Summer, endless summer

I have just come back from a drive to one of the beach suburbs not far from home and, of course, my trusty camera came along too. It has been a beautiful day with lots of sunshine. The temperature reached 33C and the water in the ocean a very enticing 23C. So it was no surprise to find that every beach side carpark was filled to capacity and lots of cars illegally parked on the sides of the roads straddling the solid yellow lines. (Aren't they lucky there are not too many parking inspectors working on a Sunday?) It was quite difficult to negotiate the two narrow lanes of road that were left clear - they were only wide enough for small cars so when a truck, van or bus came along it was "everyone breathe in!" and squeeze over against the parked vehicles!

Using Microsoft ICE I have stitched together a panorama of the beach and the view of Surfers Paradise in the background - so you might be able to gather that I was standing on Burleigh headland with the camera.

I have cropped a part of the panorama to show part of the crowd on the beach. Those surf lifesavers would have to be very alert to keep an eye on all these swimmers. To see a larger version try this link ....click me

If you are observant you will see where the stitching program has encountered a problem with the joining of the photos. The crashing waves are a different pattern every time you press the shutter so for the waves to be even this good is impressive - I could do some cloning to make this less obvious but I have not done that so you can see that even with such a clever program there are problems.

This CAN be corrected once the pictures have been stitched (five photos make up the main panorama) and brought into Photoshop. Again, for a larger picture .... Click here

My pictures today are just for interest to show you how on January 9th 2010 the people who are holidaying here on the Gold Coast are spending their Sunday.

AJ