After a few days of unseasonable freezing weather (with hail and all), the weekend proved to be surprisingly hot.

Saturday was customarily spent on the golf course. My game’s not getting a hell of a lot better, but it is starting to show forms from days of old. After a completely miserable front-9, I managed to shoot two over par on the back-9. Haven’t done that in a while.

Saturday night was spent at an old Telstra colleague’s birthday party. 70’s and 80’s was the theme. Now, considering I wasn’t even born in the 70’s, and spent most of the 80’s in primary school the whole thing was quite novel for me and Elaine. Even so, I was scaringly familiar with the music and the fashion. All I can say is thank goodness I was too young to make the mistake of buying tight leather pants.

I was particularly happy the weather stayed nice and hot on Sunday as Elaine and I had some location scouting work to do for Bonnie and Kie’s upcoming wedding in December. First stop was at one of the largest churches I know, Crossways. It’s so big that they have two sermons running simultaneously – I stepped into the first sermon and thought whoa, this place is big. Then after walking a little further I sighted the second sermon and thought whoa, this place is BIG.

After that we were off to Brand Receptions. They had the doors locked, but still managed to get a few sample shots of the exterior to get an idea of the location.

Bonnie and Kie want some of their wedding photos to be taken in a garden/park environment, so Elaine and I had a look around some of the parks on offer in the outer Eastern suburbs. The first one we visited was Blackburn Sanctuary Park. It’s located just off a main road, but a few steps in and you feel like you’re in the middle of the bush. It just has such a pleasant feel about it. The highlight is a beautiful lake they have there. We found some really nice photo opportunities for weddings, see some samples below (you may have to imagine a bridal couple in some of the photos, otherwise it can look a bit empty!).

The rest of the afternoon was spent visiting a few more locations around the area, including a cute little cottage. See some sample shots below.

Scouting for location shoot venues is so much fun. I get to spend some quality time with Elaine, visit places I’ve never been before and get time to get artsy-fartsy with my camera. Triple yay!

Jimmy’s a great mate that I met in one of my past lives as an Account Executive. He’s got to have one of the best marketing minds I know. Every time I sit down and talk to him about THIA Photography I always walk away with a dozen ideas churning in my head. I’m really grateful for his sage-like services, and the fact he’s playing such an important role within THIA Photography.

It was Jimmy’s 25th birthday last Friday, and to celebrate he had a rocking party at Robarta in St Kilda on Saturday night. There was champagne flowing, heaps of finger food (the pizza was awesome) and some funky tunes thanks to his guest DJ all the way from Sydney. Jimmy hired me to cover the night for prosperity… and why not? We hire photographers to record all sorts of important milestones in life, and in my books turning a quarter-century is definitely one of them!

You can check out a few shots from the party below, or check out his birthday mini-site by CLICKING HERE!

Computers and the Internet are wonderful mediums for photographers as they are largely image driven. However, as a photographer, it sometimes is hard to ensure that what I see on my calibrated screen is what you see on your screen. Sometimes contrast is too high, sometimes too low. Or, sometimes brightness to too high, or too low. Or even sometimes, screens will have colour tints causing whites to not look quite so white. Let’s not even get into the differences in colour rendition between CRT, LCD and plasma screens…

So, without going into too much technical detail, you can perform this basic calibration of your screen to ensure that what you see on your computer screen closely approximates what was originally intended.

>>>click here to visit PhotographerUSA.com’s screen check<<<

Ever since we moved into our place we’ve had to live with waist-high wallpaper. I think I know the effect that the previous owners were after, but it just didn’t work. I felt like I could live with the wallpaper, even if only to honour the previous owners’ daring attempt at interior decoration, however Elaine’s had issues with the wallpaper, especially in the bedroom. Last week she finally snapped. I walked into the room one night and she was there, steamer in hand, pulling the pink-rose blue-stripe monstrosity off our walls.

After taking a few moments in recognition of the pile of wallpaper that I would never see again, I quickly grabbed my camera and started taking shots for prosperity.

Anyway, to make a long story short, not only was the wallpaper ugly (there I said it), it was a bugger to get off the walls as it had been stuck onto the walls, not with wallpaper glue, but double sided adhesive sheets. It took Elaine three straight nights to get it all off.

Once all the wallpaper was off it was my turn to transform the room, so a joyous trip to Bunnings was in order. For those not around here, Bunnings is this crazy huge hardware store that a guy could get lost in for hours. It’s like Disneyland for grown men. I always walk out with the coolest stuff. This time it was three sample pots, and a mini-roller to do the edges of the wall without having to tape it up.

Three shades of white later, we finally settled on Lamarque (don’t ask me to describe it… I’m a guy) and I started painting this past weekend. The painting was going really well and I was almost finished until I fell short of paint by about a litre. Yer, pretty basic mistake, but at least it gave me an excuse to go back to Bunnings =)

This time, I not only came away with 12 litres of paint even though I only needed one (I can explain), but I scored a free 4 litre tin of jelly beans for my efforts. Sweet.

I told you I always walk out with the coolest stuff.