This was taken from the roof of the building opposite us in Harris Street. From up here you get a great view of the architectural structure of the Museum, designed by architect Lionel Glendenning, and the evening light that is cast over the city skyline. This is an interesting time to shoot with medium to long exposures because you get the ambient light of the sunset and the bright lights that appear as lines produced from the traffic headlights. This is a good time to experiment with long exposures. This was photographed quiet a few years ago using the medium format camera on a tripod and was shot on transparency film.

File# 00z19014

Photography by Andrew Frolows
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0

This image titled ‘Shearing by machinery’ from our Tyrrell photographic collection has just been added to the Commons project on Flickr. This brings our total number of images to 400 with over 2000 fantastic tags from other members.

This great image shows a shearing board with its mechanised shearing equipment , the shearers busy at work and three young boys collecting the fleece. Mechanised shears were introduced into shearing sheds in the late 1880s and had a dramatic impact on the quantities that were being produced in the sheds thus slowly replacing hand operated blade shears on many properties.

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This was shot with the aperture wide open using a macro lens on a very windy day. The leaf was moving around and it was very difficult to find the focus point however this is the resulting image. This was taken whilst shooting for the Indigenous women’s exhibition Yinalung yenu: women’s journey. This leaf was photographed on a bush track close to where Marlene Kong, one of the women featured in the exhibition, grew up. Marlene took us to the bush setting where she used to play as a child and this is where we set up to interview her for the exhibition. It was during this time that the bush setting was photographed.

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Photography by Paula Bray
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0

This fantastic image titled George Street, looking north from GPO Sydney is one of our images from the Tyrrell photographic collection that we have uploaded to the Commons project on Flickr. If you go to the larger version of this image on Flickr you can see the fine detail including the names on the shop fronts, the people walking on the footpath, the horses and their carriages. You can also see one gentleman on the main carriage either bending over to reach something or trying to get off the carriage. This sort of detail is sometimes missed at a first glance. What was this man doing whilst traveling down George Street?

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This architectural detail of the exterior of the Powerhouse Museum, designed by architect Lionel Glendenning, was taken in October 1993. It was shot in the forecourt of the museum when the archway was painted yellow and the details were blue, it is now all white. This is a simple graphic image using colour and shape to accentuate the design of the building. The museum is an interesting place to experiment with architectural photography with its combination of shapes, lines and long corridor at the side. Sometimes it is the smaller details of a building not usually noticed until you look through a lens and isolate the sections that can have great impact in an image. This was photographed with a medium format camera using colour transparency film, before we went digital. The film had an ISO rating of 50 with qualities of extremely fine grain, saturated colours and sharpness. We no longer shoot anything with film, all our production is digital. We use a medium format camera in the studio with a digital back and shoot the majority of our location work using the digital 35mm gear.

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Photography by Jane Townsend
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0

With over 35,000 views the Commons project on Flickr is going really well. We have been very impressed with the information about the images and the quality of the tagging. Yesterday we released an additional 50 images which includes some rural scenes, Blue Mountains, Neutral Bay, Lane Cove River and Kosciosko. This image Weeping Rock, Wentworth Falls is one of the images we released yesterday. Weeping Rock is a rock waterfall formation at the top of Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains.

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This view was taken from inside the Space Shuttle replica, looking into the Space Station Habitation Module. The museums Hab Module was based on an early prototype for the living quarters of the International Space Station. Although the module it represents has now been deleted from the ISS design, the Hab Module exemplifies many aspects of living on board the International Space Station. When this image was taken, the module had been partially stripped for repainting. It has now been refurbished with new graphics and labels reflecting the current status of the ISS. How Stuff Works has an interesting article on Living and Working Aboard the ISS.

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Photography by Sotha Bourn
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0

This bridge, formerly known as the Glebe Island Bridge, was renamed on Rememberance day in 1998 to Anzac Bridge in memory of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corp. To commemorate this there was an Australian flag placed on top of the eastern pylon and a New Zealand flag on the western pylon. At the western end of the bridge is a bronze memorial statue of an Anzac soldier that was placed there on Anzac day in 2000. Sydney Architecture has this image of the statue.

This was initially photographed for the publication Paradise, Purgatory and hellhole: a history of Pyrmont and Ultimo.

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Jean-François Lanzarone
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0

A museum photographer took this image whilst shooting on location in Narrromine, New South Wales. You can see from this image the great fleece that is produced by Australian sheep. The Australian rural landscape is perfectly suited to producing wool with approximately 70,000 properties dedicated to this major industry. The majority of sheep in Australia are pure merino which are known for producing fine wool and Australia has become the world’s leading producer of this type of wool. Australian Wool Innovation Limited has facts about Australian wool.

This year the museum exhibited Fashion from fleece: 200 years of Australian wool in fashion. It looked at the journey of the Australian merino from the pastoral boom to the high-tech fabric innovations of today.

File no. 00223729

Photography by Andrew Frolows.
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0

This photograph was taken from a low angle using a fish-eye lens. The low angle view makes the time ball look important in relation to its surroundings and distorts the view, making everything in the frame appear slightly curved. Fish-eye lenses were originally used for meteorology and astronomy and became extremely popular soon after for any form of photography due to the distortion the lens produces. Focal lengths can vary and therefore the distortion can be very dramatic or slight as in this shot. The focal length in circular lenses is usually between 8-10mm and 15-16mm for full frame lenses. For more shots taken with fish-eye lenses have a look at this selection on Google Images where you can see the difference between the circular and the full frame lenses.

Plans for Sydney Observatory began as a simple time-ball tower, to be built near the signal station. Every day at exactly 1.00pm, the time ball on top of the tower drops to signal the correct time to the city and harbour below. The original purpose of the time ball was to provide the time to ships in Sydney Harbour. The ball was first dropped on 5 June 1858 and has been dropped regularly ever since. The Observatory will celebrate its 150th anniversary in June.

File # 00218314

Photography by Marinco Kojdanovski.
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0