this one to work. But when the light is right and we have the perfect subject. You can bet that we’ll head up the driveway to  this new photo location.

Lots of our clients like to have their children photographed in our studio. But for those who are prepared to venture out into the great outdoor playground of the excitations outdoor studio. the rewards are often worth the little extra effort. If you’d like to have your child photographed by excitations. Give our stylist, Robyn a call on 5025 3368 and have a chat. She’s just mad about creating great picture opportunities for young children.

Spent a couple of fantastic hours recently shooting some family portraits in a great location. It’s always a heap of fun working with kids on location, trying to guide them without being bossy. But inevitable doing just exactly what they wanted anyway. Location portraits give us an opportunity to explore not only a new location. But more importantly  different ideas. The image below of the wonderful young Klancy, was a joint brain child of Klancy’s mum, Katrina and Robyn.

Hey while I think of it… Evie you haven’t missed out. Your photo will be on our new website going live next week.. Fingers crossed.

Normally when we’re photographing with children, we use really fast focusing and handling cameras. Because … well if you’ve ever tried to take a photograph of a young child at play or in exploring mode, I don’t need to explain why fast equipment is so important. However for this shot and a few others in this location I chose to use a medium format digital camera. Which I gotta tell you. Whatever they say in the adds about how they handle just like a smaller DSLR… Don’t believe it. Try and picture if you will, a red double-decker  London bus racing against a formula 1 race car. That’s about the difference in handling  between a medium format digital camera and a modern DSLR. But when it comes to awesome quality… it’s MF all the way.  Of course here on the web all that goodness is chucked away. It’s not until you start making big beautiful prints that you can really see the difference. So why did we go MF with these girls… they’re photographer friendly that’s why. Bet we had a big sleep on the drive home girls.

Location portraits allow us a chance to tell a story. To be honest even here at excitations studio complex. A lot of our work with children  could easily be described as location portraits. Often the outdoor and sometimes even the indoor studio spaces are set up to be more of an adventure space that photographs well, rather than being a photography space. The story telling part comes when kids discover something new or different. Kids like cats are curious.
They become involved, and when they’re involved little windows into their world open. Our job as photographers is to start telling those stories as they unfold before us.

Bronson and Nicole’s wedding was always going to be a motor cycle and car kinda day. So it was only fitting that we got some shots in early with so bikes. Tried lots of angles, high  and low, in focus bikes and out of focus bikes as in this shot.

Second location for the day and we have a room full of very warm almost yellow light. There are lots of ways of approaching this sort of lighting. Firstly I love warm light but mostly I filter it back a bit so we get a slightly more natural look. For this shot of the gorgeous Nicole. I went the other way and added more warmth to the camera settings to really get that warm yellow glow.

As much as I love shooting warm. It’s just not the done thing to shoot everything in one style. Or in this case one colour. To tone things down a bit but still keep the natural light look, I stuck a great big studio flash outside, encased in a soft box. Turned up to full power and blasted through the bedroom window. Allowing the curtains to act as diffusers and then encouraging  the light to bounce all over the place. Off wall and ceilings to give a still warm but pretty natural window light look. Why go to all that trouble. Well let’s just say there wasn’t a whole lotta light finding its way into this room. So shooting available light was kinda  out of the question.I love the dad walking his daughter down the aisle type shots. Often we get great shots showing real emotion. Joy, nerves, laughing and crying are some of the moments you can capture if you’re ready. We to0ned this image of Nicole and her dad during post production. Love the simplicity of monochromatic images. somehow getting rid of the colour and distractions that often brings allows our viewers to focus on the real picture.

After church Nicole and Bronson headed down to The Office for a bit of a snack, before heading out to shoot wedding photos. We took advantage of the stop, to create a few informal portraits. Thanks the the team at The Office for allowing this opportunity to shoot in their fabulous facility.

Still in The Office, this time a simple available light portrait of Nicole and Bronson. Like to tell you we spent like forever, setting this shot up. However, Nicole was already waiting at the bar, so we called Bronson over. Over he comes, walks straight up and pretty much nails this pose in about a millisecond. Click….. Then he asks, “What do you want?’  Our answer…. ‘Nothing rally, cos it’s done.”

In the 30 years that Robyn and I have been shooting weddings together. Robyn has only missed 3 weddings. Two on one weekend a few years back because she was a guest of the surgical ward at the local hospital. And the 3rd, Nicole and Bronson’s wedding, because she was feeling unwell. Now when I say unwell. I don’t mean, “Oh, I don’t think I’ll go today because I’m getting a cold”. kinda unwell. I’m talking the I can’t even stand up kinda crook.

We discussed trying to get a second shooter in at short notice. There were a couple available but I decided that I would be far more comfortable shooting alone. Without the worry of having someone else to keep an eye on. After all,  I have been shooting weddings for over 40 years now, so I should be about ready to go solo. Turns out, a good friend heard I was shooting a wedding and Robyn wasn’t there. So without being asked, Stephanie Bozzi just turns up at the church and says “do ya need a hand?” Without hesitation, I handed her a second camera and told her to go for it.

Stephanie, you see,  had done about 12 months worth of training with us a few years back. Knows her way around image processing and better still has a good understanding of how we shoot. Added to that she just happens to be a Canon shooter as well. The image above of Nicole and Bronson, checking out wedding rings is one of Stephanie’s images. A beautiful candid moment, captured during a very busy day.

Pretty much the same location as the previous image, just shot from a different angle with some long fast glass.

What’s the old saying? Something about the journey being important not the destination. Really does apply to photography. This happy shot of Nicole was taken during our short journey from semi formal images to the garter shot. Which by the way ended up being really cute. But I just love this shot of Nicole, having fun. After all that’s what your wedding is supposed to be…. FUN.

Are you planning a Mildura wedding?  If you are, just a quick reminder that excitations specialize in shooting and creating custom designed wedding albums, using only the best materials. We don’t provide a “Shoot and Burn Service” Lots of photographers do, so you won’t have any trouble finding someone to shoot your wedding and give you a disk of all your wedding photos on the night. We choose to be the odd ones out and still only shoot designer wedding coverages.