Jet ski's and castles

Jet ski's and castles, yep, absolutely nothing to do with each other, but that's what I did today.
Went out to the beach and for a few hours and shot a few photos of the guys and girls at the Yamaha Free ride competition.  I couldn't handle the jandle and stay the whole day as my back has been playing up, but still had enough time to get some nice shots.

Then I worked on my Castles, yes plural. One I'm scratch building and the other mammoth beast, is a Warlords games one, with a stupid amount of parts ... but it looks awesome, even at this stage of undress.

Soooooo many sprues... so many parts.

Once built and ready, Mark and I plan to do a mass Hail Caesar battle including the castle which will be a huge 1000 point battle.

March Madness

After a hellish busy week at the office, I find a package arrive for me at home today. Finally my new airbrush turned up weeks after ordering it. Ordered off Ali Express so the time factor was expected, for the whopping cost of $50, about a 1/6th of the price of buying in here locally.  So I now have a dual airbrush setup, so the weekend is looking like a painting mission for sure.

Game wise, the plan is for more Hail Caesar in the coming weeks as I try and finish off some more Greeks, and the local supplier had a sale, so of course I caved in and started another army. I've always want to do a full on Knight army. So I purchased a bunch of boxes (on sale) from Fire Forge. The Teutonic Knights. I'm trying to keep them in there boxes until I complete my Greeks. Which is a seriously challenge. So far I've almost finished one more unit of Greeks.

I've also now got the L'Art De La Guerre rules to read through as a replacement for our 15mm FOG gaming. This might be on the back burner for awhile.

Also on the photography side of things I managed to get my camera fixed after a bit of a disaster. And I've still got 3000 odd photos to sort through from a few weeks back when I went to the 80th Anniversary Air Tattoo for the New Zealand Air Force. I have put together two videos from the trip so far, which I'm rather pleased with.

A bit of this and a bit of that

With a public holiday today I spent the day around at Mark's play Battletech, well kind of. We yakked and talked lots about all sorts and played out several turns of Battletech as we got back up to speed with the rules since we haven't played in over a year. It's rekindled my love for the game all over again, so we are going to plan out a few more games in the coming weeks. (And I totally forgot to take any photos of the game)

After that we rocked out to the local airfield as Mark had purchased a new lens for his camera and was keen to have a go with it and get some pointers from me. Not alot was happening at the airport but we did see some of the land yachts playing around on the other side of the airfield. So we zoomed over to take a few pics and talked to a couple of the guys that were into the sport. I found out that they call if Blow Karting ... unfortunate name if you ask me  ...LOL .. We are definitely going to go back and take more photos during one of there competition. Most of my shots were crap as I was concentrating on helping Mark out.

On the terrain side of things I've started building and painting my next Sarissa purchase from Christmas, the watermill. I must say 1 mm makes a big difference. If I compare my 3 mm City block building I have to the newer 2 mm building, the 3 mm ones are far superior. (still nice buildings thought)

Shutter Bug

So I haven't posted anything in awhile,which isn't surprising since I've been a bit of a shutter bug of late, with my photography taking over my gaming. Having just gotten back from the Omaka Classic Fighters Air Show I'm sifting through the 12,000 odd photos I shot. Yep an insane amount of shots, but actually rather easy to do with the camera gear I have.

So far I've sorted out the ground theatre and the Omaka Heritage Centre shots. Which I've posted up on my photography web site.  http://www.robertwood.co.nz/  Here's just a few I picked out.

The explosion is whats left of a V-1 bomb.

The saddest thing was having the FW190 crash on landing.Apparently one of the wheel breaks failed on landing and caused the plane to be thrown into a loop on the ground with caused the landing gear to fail and the plane hit the dirt. Thankfully the pilot was ok and no one got hurt.

Lots more photos to come in the next few days.

Bit of this Bit of that

It’s the time to be busy. So like everyone else I’ve been busy at work and at play. First up I’ve now finished my first box of Greeks. So I’ve now got 40 painted and ready to go.

Now I move onto the Victrix box of Greeks for something a little different.

On the photo side of things since I didn't manage to get out to Marks to game today I cruised down to Muriwai in the late afternoon for some more practice with my new lens. I was hoping to test it out on some surfing, but the tides and waves were against me there. But the Kite Surfers were out in force, along with a few buggy surfers or land surfers… not sure what you call them. Dudes speeding around on the beach in two or more wheeled buggies. Looked like alot of fun.

I’m getting use to the “The Dog” … that’s what we call my big heavy new lens. (That's a story for another time) The lens is simply awesome, I can now pass as a paparazzi and the reaction I get from some people is quite funny.

The funniest was a bunch of non English speaking Asians (Korean's I think) stand shoulder to shoulder to me and take photos of whatever I pointed my camera at.
Hmmm….. sorry mate, your 105mm lens just an’t going to see what I’m looking at with my 896mm. .. but hey, they were friendly enough even if we didn't have a clue what each of us was says.

Anway, here's the shots from today.

Photo Practice

 I got out to Murawai tonight and shot a few frames and practice with my new lens and discovered that the Turns with some young chicks they were feeding. The extra reach of the new lens is awesome.

NZ Warbirds at Ardmore.

On Sunday I meet Will and Mark G. at Ardmore for the Warbirds Air show. Will was wanting to get some practice in with his new Canon 7D MrkII and Mark G. had picked up a new Nikon camera body as well (cant recall what it was, I'm not a Nikon guy) and I wanted to get some practice in with my new lens that I had unexpectedly acquired.

Now I've been saving for quite some time for a new lens, a rather expensive bit of kit. One just happened to come up on sale, second hand... practically new with 7 months on a 12 month warranty to go. I couldn't pass it up. So I'm rather broke, but extremely happy... early Christmas for me.

So I played around all day testing out the new lens, and what a lens it is... Awesome.

Canon 200-400 F4 with 1.4x Converter ...Big , Heavy and Awesome

Here's a bunch of shots, unedited apart from my logo.