Jason Bagley » Photos

The Queen Mary 2 in Cape Town

Jason — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:19:12 +0000

The world’s largest ocean liner, the RMS Queen Mary 2 docked in Cape Town for a night last week and I was lucky enough to snap a few pics. It wasn’t easy trying to find a decent vantage point as you weren’t allowed anywhere near the boat. I took the night shots from the N2 bridge as you leave Cape Town. The day shots were a little more tricky. I eventually paid a taxi driver R50 to drive me past security as a passenger. Although the best spot would of been to take the pics from across the dock, these will have to do! (Best viewed in their full glory on Flickr. As an example, click here to see the pic below in full)

Just some interesting stats on the cruise liner. Via Wikipedia:

The Queen Mary 2 has:

fifteen restaurants and bars
five swimming pools
a casino
a ballroom
1000+ seat theatre
capacity for 3,056 passengers and 1,253 officers and crew
and weighs a massive 148,528 tons!

It’s not the largest ship on the seas, with the MS Oasis of the Seas currently holding those honours.

More pics after the jump.

See more pics of the Queen Mary 2 on my Flickr stream.

Pics from the Old Biscuit Mill

Jason — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:12 +0000

The Old Biscuit Mill has one of the most amazing food markets that happen every Saturday. The last visit I made to the Neighbourhood market was at the beginning of the year, so Karina and I were definitely due for another visit. This time we convinced her sister and their family to come too. Those West Coast oysters, Karina’s sister had about 20!

So with my newly acquired photography skills and a new lens (Nikon 50mm f1.8), here are a couple of my favourite pics from Saturday.

View the rest of the pics on my Flickr photostream.

Expect some more photos as I’ve got a holiday to Paris, London and Dubai coming up at the end of October. I can’t wait!

Pics from my photography course

Jason — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 06:15:38 +0000

So last week Monday was the start of my photography course at Vega’s college of photography. The first lesson was pretty much a “get to know your camera” session. I learnt about how to setup all the different functions, change apertures, shutter speed, auto & manual focus, ISO settings, light metering and others.

We also have 2 photo assignments. The first was a light meter reading exercise taking photos under different conditions – shade, sun, dark background, light backgrounds etc. The 2nd assignment was a lot more fun – night time exposure photography. Choose 4 different settings, use an aperture of F8 and take 6 pics with different shutter speeds – 1 second, 2s, 4s, 8s, 15s and 30s. Here are a couple of the pics I took.

The biggest thing I’ve realised is composition is the one of the most important aspects of photography. Just looking at an object from another angle changes a dull and boring image to something magnificent and thought provoking. I’m sure that you can see from the above images, this is something I’ll need to work on. :)

We have an entire module dedicated to composition, which I’m probably looking forward to the most!

My weekend away to Paternoster

Jason — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 10:32:18 +0000

I had a fantastic weekend away to Paternoster with my family. This post isn’t about the weekend away, but more about my new camera I bought, the Nikon D5000.

My wife bought me a professional photography course at Vega for my birthday and you need a DSLR camera in order to get the most out of the course, so after weeks of research on both Canon and Nikon cameras, I settled for the Nikon D5000.

I have no photography experience, so these photo’s definitely aren’t going to win any awards but for my first attempt at taking amazing pics, I don’t think I did too badly. Sure the composition isn’t spot on and I probably used the incorrect settings to, but those are all things you learn as you take more and more pics.

This weekend I mostly played around with the aperture settings trying to create shallow and deep depth of field pics. I’d love some feedback on the pics either here on my blog, or on the pics themselves in my Flickr account.

I took way more than the 14 pics I uploaded, the rest were mostly family shots or not worthy of my “amateur” photography stamp of approval. :)