Boyup Brook is the Country Music Capitol of Western Australia, and the annual Country Music Festival and WA Country Music Awards brings visitors not only from around WA and the rest of Australia, but also from around the world. This was my first time attending the Festival and it was a bit of a shock to have so many people in our sleepy little town!

And yes, those last two photos are of a kilt-wearing punk playing the bagpipes at the Boyup Brook Country Music Festival! He was very good and I am still kicking myself for not buying his cd!

The 2011 Boyup Brook Country Music Festival will be held on 17th – 20th February 2011 and will feature Troy Cassar-Daley, Felicity Urquhart, Peter Denahy s well as the Bush Poet’s Breakfast, Country Music Awards, stalls and markets, free street party and the Ute and Truck Muster.

I have just changed over from using Photoshop CS4 to Lightroom 2.4 for processing my photographs – all I can say is I wish I had done this sooner! As much as I resist learning new computer programs (fuzzy mummy brain I think), Lightroom is so quick to use compared to CS4, the time out I have taken to learn how to use it is going to be a huge benefit in improving my workflow, especially for batch processing. Here is a selection of the first images that I have processed through Lightroom from my road trip down south to Boyup Brook.

The only nitpick that I have with Lightroom is the watermarking ability or lack thereof. I have purchased the mogrify preset which allows me to use my standard watermark…but it places them at the same location in every image, which can obscure important elements of the photograph. Plus I need to make additional copies of the watermark for different opacity and colours so that I can select slightly more subtle watermarks to suit individual images better…either that or just continue to use CS4 and apply the watermarks manually for each image.

Other than that one issue, I can highly recommend Lightroom to any photographer looking to speed up their workflow.

Yesterday I had a portrait session with very cute 7 1/2 month old Jack.

What a cutie-pie, but oh-so serious when it came time to take his photos:) Thanks to his very sweet mum, K for letting me come to your home and photograph your gorgeous boy! I hope you enjoy this sneak peak at some of his photographs!

Yesterday was such a beautiful day we took the kids down to Fremantle for a few hours (of course so did half of the metropolitan area;). Normally if I take my camera when we go out, I lug the heavy 70-200mm 2.8L around with me (gotta love L zoom:) but the down side is that its pretty heavy to carry when you just want to wander around for a few hours.

So I popped the nifty fifty on my camera and apart from a few portrait shots of the kids, decided to step way outside of my normal subject matter and try to get some interesting shots of some of the old buildings. Considering I’m not into architecture photography, I am quite pleased with how these turned out.

The highlight of last week for me was a wonderful session that I had on Saturday with Mitchell and Kaden, two gorgeous little boys who were loads of fun and had me cracking up all over the place with their antics!

I know their lovely mum is anxious to see their sneak peak, so here it is – thanks so much Jackie for letting me photograph your beautiful boys, I hope they had as much fun as I did :).

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