The Batblog by Photobat

I’m so excited to tell you all that the brand new Photobat shop is up and running! This has been in the works for a few months now and promises to be one of the best additions to the photobat wedding experiance. From now on, all Photobat weddings will be uploaded to shop.photobat.net so you can send your family and friends to see and purchase your wedding photos.

And if that wasn’t cool enough, you can now make one off payments for things like portrait sessions and wedding booking fees.
Head over to shop.photobat.net and view the sample gallery to see just jow cool it all is!

I just received in the post the 2008 / 2009 edition of Bride Tasmania. It’s always fun to get a new magazine and the first thing I did was sit down at the nearest cafe and flip through to see the latest ideas, stories and designs.

The latest Photobat Ad

Peppermint Bay’s spread features a few of my shots from Scott and Paula’s wedding

Morilla are featuring my shot of Monica and Craig

And 4Kombi’s are using a couple of my shots also from Morilla are featuring my shot of Monica and Craig’s wedding

Vikashni, her little sister Susanne and I went off to the APEX Australia Teenage Fashion Awards at the Country Club last Sunday. Photobat sponsored second prize in all three categories of the event but I had no idea how amazing the whole thing would be. To fill you i, each entrant designs and creates their own garments and they, or a friend, models it for them on the stage. There were three categories, evening wear, casual  day wear and fantasy.

The standard of each section blew me away, everyone was so talented. The fantasy section was really impressive, these were garments that are not really made to be worn in everyday situations and were open to the creators imagination.Plus some entrants really researched ideas and themes behind their works, giving them many different levels of creativity and also thought.

Stay tuned for some shots of the winners in the next few months. And well done to APEX Australia for creating such an important event, aimed at inspiring and supporting creativity in teenagers.

I spent all of last week in Melbourne, it was a quiet trip with the purpose of learning. I took part in a 5 day seminar with  Jerry Ghionis. Who is Gerry I hear you ask? Well let me tell you. Jerry is listed by American Photo as one of the top 10 wedding photographers in the world, listed as an Icon of Imaging by Microsoft and winner of a bucket load of awards from all over the world.There were participants from all over Australia and even as far away as New Zealand and Malaysia.

It was fascinating to see learn from a photographer who has been influencing my work for the last 12 months.

So, 5 days is a long time and there was so much information, ideas, tips and inspiration given that i’m still buzzing with everything that happened. There are many parts of what I do in photography and business that i’m working on improving to take my standards even higher. There are not too many things that will change over night, it will be more of a gradual process.

So stay tuned for more changes, more exciting products, new services and better images. I’m excited and a bit pumped!

And sorry to everyone to called and emailed while I was away, the seminar was all consuming of both brain and time. I’ll be getting back to you very very soon.

Check out Jerry’s website here

That’s right… a new office phone number! Only took a couple of years to get one.

Ok, it’s 1.10am. Being up this late means I’ve been being a bit geeky and doing website things. A WHOLE NEW SECTION. Yep, this is the biggest thing to happen to the website since I accidentally broke it last year.

So head over to www.photobat.net and click on the portrait gallery. It’s now divided up into sections covering, Pregnancy, Babies, Commercial, Couples, Kids, Families, Individuals and finally Pets. It’s still got some tweaking to do,find some more photos, add some more text, but it’s up and I can’t wait for you to see it!

Next post… is about communications…

I asked my smart wife Vikashni to write a little introduction about RSS feeds, just incase you didn’t know about them… so here goes, V’s first post on the Batblog.

Have you ever of noticed a RSS logo or link on websites that you have visited? Have you ever wondered what it is? This article is a basic overview of what an RSS feed is and how it can save you time on the internet.

So what is a RSS?

RSS stands for either Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. It is a way of delivering information to you from constantly changing websites straight to your computer.

Initially they were set up for news websites so that the latest headlines were constantly updated to your computer, now that the technology has spread other websites which have new contact added to them have taken on the RSS technology as a way to keep people up to date. For example you now find RSS feeds on everything from real estate websites that update you on the latest listing through to celebrity news sites that up date you on Paris Hilton’s latest dog fashions!

So what does this all mean for you?

If you subscribe to a magazine, the latest addition will arrive in your mail box as soon as it is released. RSS feeds work the same way with out having to pay for subscriptions. You can scribe to your favorite websites RSS feeds and use a RSS feed reader to look at the latest content on that website.

By using your RSS reader you can subscribe to all of your favorite blogs and news articles and have then arrive in one central place, saving your search time.

How do you subscribe to RSS feeds?

To subscribe to RSS feeds you need to use a RSS reader. There are a few different types of RSS readers, there are ones that you can install on your computer, others that are web based that you log into and your email program may also have an inbuilt reader.

Personally I prefer the web based reader because I can look at my RSS feeds from any computer that has internet access and I do not have to install any new software on to my computer.

Various email programs have RSS readers built into them, check your email software’s help guide for information on how you can set this up.

Using the popular web based readers is probably the simplest way of subscribing.

A lot of web sites have buttons like the image below

By clicking on the type of reader that you use it will take you to your RSS readers site and add the subscription to your RSS feed list.

Web based RSS readers

Google Reader

My Yahoo

Bloglines

Desktop RSS Readers

Windows: SharpReader

Mac OS X: NetNewsWire

So that is the basic overview of RSS, so don’t be afraid to try to subscribe to some feeds. Also, there is a video here that explains the whole RSS things in a very clear way.

Feel free to leave any comments with other suggestions about this topic, thanks for reading!

You may have noticed over the years that I have received a few awards from the Canon Australian Professional Photographer of the Year awards, organised by the Australian Institute of Professional Photography.

The top shots from the year go into a national traveling exhibition, which will be in Hobart later this year All the award winning shots go into a book, the latest of which just arrived this morning.

I still get a buzz seeing photos in print, the books are full of spectacular images and is very inspiring. That’s my shot of Rusty the dog and Gerry above him.

You can buy copies of the 2007 book and many of the previous year books here.

I have just added about 2 months worth of images into the portrait of the week section of Photobat.net. For those new, i set myself a little challenge to do a portrait each week just for practice. That was about 270 weeks ago and i’m still going.

The above shot isn’t in the Portrait of the Week, there is a different one. I thought i’d put up an other shot of the Albanian accordian playing busker/begger from Athens. He seemed to be a hit from the post below.

Click here to see the latest shots for portrait of the week

I had a message from Tom while I was away letting me know that the 2008 Canon Australian Professional Photography Awards were turning out to be very different from previous years. In a word, it was a bloodbath. Many of great photographers were scoring much l ower than usual, so I was terrified about my images. In the end I did manage to get 3 Silver awards for the below images and I was over the moon about it!

I’m really glad the awards were hard this year. I talked to some photographers and the tough judging is only doing good things for the industry. If what received a gold award the year before, a similar shot probably shouldn’t be getting the same result the next year. The awards are all about improving the industry, and if the similar images keep getting the same awards each year, the industry will not move forwards.

Big congratulations to some of the friends who took out categories this year including Damien Bredberg, Nick Melidonis and Peter Adams. Very big congratulations to Mercury Megaloudis who was one of the many photographers who opened his studio to me when I was first starting out and shared his knowledge. You can see all the top winning images here.

Also, the Tasmanian Division of the AIPP has some really fantastic photographers, quite a few managed to get awards this year which was fantastic to see. It’s not unusual, most years Tasmanians fair very well in the awards. So well done to Alice Bennett, Phil Kuruvita, Richard Bennett, Janie Boyd, Rob Burnett, Sarah McGregor, Janet Perkins, Jan Perkins, David Walker and Ian Wallace for getting more awards for Tasmania!

So my winning images are below, again this year all from commissioned work.

Pip Branson as Rufino the Catalan Casanova, Shot while shooting, Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen in Hobart

Marek, from the British comedy group We Are Klang.

Renne and Nathan. I nearly entered this on last year but changed my mind at the last minute.I’ve regretted not entering, so I had to enter it this time. It’s one of my favourite wedding shots, which is why I have it as a massive canvas in the office!