Hi all! as you may have guessed, Hawaii was awesome, I wish I had a better underwater camera, but ah well :/ I think I have some good shots.. not sure though not overly confident, but we'll see.

Anyway, Any and all comments on the layout and function of my new website is greatly appreciated! I designed it over the last week so that it would be fully mobile-compatible while being easy to access and obtain information.

Soon to come should be some photos I took in Hawaii, and of course wedding photos that I have been working on recently. Job enquiries on that front has really taken off in the past year, so that makes me very happy.

GOGO HERE

Hi everyone!, I'll be quite inactive for the next month as I'll be cruising up to Hawaii. Will be back on ay 1.

HENRY!

woo, yay for *drakeo1903 for coming up with such an original and thought-provoking name! HIGH FIVE! YAEHAH

Tell her what she's won Jill!

Certainly Sven!
devdrakeo1903:, you're going home with.... A BRAND NEW CAR! oh wait, hang on... no... sorry about that, jeese this is awkward.. Sorry, you only get a year subscription to DA.

You're terrible. :/

Hi Guys, so just after my 11th DA birthday I got me a 5th daily deviation award. That's pretty awesome so thanks for that too all those who watch me and support my work.

Seriously, if it weren't for DA I'm not sure I'd have any reason to do any personal work that I put up here, and I really enjoy doing it. It's just hard to find real support for this kind of stuff in real life you know?

Well anyway, I seem to have received a few more print sales from the recent interest in my page generated from my DD, so I have some more money to spend on you guys to welcome all you new watchers.

I'm going to give out a year sub to whomever can name my fish the awesomest (That a word?).

here he is here. I know I need to clean the tank..



GO

Well then, as the turn of yet another year comes to a close (Happy new year!) it also marks another year for me on DA. The 4th of Jan is my DA bday, and this coming bday is my 11th. I'm pretty sure I've seen people on here younger than that! hah gee whizz I'm old :/ I've been around longer than that, but I was lurking back then, still discovering this new fangled idea known as the interwebs.

I'd just like to thank all my watchers, all 1,521 of you, and all the other people on here that has kept me around this long.

Now, I have about $150 worth of print sales money in my DA account, and I figure I can give out some goodies. I'd run a contest, but no-one seems to enter my contests, well ok, 5 of you did... where were the rest of you? But anyway I wish I could give something more substantial to the DA community than buy crap for you all, but that's pretty much all I can do.

So perhaps, maybe you might get a package from DA, or maybe not, depends if you're under my mouse cursor when I go clicking about. I've already started.

*AmethystPhotographer! yaaay!

"When flatulence permeates the library, I will drown my knees in butter and show-tunes."
Such powerful words!

With a runner-up of 1month sub

~Eldr-Fire! yaaay!

"Methodically I sidestep the saccharine torpedoes in favor of a wet embrace with a hare I once bumped into while snowshoeing down 42nd street."

Eye opening stuff!

A whopping 5 entries for a year sub! yaaay!

Hi ya'll. NO I DIDDNT GET STUCK IN THAT EARTHQUAKE!.

Ok, that's out of the way.. Fact was I was in the area it struck just hours before it hit, but boarded a plane just before so I was in the air, and diddn't find out about it until that evening on the news with my Home-stay family in Kyushuu.

So, back from my tsunami trip, unfortunately diddn't visit the most heavily effected areas, so didn't get the photo journalistic shots I had hoped, but I had a great time anyway. Getting back to Japan is always great. (Especially when it's free like this, haha)

Anyway, the most strange and weirdest original phrase you can come up with as a comment on this journal will win a year sub. woo! Deadline is a dayish from now.

GO

Hi all, I've recently been selected as a teacher chaperone of Australian Japanese students to visit the affected areas of the 2011 tsunami in Japan on an ambassadorial mission to observe and help out with the ongoing rebuilding efforts.

Which means I'll be in Japan from the 3rd until the 13th of December, so a bit of a chance for me to bust out my photojournalism skills to document something worthwhile. Quite looking forward to it.

In other news I've been trying to convert my print sales monies on DA into points to give you guys back some subbies, especally with this sale on at the moment... but the damn thing wont let me Help desk is no help either. So yeah, awesome...

Long time since I updated my journal hey? Long time since I've done much creative too... Well thats about to change as I just broke up with my girlfriend (no tears please) and the South Australian AIPP awards are coming up! so eyes peeled for updates on that!

In other news I'm growing a moustache for movember, and I'd appreciate it if anyone has a spare buck to sponsor my efforts. In doing so you'll be helping the 3,300 men diagnosed with prostate cancer each year and the 1 in 8 men who experience depression. Together, we can change these statistics.

To make a donation head over to my 'Mo space' page at [link]

Thanks!

Hello all, just writing to ask very nicely on my BIRTHDAY no less for a little bit of your time to click on this link to vote for my finalist image in the Serif PhotoPlus 2012 contest! Mine is 'Steven Duncan, number 17'

Or this image:

Basically my most successful image ever, winning a gold award in the AIPP National Science awards and various other honours.

Please give me a small birthday present and vote for me please? THANKYOU!

Ok then, a grand total of 3 entries to my little contest

And the WINNER is *Sophia-Christina 12 month subbie to her


YAY

Here's a feature for *Sophia-Christina



I've awarded *Sophia-Christina with a month subbie for being the first entrant, and ~KylerTheMighty, ~genericwin, !Shep610 and ~Que-Lastima for being awesome! YEAH!
A feature from them!
:thumb309911704: :thumb310162828:

Due to the quite unexpected events over the last few days, with the submission of my most popular image ever on DA, and a DD of a photo of me (ugh)  I've received quite a few new watchers!

hello there!

As most of you older chaps might know, I like to do a random give aways of sorts, to celebrate whatever I might like celebrating... perhaps I bought some m&ms? or I'm getting married? or I feel like throwing money at people? heh, in this case I'd like to welcome those new people here, and I hope I don't disappoint

So without further ado, I'm going to give a year subscription to whomever can submit a photo of an amusing word written using something found in the kitchen (not a pen or other traditional writing materials) by Saturday night, 10pm my time.

A month subbie to the first person to submit!

So submit, upload into your scraps and post a link in this journal. Winner will depend on how amusing the chosen word is, and artistic use of materials. My judgement is final.

And for those of you too lazy to do something like this... 1 month sub to the 8th person to comment on this journal! (no repeat commentors!)

YAAAAY

OK then, I've awarded *Sophia-Christina with a month subbie for being the first entrant, and ~KylerTheMighty and ~genericwin for being awesome! YEAH!
A feature from them!

But it seems as though I've recieved a DD for the slap dash portrait of myself in front of the famous beach house in Perth. The photo itself was actually taken by the very talented ~Furiousxr so go take a peek at his stuff. Actually, instead of that, I'm going to do a feature journal on him! huzzah!

~Furiousxr tends to favour the panoramic stiching style of photograph whereby many photos are stitched together lengthways to form a much higher resolution image of a scene. He is featured on TV in Western Australia and one of his claims to fame if that he took the image used on the backdrop of the local news cast for Perth. Unfortunately for some reason his stuff is little known on DA...



So there you go.

I dunno if you noticed or not, but yeah I've been back in Australia after my last journal posted 9 weeks ago... gee I've been busy! teaching Japanese to the little ones mostly, writing reports these last few weeks... watching movies, yknow all that jazz.

You may have seen my most recent shots from that trip to Japan appearing in your watch lists pretty happy with them, I'm looking forward to putting together an exhibition at some point... dunno when.. School holidays coming up! So hopefully I find some time to do it then.

Good stuff!

I leave on the 8th (Easter Sunday) and get back on the 30th of April. So three weeks of inactivity, even though I've been pretty quiet recently anyway incredibly busy getting everything done before I go. Weddings, teaching, and I'm pretty sick right now typing this... blah, hopefully I get better before I leave.

Anyway, I thought I might outline where I'm headed just in case anyone currently in Japan wants to meet up? Also bit of a chance to showcase some more DA work other than mine from these places.

Flying into Singapore on the 8th - stop over for 7 hours, so HERES THE AIRPORT! YEAH!


Get to Osaka on the 9th


Himeji on the 10th
:thumb48769018:

Okayama the same night


Hiroshima 12th


Miyajima 13th


Kyoto 15th


Nara 19th


Nagoya 21st


Tokyo 21st-28th


Singapore 29th


And home

I hear so often from my fellow photographers around my home town of Adelaide that my home town is a boring backwater of a place that never changes, and hence a difficult place to photograph. I recently attended a critique session for the upcoming national photography awards run by the AIPP, and this came up. None of them are on DA, so the purpose of this journal I guess is to showcase my little known (outside of Australia I guess) home town.

Adelaide is the capital of South Australia, the city has a population of a little over 1million people, founded in 1836, it's the fifth-largest city in Australia. It's considered a hub for university students, with a very large population of international students, and has a focus on stand-up comedy and international art and craft.

Adelaide does however have the reputation of a boring city due to the fact it NEVER CHANGES! heh

Anyway, here's my showcase..

After my recent journal entry on alternative photographic processes on DA, I was kicking myself for overlooking the daguerreotype. If you've ever seen a true daguerreotype in the 'flesh' you'd agree that the photographic effect the process creates is quite spectacular, and very different to any other, more traditional processes. Anyone who's studied photography has been forced to study up on the process, as it's just so different to what we think of photography today, and yet played a pivotal role in shaping modern professional photography. Largely due to the fact it was  the first commercially successful photographic process developed in 1839.

These images have a remarkable 3D effect in depth due to the harsh contrast these images produce, coupled with the incredible whites-produced from light reflecting on the embossed silver plates the images are developed upon. Unfortunately the digital representations I've included as part of this journal cannot replicate this sense of being. However there is a way to describe it. Think of those holograms you would get in a packet of chips, or on the VISA sticker on your credit card, but the effect doesn't 'move' when you tilt it around as these holograms do. It's really quite spiffy.

You'd hope so too, considering the amount of time and dedication it takes to develop a true daguerreotype. Usually produced on a silver-surfaced copper sheet, or any embossed metallic surface coated with silver halidades or other photo-sensitive material, daguerreotypes are an exposure of a scene or image through a lens, forming a 'latent image' (or invisible image). The latent image is then made visible, or "developed", by subjecting the exposed plate to the fumes rising from a quantity of heated mercury. The mercury vapour condensed on those places on the plate where the exposure light is most intense (highlights), and less so in darker areas of the image (shadows). The developed image is then dipped into hyposulphite of soda to fix it, and remove any lingering photosensitivity. So as you can appreciate, the process can be very dangerous, and very rare to come across in the modern world, and older ones are hard to come by as the actual image produced is very fragile and very prone to damage. In fact the daguerreotype fell out of favour by professional photographers as early as the 1860s in favour for less dangerous methods.

Still, the marvellous process is still possible today, and very few dedicated deviants still practice the art. It's a real shame these artists truly do not receive the exposure they deserve due to their devotion to a highly unorthodox method of creating an image that would be made so much simpler with modern equipment. I guess this unfortunate phenomenon can also be attributed to the tiny percentage of people on DA who have dabbled in this kind of thing, and hence don't recognise the skills needed to produce works like these below. Indeed, actual daguerreotypes, and those mimicked using digital textures are very difficult to tell apart sometimes.

~sludge-factory Seems to have dabbled in a method with Becquerel instead of silver halidade producing these Nude Studies.
:thumb145093768: :thumb145090052: :thumb145094084:

*MordsithCara seems to have more of a grasp on contrast and detail with her work, but still following along with the nude theme. Seems pretty popular with Daguerreotype photographers


~VivianDeMilo uses a wetplate tin-type process that is very similar to the traditional daguerreotype, but differs in the way that these are photographs made by creating a direct positive on a sheet of iron metal that is blackened by painting, lacquering or enamelling and is used as a support for a collodion photographic emulsion. Tintyping was developed shortly after the daguerreotype, it's slightly safer, but still takes alot of preparation.
actual daguerreotype though:

And a few others:

Recently I've become a little bit obsessed and fascinated by the alternative processes people use, or have developed to capture a photograph. However, I'm not particularly keen on the term 'alternative' as it can conjure the idea of 'new' or 'fringe' methods, when in fact most of the methods DA considers alternative for the purposes of the 'alternative processes' gallery have been around far longer than the overwhelmingly popular digital method of today. In fact plenty of the methods on show in this gallery date as far back as photography itself. I'm very sad that some of the better shots produced in these ways aren't often thrust into the forefront of mainstream showcases, so therefore I'm attempting to use my humble journal to develop a bit of buzz around these types of images.

Using these methods in today's digital world, to me screams devotion to the artistic side of photography. Generally speaking I feel these images have a quality to them that organically showcases a story behind an image, rather than adding this in post-processing in Photoshop. It's something that actually easier done via these processes than with the crisp, clean super-sharp images we get with modern cameras today.

First up is everybody's favourite, the pinhole camera obscura. Usually consisting of a simple box with a hole the size of a pin in one side. Depending on the sensitivity of the media used to capture the image, exposures can last for very long periods of time due to the small amount of light entering the camera.
:thumb160820769:

Recently with the advent of decent sensors in smartphones, people have taken to producing serious photography on their phones, and with that comes art photography. One of the most popular effects people have utilised is the holga filter in the phone's software. Real holga lomography isn't really overly difficult to comprehend, it still involves a simple film and camera, but its the way the sight uniquely falls within these wonderful cameras to develop these kinds of fine-art photographs
:thumb169428903:

Ambrotypes are hugely under represented on DA, with little surprise considering the amount of preparation and toxicity of the chemicals involved. In fact I am only aware of one true Ambrotype photographer on DA `mjranum. Generally speaking, an ambrotype is a photograph that creates an image on a sheet of glass, often developing a metallic lustre that is then varnished into a one-of-a-kind image.


Lith printing uses standard black-and-white photographic paper with lithographic developer, or diluted standard developer to heavily influence the blacks and colours produced in an image.


And finally for this little feature, solorgraphy, or solorisations, which is something that looks to be incredibly rare on DA, is the process where one would use the same process as a pinhole camera obscura, but instead of using film, one would use photo-sensitive paper, to further elongate the already long shutter time needed. The shutter speed on these images can range from anywhere between 24hours to 4 years. I'm sorry to include my own images here, but I couldn't find many examples.


So next time you see images like this, don't directly dismiss them as a photoshop filter, make sure you take note of the gallery, and the potential effort put into these image's creation.

So often in comments left on my deviations I get comments stating, whining, dreaming, whatever you want to call it about actually visiting Japan. As in the commenter would like to also visit the places I have photographed. Whenever I receive one of these comments, I usually ask why don't they just up and go? Only very rarely do I receive a reply is absolutely a legitimate reason why they cannot just visit Japan. And NO, having no Money is NOT one of those reasons....

I've decided to resurrect my 'The Real Japan' title for news posts I used to submit here to try and shed some light on how to travel on the bone cheap.

I've visited Japan on three separate occasions now, soon to be a forth in April this year, for a combined total of 2 years, 5 months. And I've had to pay, without any help from sources inside Japan for a grand total of 2 days. I'm going to try and outline methods by which you also can visit Japan, and many other countries these opportunities exist for. Unfortunately with the vast majority of the population of DA being North American, my information may be a little off, but I'm sure this will help you in any travelling endeavour you may wish to embark on.

Live and work in Japan.
This is what I did for the most part, I worked for a company named 'interac' [link] who happen to  be a English teacher distribution company who recruit western people from all over the globe to teach English in Elementary through to University lessons. I was recruited in my home country via interview, and I ended up travelling right around the Japanese country side on company funding to teach in all sorts of wonderful locations. There are dozens of companies to choose from if this idea interests you, some better than others, and I'm sure Interac wouldn't be the first choice to recommend for many people out there due to some dubious work place policies, but I personally had no problem with them, and I really enjoyed my time with them. Other companies include James English school [link], Berlitz Japan [link] , Gaba [link] infact these companies are always advertising on [link] They are always recruiting and all you need for some of them is schooling in English, and for others a bachelor degree in any discipline. You do not need to know Japanese, in fact it's often frowned upon.

From my experience teaching English in Elementary schools over there, I have now moved back to Australia, and did a masters in Teaching second languages, and teach Japanese now in Australian schools. So it's certainly a positive experience from my perspective, gets you to Japan, and you get paid to do it. Only cons are that you are away from your home country for expended periods, and the pay isn't overly amazing, but it's pretty good for an individual.

Plenty of IT jobs going too.

Go on exchange
If you're still in school, look into your school's exchange program, and if they don't have one hound them to implement one, or go through an organisation like the Lions Club International [link] who sponsor young bright students on international exchanges like this. You will stay with a Japanese family if you choose to goto Japan, and your family back home will host a Japanese student. You will take their place in their life and live like a Japanese student. Often there is an upfront cost to this however, but the great thing about this option is that many people around you are often willing to support you. You can hold fund raisers with your school, your sporting team, ask local businesses to support your bold adventure, and blog about it making sure you mention their business. Whatever! You'll be surprised how many people would be willing to throw money at you for this sort of thing.

Occasionally your workplace may even offer something similar to gain valuable international insight on business practises overseas. Ask your boss if such an opportunity exists, and if it doesn't state very sternly the benefits you can see arising from just such a program. Don't forget to nominate yourself as a guinea pig

Gain a government grant
Being on a site like DA, you don't have to go far to find artists worthy of earning themselves grants for their work. The Australian government offer such grants and funding for a variety of reasons, mainly through State-based initiatives designed to broaden horizons and experiences of local Australian Artists. You can find more info here: [link] or here if you're from SA [link] There are grants ranging from a few hundred dollars to develop a small project you're working on that may involve travel, to full blown artist-in-residence positions overseas. A quick google for equivalent United States initiatives yielded quite a few similar opportunities, so look into it. Just remember no one is going to give you tonnes of money for doing nothing, you do have to work for it a bit.

Professional development
My trip coming up in April this year will be a tax write off due to my professional position as an educator in the field of Japanese language. It will be considered professional development, and it's something you should ask your tax man about if you can think of any reason why visiting Japan may be beneficial for your professional position. Other than that though, often unions, or professional societies give fellowships in the form of overseas training. I spent a month in Japan due to one such fellowship, where all I had to do was write a 2 page essay stating how it would benefit my personal development. These things are also offered to students in the field, so just apply and see how you go, they have to be awarded to someone, so why not you?

If you're just going on holiday, don't think it's overly expensive
Japan isn't an expensive place to visit. I'm an acting tour guide for a few friends when I return to Japan in April, and for a 20 day visit, we've budgeted AU$3500 per person including airfares. Would be cheaper than that if we didn't decide to splurge on expensive accommodation every now and again, but who can say no to ryokans? Backpacker hotels are more than I expected the first time I stayed in one, and I was really impressed, and now I've stayed in dozens around the country, haven't had a bad experience yet. Food is cheap if you eat like a local, ie not eating steak all the time and getting around is easy as most places are bilingual on the signs and information personnel.

"The only thing you can buy that will make you richer is travel"

The main thing you need is determination
The strength of your resolve to just commit to anything, not just travelling to another country will inevitably be the only thing standing in your way. The main reason I see that people cannot travel that I agree with is if they are married and have family commitments beyond themselves. So if you have no kids, or other such burdens, I'd do it as much as I can until I do, and I have, and I love it.

As always at the end of 'The Real Japan, a selection of top photography of Japan I've discovered on my travels around DA.