At the weekend we discovered a new location: Karawatha State Forest. Even knowing where it is, it turned out that it was extremely easy to drive past the entrance as the local council hadn’t felt it necessary to put up any kind of advance indication that a side road was coming up. Having driven past the first time, we turned around at the first opportunity (easier said than done), and very nearly managed to drive past again. Saved by the iPad, again.
Once in the park it was lovely though, dappled sunlight filtering through the eucalypts. This park has only walking trails — for mountain biking one has to go to nearby Daisy Hill, and frequently we do. We picked a walking trail and set off. The weather was perfect for walking, 25C (as in, not yet too hot). Large butterflies fluttered by, so naturally we went hunting for a shot.
Everything is dry after a dry winter. We crossed some river beds where only the shape and arrangement of stones hinted that water might be present some of the year. And the trail had some oddly-shaped trees on it. Do pay attention to the captions; I sometimes try to produce puns….
In an effort to bring a coherent theme to my blog posts, today will be about the colours I found while wandering around the neighbourhood. Admittedly in some cases I was ‘reaching’ a bit with the colour names.
As anyone who hasn’t spent the last month living in a cave on top of the Himalayas will know, Google has made its entrance into the social networking fray with Google+. Â I was very keen to start using it but it’s still invitation-only so I had to wait a bit until the network reached me. It finally has, I’m playing with it a lot, and I thought I’d record a few thoughts.
A symbol for social networking?Â
I already have a Facebook profile, do I need another “social network”? Well, not really. But I’m very much inclined to prefer Google+ over Facebook; certainly I have somewhat more confidence that Google can handle data security. Google+ has easy-to-configure privacy controls, and  some built-in features that I’m keen to use, such as the concept of a circle as an easy way to limit posts to a subset of your online friends. (I know it is possible to separate friends on Facebook into subcategories but the hassle…) Nor do Google+ relationships have to be bidirectional: You can add people to your circles (“follow” them) without them putting you into one of their circles. That way, you can only see their public posts. Also, Google+ isn’t full of third-party applications that may or may not be secure as far as protection of my data is concerned (which is why I don’t use a single application on Facebook), nor does it clutter my page with annoying adverts (so far).
So, as soon as I got invited I set up a very minimalist Google+ profile and started playing with it.. There is a little bit more of a learning curve than for Facebook but the basics are very similar: Add people you know to your circles, share status updates / photos etc with any appropriate circle, or make them available to everyone. Â If your friends don’t yet have a Google+ account you can send them an invite. While they’re “not yet” on Google+, you can still share with them via email, the instructions helpfully state. I hesitated at that point. Surely if I send someone an invite, and they don’t accept it because they don’t want a Google+ account, is it not rather annoying for them to get my posts anyway in their email? I really didn’t like that option but the first time I posted something to a circle that included email-only contacts it asked me if I wanted to share by email, I clicked “no”, and this option became the default. I appreciate how the last post’s settings become the default for the next one; it’s a nice touch.
Facebook-like minimal functionality thus established I started to look further. As I learn more about photography I find I like to share some of my photographs with a wider audience. Hence this blog, for example. Then I stumbled on this article:Â Google+: The Survival Guide for a Photographer’s Paradise, which I found an excellent introduction to the basics of Google+ even for non-photographers. The post explains every menu item, button and display area, and goes into some detail about circle creation and settings. It also pointed me to the Scrapbook album, which I might not have found on my own. It can be set up so that it shows five photographs on your profile page, and you can even choose which ones. I like this functionality a lot.
Of course I’ve still barely scratched the surface, for example, I haven’t been in a Huddle or Hangout yet. But so far I like Google+ a whole lot more than Facebook.
After all the fun I had last time at the City Botanic Gardens with their waterfall we decided to see what flowing water might be available at its bigger out-of-town sibling. Since I had my Key Grip with me to carry things I brought all my lenses, and even a tripod. We came away with several lovely shots, including my current favourite, a currawong in flight. In the expectation that it might take off I’d adjusted the camera settings in advance, and got rewarded with a sharp image of it flying away, including its reflection. Pleased, I am.
Yesterday’s shoot also produced my contribution to today’s Daily Shoot.
A currawong, going places.The 1/4s exposure makes the water blur.A beautiful, delicate-looking plant.A field of slim-stemmed plants.The Japanese Garden, upside-down.My Daily Shoot contribution
Late winter is producing warm, sunny days, and while the harsh sunlight is perhaps not perfect for photography it’s awesome for wandering around outside with a camera. A jumper during the day is no longer necessary; sunblock, however, is. I watched this cormorant for quite a while, getting a shot just as it was flying off. It didn’t go far; it was mostly after a higher spot from which to watch the world go by. Note that the chosen tree is still devoid of any greenery.
Cormorant taking offCormorant watching the world go by
This Eastern water dragon did what lizards do best: sun-bathing, while this moorhen preferred to stay in the shade.
Portrait of a LizardA moorhen sheltering from the sun.
A waterfall afforded the opportunity to play with manual settings. Give a waterfall a long enough exposure and the water droplets should look like long streaks. This is limited not so much by the minimum available aperture but by how long I can hold the camera steady-ish. This turned out to be one-fifth of a second. Any longer and a tripod will be required.
When I went out in search of photographic subjects today I got a bit more than I bargained for. Sitting in the sun with a vague idea of maybe photographing some seagulls I spotted a Wedgetail eagle! What an excellent time to be trying out my new camera’s AI Servo focus and multi-shot drive modes. AI Servo focus means that the focus intelligently follows the moving subject that the camera thinks you want to focus on. And to be fair, while there were a few misunderstandings between me and the camera (yes, I know there is a cyclist over there, why would I want to focus on him rather than the shiny eagle??), overall it did actually work pretty well. Certainly better than my previous attempts at photographing moving subjects.
The other thing that this camera setting does is take lots of shots in close succession. My old camera could only take four pictures in a row before wanting a break to write the stuff out to its card. This one rattled off several six-shot sequences in succession without batting an eyelid. 384 shots later (I didn’t count but I assume my camera can) I had a pretty decent shot, taken with a 75-300mm telephoto lens.
384 shots later I also had 384 18-megapixel RAW files that made a considerable dent in the computer’s 1TB hard disk and caused Aperture to crash. Maybe 8GB of RAM is not enough after all…? After several hours of editing, the best shots of the day are attached below. I used the eagle for today’s Daily Shoot as well.
Slight administrative change, the thumbnail pictures below now link back to my Flickr photostream. This is an experiment. I am trying to consolidate my public photo store. We’ll see how it goes.
Shot 320 out of 384...A ternBusy BeeWill I ever get tired of playing with depth-of-field?
I took my new camera to Daisy Hill at the weekend, to explore its capabilities while Other People took their mountain bike up and down trails (and had a puncture — but that’s another story). Anyway, new camera has HD Video recording capability, and I was lucky enough to run into a wild kangaroo in the picnic area. The kangaroo was only interested in picnic remains (of which there were none — by and large, Australians leave their picnic areas tidy) and, having determined that I wasn’t edible, proceeded to ignore me. So I shot my first-ever video. I think my camera work could do with improving but still, a wild kangaroo this close, how cool is that?
Since this was so much fun, I repeated the experiment with a not-so-wild koala at the Daisy Hill Koala Centre. It was almost dusk and the koalas were waking up and starting to move around. In fact, this was the most active koala I’ve ever seen.
I still prefer photographs but it’s fun to try a movie from time to time. Meanwhile, here are the best of the weekend’s pictures.
