Sunday 21st August - Judgement Day.  The East Fremantle Sharks fighting tooth and nail for the right to compete in the 2011 WAFL finals campaign faced the classy Claremont Tigers who look comfortable perched at the top of the ladder. 

Conditions were terrible, strong breeze, intermittent showers were hardly the ideal conditions for a game of critical importance for both sides and perhaps season defining for the Sharks.  Lose and it could be curtains for season 2011 given the Subiaco Lions and South Fremantle Bulldogs, teams they will play away games to complete the home and away season sat above them prior to this game.

After the completion of the first term, it was clear the league leading Tigers were in for a fight.  Kicking with the aid of a 4-5 goal breeze the tigers felt themselves ambushed by an aggressive and determined Sharks team had clearly heeded the words of the coaching department and came out and not only neutralised the breeze but seemed to be the more switched on team.  The second quarter saw the sharks arrest the narrow deficit and take a handy two goal lead into the half.

The third quarter was another tight tussle between two desperate teams in trying conditions with the rain and wind making a case for back to basic football.  Strong tackles, clean footwork and backing your teammates.  At three quarter time there was signs of an upset brewing with the East Fremantle Sharks heading into the 4th quarter with the aid of the breeze and a narrow lead.

This was when the game turned.  A 7 goal to 1 onslaught saw the Sharks storm home to win by 45 points in a stunning upset that would be sure to boost confidence given the tough schedule remaining.  Not only did they get the four points but with the upset loss by the Bulldogs the Sharks jumped from 5th to 3rd position, a spot that seemed almost unachievable prior to this round commencing.

Luke Blackwell and Thomas Lee impressed again for the Tigers with 27 possessions, while for the home team Rory O'Brien was outstanding with 36 touches and two goals and club stalwart Jamie McNamara had 32 touches of the Burley.

Next weekend gets no easier for the East Fremantle Sharks as they face another "Finals" type game against fellow top 4 aspirants Subiaco, while Claremont face the unpredictable Peel Thunder who will be looking to spoil their opponents quest for top spot.

Another Monday, Foundation day public holiday another classic Fremantle WAFL Derby. After taking the honours on their home ground, the South Fremantle Bulldogs came in wanting to make it two in a row over their arch rivals.
Meanwhile the East Fremantle Sharks, winners of 5 straight games including upset wins over the undefeated West Perth Falcons were confident of continuing their strong vein of form.

The game ended up being a classic arm wrestle with the visitors over running the Sharks in the last quarter to win: 88 - 71. Theo Adams was dominant throughout the game to finish with 32 touches while Ryan Cook worked tirelessly for his 30 touches.

For the East Fremantle Sharks, Rory O'Brien and Koby Stevens were impressive in the middle with 32 and 31 touches respectively. In the end the Sharks needed more help on the scoreboard with Brock O'Brien kicking 7 of the Sharks 11 goals.

Next week sees the Sharks given a solid opportunity to rebound with another home match against the much improved Perth Demons while the Bulldogs also have a home fixture over the struggling Swan Districts.

You can view the full gallery of the Foundation Day Derby here.

RAW - Is an informative blog website run by Perth based professional photographer Tristan Judd.  A couple of weeks ago Tristan put the word out of an exciting competition based around the name of his website "RAW".  The concept was staggeringly simple.  The execution of the task...challenging.

Simply supply an out of camera image and the same image after post processing...simple right? To make the challenge all the more enticing there are some awesome camera bags up for grabs from Thinktank Photo. Check out Tristans review here.

So after deliberating for far too long what do i enter, how much post processing should i do. I ended up with the image above.  I wanted to take something new for the photography competition as i get bored of my photos very quickly, and i believe my best photo will be my next one.

It was Good Friday when i went for my first visit to the derelict and abandoned Power Station for the first time.  Such an incredible building to photograph in terms of its heritage listed architecture and then the abundance of graffiti throughout.  The challenge artistically was to find  a focal point in a landscape that was covered in glass and graffiti. 
It was so visually busy it was almost distracting.  Technically the biggest challenge i faced was the enormous range of stops between shadows and highlights.

I was pretty happy with this final image and i still cant decide if i prefer it in colour or black and white, though i've choosen the colour option to highlight the difference after post production in photoshop.  Regardless of the result of the competition it got me thinking about photography in a new way so its been a really enjoyable challenge.

The RAW photo blog by Tristan Judd is full of reviews and interviews and i was fortunate to be one of the first interviewed several months ago.  You can read my interview here.

Finally as a side note, does anyone recognise the "Monster Image" on the left.  It is none other than the internationally famous "Beastman" - Brad Eastman.  I love his style and iconic images that can be found scattered throughout Australia.

One of the most frequent questions I am asked as a Perth photographer from photography enthusiasts is how do i store and archive my digital images. Unfortunately for the photography enthusiast the precursor to the question is often along the lines of "my computer was stolen, my hard drive has crashed, I accidentally deleted everything, my dog at my hard drive etc. These all too common incidents are often described with sunken watery eyes and a sprinkling of expletives.

Fast forward to our conversation..."chris how do you back up all your precious photographs and digital images?" My answer to any enthusiast or professional alike is to "establish what works for you and keep a routine that you can maintain week after week, month after month, year after year.  There is no point developing a back-up system so elaborate and secure that you become exhausted at the mere thought of having to perform another back-up of your digital image collection.

With digital cameras both compact and DSLR versions having the capability of storing thousands of images on one SD disk no-one is shy about taking a seemingly endless stream of photos on a daily basis. So with 4 out of 5 digital files seemingly identical to the last what do we do to manage and control an abundance of images.  Well for me i have a staged process that i find manageable, time efficient and an effective means of filing digital image files to find easily today, tomorrow and indeed in years to come. I will explain this process in the coming paragraphs.

Step one:  When i return from a professional photography shoot either for a commissioned job or a personal project the first thing i do i download all photos (usually several 8gigabyte SanDisk Ultra 3 SD cards) onto my Macbook Pro desktop.  I always - repeat always use a card reader for this as opposed to plugging in a USB into the Digital camera body for the reason that you can sometimes get card failures by doing this and miss out on downloading all the images available.

Once i have all images on my desktop and having still not reformatted my SD cards ready for my next photo shoot I drag each image into Adobe Bridge.  Adobe Bridge is an image viewing program that comes with most editions of the Adobe CS Suite.  I find it particularly useful as it lets you see all the meta-data of an image and also view the RAW .CR2 files that most image finders don't show.  It doesn't really matter though what program you use but its preferable that you can view the images side by side so you can begin to compare photos.

Its at this stage that i look to cull as opposed to deleting photos on the shoot by looking at them on the back of the 3' screen on the back of a Canon 5D Mark II or  Canon 40D which while useful to establish rough composition and exposure really lack the detail required to judge a images quality.

Going through the photos i quickly delete photos where people are blinking, exposure is clearly over or under exposed, or images that are blurry or poorly framed. Once i have done this i create a folder that is named with a sequential job number that i keep on google docs and place all remaining files in there.  The sequential job number links to the google doc file (available from anywhere with internet connection) then tells me more details about the shoot.  Details such as date of shoot / subjects / photography brief (if applicable) / Location (Perth, Western Australia, or overseas). Once this stage is complete I burn two copies to DVD which are then labeled (filed in CD case) and copy a remaining copy to a 1.5 Terabyte external hard drive.  One of the two DVD's are then taken off-site to safeguard against theft.

Now i have my base selection of images all safe and backed up 3 times.  At this point i delete the images off my desktop to ensure my computer and the available RAM is accessible to use in photoshop and the processing of the RAW files that draws considerable memory usage.

Each image that i work on is entered into another google doc database for final processed images.  Again this database of images details where photograph was taken,subject, landscape photograph or portrait photograph in terms on composition and orientation of camera.  Once i have made any necessary post production I create store the following files all with renamed file names to match my database:
1x Raw .CR2 file
1x Photoshopped .psd file with all layers un-flattened.  This is useful in the event that i want to change the look or feel of the image at a later date.
1 x high resolution jpeg
1 x Medium resolution jpeg
1 x Low resolution jpeg (This file contains my logo watermark - as seen on all my work published on the internet)

These 5 files are each filed into a folder of the same name that grows larger  and larger as it contains images from previous photography shoots.  These folders are then backed up in the same way as my unprocessed photographic collections: 1 copy to the external hard drive and 2 x burnt DVD's to file and archive.

Well that about summarizes my process.  I'm not saying its the best or the only way to archive and back-up.  The onset of cloud computing and websites such as dropbox.com has me thinking about other ways to safeguard my work.  But as mentioned earlier what ever process you decide on, or develop yourself make sure its one you can maintain.