A very friendly kookaburra turned up on our balcony to say hello. In the middle of a torrential downpour  it was a nice dry place. We tried to feed it a piece of cheese but it wasn’t interested. My new prime lens took some excellent shots.

This year Easter Monday coincides with Anzac Day, hence we get the Tuesday off as well. A five-day weekend! Awesome. So we’re making the most of it.

First of all we had a look at Daisy Hill and the Koala Coast. The area is a 20-min drive away and boasts mountain bike trails and, of course, koalas. It was a changeable autumn day with the occasional shower (I mean, downpour). We did some exploring together, running into several kangaroos on the way. Then the Mad Mountain Biker wanted some hills to climb. I put away my bike, grabbed my camera, and went in search of koalas meanwhile.

They weren’t very hard to find — an open enclosure that every self-respecting koala could easily get out of held two of them, one exploring its climbing tree and the other doing what koalas generally do in the middle of the day: Snooze.  A sleeping koala is an excellent subject for a prime lens.

Technically, there were supposed to be koalas elsewhere around, too, but I didn’t see any. One of the walking trails provided more subjects for artistic interpretation. Then the heavens opened and I ran for the car, mostly to make sure my camera didn’t get wet. The Cyclist had the same idea and we found each other at the car, though I first thought a Mud Monster had designs on our car. A good time was had by all, especially people who like getting very muddy.

For variety, the next day we went west over the Great Dividing Range. All the way over the mountains, stopping at three lookouts: McAfee’s Lookout, Camp Mountain Lookout and Jolly’s Lookout. The views were awesome — see pictures at the end. On the other side of the mountains, Lake Wivenhoe, South-East Queensland’s biggest water catchment and flood prevention area. It’s currently only about 80% full since they keep releasing water, fearing another flood. Apparently everyone has already forgotten about the previous 7-year drought…

Today we returned to Daisy Hill and found a single-track that even I could (mostly) do (the occasional bit of pushing doesn’t count!). It’s a lovely area with many trails for walking, cycling or horse-riding, and we’re looking forward to returning often.

I know you all read this blog only for the piccies, so here you go! Happy Easter, everyone.

Today’s Daily Shoot assignment was about textures. But, since I had my camera out anyway, I naturally shot other interesting things as well.

Here are the best of the weekend’s crop of photos. I am starting to get to know what can be done with my new prime lens. It’s worth clicking on these for a full-size view.

Ah, the fun that can be had playing with depth-of-field. Enjoy.

A very generous person gave me a 50mm prime lens for my birthday. Naturally it needed trying out immediately, so we took it to Brisbane’s Alma Park zoo in search of subjects. It’s a very small zoo set in beautiful rainforest, with a fairly restricted range of contented-looking animals. On an unexpectedly beautiful, hot, sunny autumn day it was just the place to be.

The point of a prime lens is that it’s really fast. These lenses have huge maximum apertures (where bigger equals more expensive on what seems to be a logarithmic scale), with correspondingly tiny depth-of-field, and work well in low-light conditions (such as, in a rainforest). Mine goes up to f1.4. For comparison, a standard 28-55mm kit lens can sometimes, if you’re really lucky and it’s bright and sunny, reach f4.

The low depth-of-field means you can play with awesome effects. For instance, you can focus on someone’s eyes while their nose might be out of focus. (Normally, this is called “doing it wrong”.) Not having a willing subject to hand to demonstrate, the effect works on birthday chocolates just as well:

More usually a narrow depth-of-field is used to blur the background, such as in this picture:

Wanting to play more with depth-of-field, I found four kangaroos conveniently lying down one behind the other, enabling me to shift the focus from the first to the last in sequence to see what the result would be:

Spot the problem? Depth-of-field is not quite enough to keep a whole kangaroo in focus, especially not the nearest one. Might have done better at f1.8. But you get the idea.

The kangaroos were fantastic, and very tame. They liked to be snuggled.

Sometimes they find someone tasty.

There were all sorts of varieties of kangaroos, all in walk-in enclosures. Here’s an albino, which I’d never seen before:

A lizard is quite a “long” animal so focussing on it’s head will blur the body (and, luckily, the surrounding foliage).

This young buck was very interested in us.

Tasmanian Devils are supposed to be nocturnal. These sure weren’t. They were the most active Tasmanian Devils I’ve seen, spending a lot of their time playing.

Here’s elegance personified:

Shooting through a cage is rarely successful but this little chap had to be photographed. He was born on 18 March and represented one of the highlights of my day.

I shot most of the day at f1.4 (because I could) but I am told it is not absolutely necessary to shoot at f1.4 all the time. So here are some landscape shots with the aperture stopped down to something a bit more reasonable (like, f8).

And I caught a tern in flight:

A lovely day was had by all!

My contribution to today’s Daily Shoot:

While the Obsessive Cyclist was climbing a mountain again, I wandered through the Botanical Gardens and found an extra bonus: an outdoor concert in progress, courtesy of Brisbane City Council, and stopped to spend a very pleasant hour sitting on the grass listening to Australian composers.

Afterwards, the Japanese Gardens are always a relaxing sight.

These lizards found it relaxing, too, especially on stones conveniently warmed by the sun.

To round off the wildlife sightings, a young bird scratching happily, completely ignoring people. Not sure what it is when it’s grown up — a lyre bird of some kind?

Last Friday we decided on a few civilized evening drinks across the river, where most of the bars have just reopened after the January floods. It was not much of a success as, in some cases, “re-opened” meant “open if you don’t mind sitting among hastily-hired external cooling units because the new fridges haven’t arrived yet”, or “open if you don’t mind a very restricted selection of beer”. In other cases, it meant “open if you don’t mind eye-wateringly high prices for (admittedly excellent) beer while being squeezed like a sardine among the throng”. With hindsight maybe a Friday evening wasn’t the best choice to try out new venues.

However, it was a gorgeous, warm evening, and just right for some sunset photography.

Having had one beer at each of the likely-looking establishments on the North side we decided that South of the river is more to our taste and ended up back at our usual haunt a worryingly convenient 2-minute walk from our flat. An excellent choice of beers in a busy but not overcrowded bar, a civilized atmosphere and available seats all made the local choice a no-brainer for us.