New Years Eve

Tonight is the night of fireworks and I intend to try and shoot a few using my Olympus 500E. With this in mind I had a little practice at getting settings that worked for fireworks - but in daylight. To do this I made up a sort of "studio" on the veranda using the black barbecue cover as a background and a brick wall as shelter. A sparkler was stuck into a piece of florist's "oasis" foam and Colin was my pyro-technician with the flame thrower!
For this shot I was using my 40-150mm lens and I set the shutter speed to 1/20 second and the aperture at F11
To begin with I went to the scene mode on the camera to see what the settings were in that. That is where I found out to use F11, however I knew that the speed was wrong. The speed in Scene mode was four seconds. I actually had a try with that setting and of course the captured picture was just completely blown out. Far to long! Even if it hadn't over exposed the picture would have been a white blur where the sparks are in this image.
I will try the settings I tried - F11 with a variety of shutter speeds ranging from 1/15 to 1/30 second - all of which gave good results. Of course the camera was locked on a tripod or there would have been blur.
Next blog hopefully will contain a shot of the fireworks!
AJ

Climbing Frangipani

As I sit on my veranda to have breakfast or lunch I can see the changing colours of the creepers that swarm over a tall tree stump. My veranda is not on ground level, it is on the first floor of the house, over the flat used by our travelling son when he eventually comes home for a break. So the tree stump is quite large - the original tree was enormous and we had it lopped for safety reasons when we built the extensions that include the flat, unfortunately the shock of the severe pruning killed the tree so the five metre tall tree stump was left to support three different creepers.

At the moment it is the climbing Frangipani that is in flower, when it has finished the pink Jasmine will take over the display. The strands of the Jasmine are completely hidden at the moment and house a huge collection of finch nests. The sweet little Double Bar Finches know when they are onto a good thing and have made homes close to where there is a regular supply of seeds! As you can see the Frangipani is quite vigorous and has continued past the tree stump and up and into the African Tulip Tree! That tree is not ready to flower yet so it was looking rather boring until this happened!

Not many people have come across the Climbing Frangipani and I am constantly asked what it is. I have included a close up picture of the flowers so you can see how much they resemble the familiar tree Frangipani with the number of petals, the way they are slightly overlapped and the subtle yellow and white colouring. They are also quite different - the petals are thin and fragile and they do not drop off the vine and fall as perfect flowers to the ground. Often the flowers look rather a mess. It is thanks to our recent rains that there is a fresh flush of flowers today and they looks so good.

The birds are not interested in the nectar of the Climbing Frangipani. Either they have very little nectar or it is not sweet enough for the lorikeets.

AJ

and still it rains . . .

The rain is still falling, it was only light through the night but when daylight broke the clouds did too and as I write it is still "pelting it down". I have just looked out down our back yard - we have an acre of land - and it looks a little damp. So far it is not flooding. Our next door neighbour's land is lower next to the billabong and it is already covered with water as is his neighbour on the other side. The horse paddock in that yard is non existent now and the horse has been moved up near to the house.
I took my car to be serviced this morning and tossed a large white umbrella in the front seat so that I would not get wet going into the office at the workshop. Just before I arrived the rain started to come down even heavier and even with the wipers going I could barely see out of the windscreen. Pulling up at the workshop I manoeuvred my umbrella through a crack in the open door and tried to open it so that I didn't get too wet - but the stupid thing turned inside out! There is not much shelter under a "brolly" that is inverted! I had to make a dash for it. To close the umbrella I had to stomp on the thing to make the wires turn over. When I got inside the office there were three fellows splitting their sides with laughter. The walls of the office are glass and they had witnessed the whole drama!
AJ

More wet weather

An night of steady rain has brought several changes to our immediate environment. The old Eucalypt has burst into flower and the billabong - a horse-shoe loop in a creek that has been by-passed by the main creek - is full and is overflowing its banks. Our home is on this small billabong and as it is not recognised as a waterway by the "powers that be" we can pump water to our gardens from it without needing a license.
The lorikeets that screech and make so much noise in the mornings demanding a sugary treat are now biding their time doing what lorikeets should be doing - taking nectar from the blossom. After the rain that fell through the night the nectar is a bit dilute and this is why they will come in even greater numbers to the feed dish in the wet.
The land the house resides on was once part of a dairy farm and only had two Eucalypts on it when we first bought it. I now have a small forest of native trees that were purchased primarily for the fruit and flowers that attract birds. One of these trees has masses of purple plums on it and so far I have not seen one bird eat any of them! The tree is the Davison Plum - I presume that it might be food for possums since the birds are not interested. Or maybe tree kangaroos - but they are a creature of far north Queensland, not the Gold Coast!
AJ

Drizzle after Christmas

Sad to see the festive season over, mother nature has turned on the tears. Much of the country is now in flood but here on the Gold Coast the rain is lighter and soaking into the ground. We had a gentle fall of rain through the night and when I went out this morning to feed the lorikeets I found them all over the chairs and the table trying to keep out of the weather. They looked all drab and miserable!
Feeling a bit sorry for them I gave them twice as much breakfast - they get raw sugar mixed with water. I only give them a tablespoon of sugar to a litre of water so the mix is quite thin. I have also found that the birds are not interested in the juice unless there is bread to sop it up! They like to hold the bread between their beaks and suck the juice out!
Anyway, the birds shoved and pushed their way into the sugared bread mix and gobbled it all down in the same amount of time they normally do - So I have resolved not to give in to their pleadings and give them as much as they crave, I do not want them to become dependent on being hand fed. The trees are loaded with flowers and they must work for their meals! Nectar is their main source of food but they do enjoy a few seeds too - especially sunflower seeds.Here are the wet lorikeets scrambling through the wire cage over their feed dishes. The terracotta dish contains the seeds. The cage is to keep out the large cockatoos, it does not restrict any of the other smaller birds. They do not see it as a barricade. They treat it as if it were a climbing frame.
As you can see from the colour of the birds the emerald green of the feathers has become a drab bottle green and the brilliant orange on their chests a muted red colour. After feeding the birds scattered to the trees in pairs and spent the next half hour preening - the rain stopped while they were dining.
AJ

Christmas Day

For me the celebrations of Christmas Day are almost over. I haver returned home from a wonderful day with the family. Here is a picture of my daughter in law, Donna with her two beautiful daughters, Kayla aged five and Chantelle, three. They are all excited and ready to open their presents. And what a lot of presents they got! Christmas is very much a time for children and our day was no exception to that rule! It was the children that received the most presents including the most noisy and the most fun! Although I took lots of photos I switched the camera to movie mode and took half a dozen little movies as well. They are fun to watch. The children got a fun game that was a set of tunnels and toys for two mechanical guinea pigs! The guinea pigs made all sorts of noises and ran backwards and forwards in a most realistic way through all their obstacles. They were really fun to watch - and to take movie of!
So Christmas is now over for yet another year. I have set my reindeer and Santa on the dining room table and have just taken a shot of them because the little Santa seems to be waving "good bye". Since he will be back in the North Pole working on his next assignment - Christmas 2010, this photo is an appropriate one to end this day's blog. I hope you enjoyed the day as much as I did.
AJ

Christmas Lights

This white display was created by one woman on her own. She even clambered onto the roof by using her wheelie bin as a ladder to put the lights up there! She was telling us that no one in the hardware store was able to advise her on how to anchor the lights to the tiles so she worked out a method herself.

Although very simple and not a winner in the Christmas lights competition, I liked the way this house was picked out with lights - it created a sort of light painting!

These two pictures are of the overall winner of the lights competition. It really was amazing how much had been created, snowmen, reindeer, ten drummers drumming on the garage roof and lots of little animated Christmas toys in the garage display too. It certainly deserved to win.

These are just a few pictures of the lights that decorated some of the homes on the Gold Coast for Christmas. I took lots of pictures but will only share a few!

AJ

Christmas and birthday

The decorating just never ends!
I have just put the finishing touches to yet another Christmas cake. This time I have been rather radical - I cut the cake in two and as my husband has his birthday on December 24th I made one half a birthday cake and the other the Christmas cake! That way we have a new cake for each occasion and if we decide not to cut the chrissy cake it will stay moist in its icing wrapper! When racing the shopping crowd this morning to get a few fresh vegies I called in to the bakery to get my favourite "Tiger bread" and spotted some fabulous gingerbread houses on display. I asked if I might take a photo of them and was given permission so I am sharing them with you. They are lovely - it would be a shame to cut into them. I think gingerbread houses might be more of a German tradition because I have not come across them for Christmas before. I believe the baker is either Austrian or German.
On Monday I took a few photos of some of the Christmas decorated houses and will show a couple of shots in another blog.
AJ

Stitching a panorama

Having decided to show the members of Visions how to use Photoshop to stitch a series of photographs together to make one panorama, I decided to take a cruise through the free programs offered on Google. The first one I downloaded is actually a program developed by Microsoft and after using it I have given up looking at any of the other programs or stitching photos in Photoshop. Take a look at this panorama.

It was created from four photos while I was on a holiday in September to the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.
When I looked at the photos I could not work out how to stitch them together, the overlaps were not clear and the colour of the foreground and of the sky differed in every shot. I had put that collection of shots on the back burner - you can tell that because I told you they were taken in September!
I converted each of the four photos from RAW to jpg and saved them in a separate folder before opening all of them together in Microsoft ICE. less than 30 seconds later the shot I have shown here was the result. There is no obvious join anywhere. I magnified the image and really looked for joins but found none.
If you would like to get hold of this program Google search for Microsoft ICE and download and save the program, then install it. AJ

More handmade decorations

Many years ago I used to play with clay. I was a reasonably successful potter but I would amuse myself - and everyone else - by modelling with clay.
In a moment of madness I decided to make a Nativity scene. Every "famous" artist has painted the Nativity and since I was hoping that one day I too would be famous (!!!) I too created my version. I think I went a bit overboard with the sheep though! I enjoyed pushing the clay through a garlic press to make the shaggy wool so the shepherds ended up with a very large flock! I did enjoy creating the camel for one of the wise men. In fact it is the best piece in the collection! The little figures were all covered with white glaze and fired to 1200 degrees.
For many years the Nativity scene has been stowed away in a suitcase but this year has been unwrapped and is on display in my lounge.
We have the reason for our celebrations on display alongside the pagan Christmas Tree with all its lights and decorations.
I have a crazy mixed up home!
Thats the way I like it!
AJ

Decorating for Christmas

My house guests were out for the day so I hastily stole a few moments to finish decorating my reindeer. I have a bit of a collection of Christmas confetti - the stuff you sprinkle over tables to make them look pretty - as well as pieces of felt and a few beads so with a glue gun and a bit of peace and quiet I applied the glue and glittery bits. (I managed to singe the tips of my fingers twice before I learned not to do it again!) After lunch I decorated the Christmas tree and set out the reindeer on a set of cupboards in the dining room.
A few weeks ago I had sent away for some fibre optic lights (Ebay) and after searching for AA batteries I set them amongst the reindeer for a rather fun look. I know this is a bit "over the top" but I am not going to string streamers around the house nor make a big fuss with other decorations so in the dining room "This is it"!
The little Santa with the sack is made of pottery and was made by me twenty years ago now! Boy it doesn't feel as if it was that long ago!
The sleigh I found in a store on sale one year after Christmas when all left over decorations are sold for half price. I like a bargain!
The funny stuffed reindeer were once used as gifts beside each plate one Christmas - some of the adults didn't take them home so I have four to play with! Some of them you can squeeze and they sing!
I have taken a photo of the decorations in the lounge and will share those with you another time.
AJ

Christmas is coming

While everyone else is out shopping or doing sensible things what does AJ do with her time? Paint reindeer of course!
For my family the decorating for the festive time is done two weeks before Christmas so the week leading up to that time of decorating HAS to be the preparation of those decorations! I had bought some papier mache small reindeer and they are a most uninteresting brown cardboard colour so I had to set too and change them. I used Ceiling white paint because it is water washable and I am not the cleanest of painters! I also wanted something that would dry reasonably quickly. I don't want the reindeer to be tacky at Christmas!!!! (sorry! wierd sense of humour!) Besides which, I need to stick all sorts of ribbons and sparkles on them so they look smart and special. So they need to be dry by tomorrow.
I did surprise my daughter in law when she rang me in the middle of the painting job and she wanted to talk to someone sensible - and proceeded to ask me what I was doing. Gulp! At least I made her laugh! I guess there are not too many people who admit to painting reindeer on a hot summer's day!

AJ

Pink in the garden

It isn't deliberate and it is not my favourite colour but somehow my garden has more pink flowers than any other colour! I think that there should be a garden competition for December - that is when my sub tropical garden is at its best. The amazingly intensely coloured flowers of the Poinciana are setting the tree tops ablaze at the moment. There seem to be two varieties, orange and red. My one is orange and I haven't seen it quite as showy as it is this year. Maybe the long dry leading up to the flowering time has made a difference. Very often trees produce more flowers when they are under stress.
A flowering gum I bought a few years ago and planted in the main, centre garden in front of the house has grown to about two metres tall and it is in full flower at the moment - pink!
Almost adjacent to it is a young crepe myrtle planted as a cutting - it too is flowering - pink again! Surrounding these two trees are many varieties of the bromiliad family and one very tall and lethal variety is in flower at the moment too. The flower head reaches up over a metre above the thorn edged leaves and guess what . . . they are pink too!
Oh yes, one more flowering plant shared the same garden. Several pink flowering geraniums are dotted around the garden! I think I need to shop for some white flowering plants!
AJ