Gallery Red‘s annual retrospective Christmas show ‘4‘ opens tonight 6-8pm Friday 2nd December 2011, Shop 11, 131 – 145 Glebe Point Road, Glebe.  Artist’s exhibiting include Margaret Carey, Tania Castaing, Chidzey, Helen Daley, Jason Foote, Tom Rae, Kerry Freeman, Michael Gunadi, Sally Mowbray, Sarah Park, Fernanda Porto, Alexandra Robinson, Stephanie Simcox, myself and North Sullivan.  The focus of the show is on smaller more affordable works, perfect for that Christmas gift.  I’m exhibiting four new landscape photographs, similar to the Mileage series, but rendered in a slightly dreamier style and presented in a smaller format for this show.

Firstly thanks so much to everyone who made it along to the exhibition, either on opening night or during the following days.  It was a fantastically successful show for me and I’m so grateful to everyone who purchased a print to take home (or the office) with them, you know who you are.  One of the great side effects of this is that we raised $468.00 for World Wide Fund for Nature’s Queensland Flood Recovery Appeal, both through sales and the many generous donations on opening night.

As the show is well and truly over I’ve put the entire exhibition online, both for viewing and purchasing, here.  So far I’ve only worked out postage for Australia, United States of America and United Kingdom, so if you’d like to buy a print from elsewhere please do contact me for costs.

And lastly, the shot of opening night, was taken on my iphone with hipstamatic.

I’m launching my new exhibition “Mileage – Images From The Road” at Gallery Red on Friday the 19th August 2011 from 6 – 8pm.

The exhibition is based on a 10 day road trip I did back in December 2009, travelling over three and a half thousand kilometres from The Whitsunday Shire in North Queensland to The Dandenong Ranges in Victoria.

The resulting limited edition prints are rendered in a toned black and white and printed on the beautiful Hanhemule Bamboo archival fine art paper, made from – you guessed it – 90 percent bamboo, 10 percent cotton rag.

These are very personal images that I hope show a mysterious and perhaps even magical vision of the widely varied Australian landscapes seen across the three Eastern States.

It’s a pretty huge solo show for me, with 27 prints on display and for sale, so I’m hoping you’ll all find something you just can’t live without come opening night.

We’re also donating 15 percent of the sales towards World Wide Fund For Nature’s Queensland Flood Recovery Appeal, as a gesture of thanks and support to an amazing land that provided me with such inspirational visions.

The exhibition runs from Friday the 19th August through to the 30th August with the gallery open Monday to Friday 10am to 5pm and Saturday 10am to 3pm.

Outside (Morning Song) by The Asian Goat Project from Shahane Bekarian on Vimeo.

This is an Asian Goat Project video clip I shot alongside Michael Blake and Director/Producer Shahane Bekararian. I’m mostly responsible for the messed up Lensbaby work.  The entire video was shot over 3 short afternoon sessions, 2 on location in Sydney’s Inner West, and one very brief studio stint.  We used a couple of small LED location lights, a Canon 5D for the Lensbaby stuff, 7D for the slow motion, a GoPro for most of the spinning camera work, and far to much smoke machine.

We are looking for more video projects to undertake together, so if you’ve got one, get in touch!

The video will also be screening tomorrow night, Tuesday, June 7 at 8pm as part of Music Video Night @ Harold Park Hotel – Harold’s Shorts, Harold Park Hotel, 70A Ross Street, Glebe.

I’m lucky enough to have a selection of my soon to be released series mileage included in a curated group photography exhibition entitled Shutter Speed opening at Gallery Red, on the 6th May 2011, 6-8pm.  It’s sure to be an interesting and varied exhibition with recent work by photographers Lucia Fischer, Joseph Harb, Adriane Hayward, Constantine Korsovitis, Elizabeth Schaffer, Stephanie Simcox, Daniel Sponiar & myself.  Come along, enjoy the art, have a drink and maybe even bag yourself a bargain…  Gallery Red is located at shop 11, 131-145 Glebe Point Road, Glebe, NSW 2037, and is open Monday – Friday 10am – 5pm or on Saturdays by appointment.

I’m auctioning the above image this Thursday at Yuga Cafe and Floral Gallery.  It’ll be just one of many fine artworks up for the hammer in a bid to raise money for Japan’s disaster relief.  For more information click here.  The auction takes place 6pm this Thursday 7th April at 172 St Johns Road, Glebe, and will also feature two live performances and an Ikebana demonstration.  Entry is via $25 donation with the funds going to The Japanese Red Cross Society.

An image from Douglas and Kylie's Wedding I shot late last year.

The image above was shot using a hired 85mm F1.2 L II lens, it’s a challenging lens to use but so worth the slow focussing and heavy weight to get dreamy shallow focus images like this one.

I’ve also been busy integrating my brand new Graph Paper Press blog matthewsyres.com with my main Photoshelter powered photography website www.matthewsyres.com, both visually and functionally.  I’ve still got a few kinks to iron out but it’s about 95% there.  Feel free to let me know your thoughts on the designs and any features that might need correcting.

I recently switched over to Photoshop CS5 from CS3 and did a quick test of the new raw processing engine (Adobe Camera Raw 6.0).  To say I was impressed is an understatement.  Here’s a sample image processed with default settings in CS5 (ACR 6.0), with a CS3 (ACR 4.5) version supplied for comparison purposes. This image of Sydney musician Justine Wahlin was taken in fairly low light on my Canon G9, exposure was 1/10 at F2.8 and 800 ISO.

The differences between the converters are fairly subtle at such small sizes though you can already see some breakup and colour noise in the floorboards of the CS3 processed version.

See below where I’ve included 3 different sections at 100% to show how each converter deals with skin, fine texture and shadow areas.

At 100% it’s obvious how ACR 6.0 has totally removed the blotchy colour noise present in the CS3 version.  It also has a very tight and in my opinion much more filmic grain pattern.  The skin tones are much cleaner and would be unoffensive even in a decent sized print, especially in comparison to the ACR 4.5 version.

This section shows that we are not losing any fine detail to gain the much improved noise performance.  The much lower chroma noise even enhances the apparent detail in the fine flyaway hairs to provide a more realistic rendition.

This out of focus shadow area again shows the cleaner results, tighter grain structure, and smoother tonal transitions provided by the new raw engine.

I’ve usually considered 800 ISO to be a bit of a last resort on my G9, yet now I’m keen to try 1600!  I’m also looking forward to running some of my 6400 ISO Canon 5D mkII images through ACR 6.0 to see just how much more usable the resulting images will be.  All in all a very impressive result that bodes very well for Lightroom 3.0, as they share the same new conversion engine.  In the past I’ve felt that though I love Lightroom for it’s speed, features and file management I always knew that I was not really getting the best absolute pixel level quality from my files.  That has surely changed with this latest release of ACR and Lightroom. Nice one Adobe!

Macro shot of a White Crab Spider (thomisus spectabilis) on the petal of a Swamp Lily (crinum pedunculatum).