Tibouchina days

All of a sudden - maybe because of all the rain - the Tibouchina has burst into flower. Most of the flowering trees and shrubs and garden plants in my garden seem to be pink but this is one tree that has broken the mould. The first shot was taken from my veranda this morning. I was enjoying a morning coffee with Colin, watching the finches as they squabbled over the seed when one little bird flew between us and I followed him with my eyes and it was only then that I realised just how spectacular the tree was! The birds were forgotten (even though one had nearly touched us with its wings) and I went inside to get the camera.

I seem to get things wrong when I first take pictures - it is so good that there is a screen for reviewing the image so that you can re-set the camera and try again and again.

As it was a bit grey first thing I hadn't realised how dark it was and with the dark colour of the leaves and flowers I really needed to "open things up" but since I did not want a shallow depth of field I needed to play with the shutter speed rather than the aperture.

ISO 100 f/8 1/80 sec Focal length 14mm (14 - 45m lens)

The second picture was taken using the same settings and was also taken from the veranda looking across at the tree

ISO 100 f/8 1/80 focal length 45mm (14 - 45mm lens)

Finally I made my way outside to get a little closer before roaming around the garden and realising that I had not done any weeding for three weeks! Oops! What a jungle!

ISO 100 f/5 1/60 focal length 18mm

The flowers are short lived and make a carpet of colour under the tree - and every time I take the car out of the garage I manage to get at least four flowers stuck on the windscreen!

I love colour in my garden.

AJ

A movie of Emerald Lakes

Just a quick update to give you a link to a little "movie" I have just made of the buildings of Emerald Lakes. For some reason the conversion of the movie has torn the timing something terrible and some shots seem to be "stuck" nothing I have tried seems to work so I apologise for a less than perfect upload.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb_kySXGfvo

The images are uploaded individually to a web album and they are viewable more easily - and a bit larger!
http://picasaweb.google.com.au/joanren/EmeraldLakesResidentialEstate?feat=directlink
I hope you enjoy looking at the amazing architecture of the French Quarter and of the Italian sector. I loved being there!
AJ

A touch of the Med

ISO100 f8 1/200 40-150mm focal length 123mm

I mentioned yesterday that on Sunday Colin and I explored a new home development - I am not really sure how to describe the concept - but this is an area that has been developed to look -and feel as if one is walking through a place in France or in Italy.
To begin with we explored in the car and drove through the coloured buildings and on to an area that was called "The Islands". From one of the islands I looked across at the buildings we had just driven through and they looked so amazing that I just had to stop the car and use the camera. This was going to be one fantastic day for photography!
The dreadful weather that started the day was evaporating and the sun was forcing its way through the clouds and brightening up the gorgeous colours on these walls.
The top photo was taken from across a lake with the camera and 40-150mm lens so that I could see the mural over the archway. Once I have all my photos converted from RAW I will put them into a web album and share the link.

ISO100 f8 1/200 focal length 14mm

The statue of David is an exact copy of the statue of David by Michelangelo in Florence and stood for many years in a shopping centre called The Raptis Plaza in Surfers Paradise. When that shopping centre was purchase and gutted for a complete refurbishment, David disappeared and I often wondered where he had gone! I feel he looked better before - he stood on a much taller plinth surrounded by water gardens that made him look so much bigger and more admirable, somehow. Now he looks like a white naked man in the middle of a collection of buildings! The fence does nothing for him! Poor David!

ISO100 f8 1/100 focal length 19mm

The collection of Italian and french styled buildings continues and I loved wandering around with the camera. On foot the place is different - it feels more comfortable and I found myself really liking what I saw and even felt there was a Mediterranean atmosphere to the place. Not too many of the shops are open yet, this will be a place I will have to return to again and again to see how it grows and lives - for once there are shops the people will be there and there will be restaurants and fashion shops to draw the people onto the streets.
At the moment there are only a few businesses, the most popular seemed to be the delicatessen that was providing meals - VERY expensive so I guess that the prices will dictate the class of customers to this location.
AJ

Dragon boats

Today I dragged my darling hubby along to a place called Emerald Lakes where there was lots of colour both on the buildings and on the water. This evening I am only showing the water colour (Oops. I just read what I wrote!!!) there was an event on the normally empty lake that made the air resound with the sound of cheering voices and the placid waters ripple with the dip and splash of paddles.
My son gave me his little Sony Handycam to try out - which I did. It does not have a view finder and I found it impossible to know if I was getting anything in the screen! It was a surprise when I got home to find I had three little clips that I could run together of the dragon boat racing. A long cry from the videos I usually make but fun all the same.
The photographs I took later in the day were much better (no handycam video!) and they were of the buildings of Emerald Lakes. I will show them tomorrow.
However this picture of Michealangelo's David will give a small clue as to the style of the architecture of the buildings!

I have tried to upload a copy of the video I made with no success, I shall have one more try and if it is in this post ... Well I will have succeeded!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gyba7cln_Vo
I need encouragement!!
AJ

A feathered visitor

I was in the middle of writing an email when a raucous noise caught my attention. It was a white cockatoo that had flown down the bird feeder dish and was screaming his dissatisfaction about the cage that was preventing him from getting at the seeds.

Before I go too much further I must apologise for the state of the photos - I have recently purchased a tiny notebook for travelling and I am trying to use it to both write this little story and upload photos for use in the story on this 10 inch device. The only software I have installed is Picasa which is what I use for uploading pictures to a web album (from where I can access them to put on the blog.) So these pictures have not had any processing done to them (normally I adjust the pictures - sharpness and brightness - in Photoshop. Photoshop is rather too large a program to put on a little machine like I am using at the moment.

To continue!

I raced outside with my camera and shot two bursts on Auto setting since I thought the cockatoo would fly off as soon as I opened the door. He stayed and watched me so I switched to Manual and dialed the aperture and shutter speed and took several more shots.

I crept closer and closer and my final shot was fired just as he was taking off. With a shutter speed of only 1/60 second he is showing motion blurr! But the shot shows off the drama of the moment and the colour that is under the wings as well as on the crest.

The cockatoos are really quite large and if you have seen my previous pictures of the lorikeets on that same feeder you will appreciate the difference in size of the two birds. The cage is over the seed dish to prevent the cockatoos from flinging the pottery dish off the stand - they used to do that before we came up with the cage idea! They can still get their heads through the wire and get at the seed but they cannot stand in the dish as they want to.
Now I am going to try something I have not done before - add a little video that was taken with the Samsung point and shoot camera in movie mode.

This, if it works, will show you just a few of the birds that visit every morning and the incredible noise they make.
AJ

Preparing to run away from home

While Colin and I were exploring some of the delights of Springbrook we chanced to see a "For Sale" sign propped up outside one of the homes, it was for a camper trailer. Now we have been spending too much money lately on magazines on camper trailers and becoming more and more disheartened at the huge price that was asked for new ones - so Colin went door knocking. The folks were not at home so we wrote down the phone number and rang the following day.

To cut a long story short - we drove back to Springbrook on the Sunday and talked "turkey" and ended up buying the thing! It was about three thousand dollars cheaper than the ones that we had been thinking we might be able to afford and it had not even been used! The poor fellow that had it for sale had purchased it and shortly after been diagnosed with cancer so has spend his holidays visiting doctors instead.

We had to leave without it because the plug for the trailer was different to the plug on Steve's four wheel drive so I happily let him and Colin drive up a third time with a new plug to bring the trailer back down to home.

Of course the tent had to be put up to see if it was big enough. No worries, mate! It's HUGE! There is a king sized bed that is in a compartment that is on the trailer itself and the rest of the tent is big enough for a family, there are two parts on the ground - one could be used as the kitchen/dining area or as another sleeping area.

So now it looks as if we are ready for the road! But .... I have a hubby who just has to "fix things" and he has all these ideas about how he will modify the way the post go through the canvas and how the kitchen should be constructed and ..... hmmm! I think I will stay out of this!

AJ

Birds at breakfast time

Some wild birds seem to forget that they are supposed to be afraid of people. Rainbow lorikeets are birds that easily adapt to being companions to people and make a habit of visiting the place where they know there is a "hand-out". Every bird (to me) is identical and the only way I know that these birds have been visiting us for years and years is because of the occasional bird with some sort of deformity.
The bird closest to the camera has a double lower bill. The large bit at the bottom is not controllable by the bird at all, inside this flapping beak is a smaller but usable bill. When this bird first came to our feeder she was quite young - in a young lorikeet the bill is quite dark - and the other birds would crowd her out from the feeder. We took to putting a special small dish on the table and would wave a hand to keep the other birds from muscling in on her as she took some of the sugar treat. (Raw sugar diluted in water). She came in for a few months and disappeared and we feared the worst but one day she was back - and with her was a juvenile lorikeet. "Twisty Beak" had become a parent! Every year this same pattern occurred and she (or he!) has been returning to visit us for at least five years - we haven't kept count but feel sure that we are right about the longitude of her visiting!
Twisty Beak is still bullied by the majority of the other visiting lorikeets and we still have to chase them back while she gets some of what they know to be delicious! They devour their own large dish of sugary water and white bread in under two minutes! Mind you, fifty birds licking and sucking up only one litre of liquid and soggy bread means that none of them get very much! It is because of the many times we have seen Twisty Beak that we know that the other birds have also been coming to our bird feeder for years too.
There are other birds with toes that are curled up permanently - caused by them being brought up in a hollow tree that has had mud in the bottom when they were first out of the egg and the mud has dried on their feet causing a problem as they grew. In spite of their deformity the birds all seem to manage to survive and thrive.
AJ

Wildlife in a beachside National Park

I promised to show the creatures that we encountered on a short walk around the lower edge of the National Park at Burleigh Heads. As can be expected, with a park that is surrounded by buildings and main roads and is traversed by hundreds of people everyday, there are not too many large animals to be found in the park - and yet there are still plenty of smaller creatures to be seen.

Colin and I were walking slowly and really looking about us and we were surprised at how close we were walking to the water dragons. In my back yard the water dragons (which are common everywhere in this region and over most of Australia) are extremely timid but here they have become so used to people walking along the path that they freeze and become invisible among the leaves and twigs of the undergrowth.

I found it extremely difficult to take photos of them because it was really quite dark under the trees - and the dull grey clouds overhead, threatening the coast with a deluge like you would not believe (we had 380mm overnight), did not help with the lighting situation.

If I did not have the ability to review the picture and change the settings after seeing the results I would have been very disappointed with my pictures. I just love digital! "If at first you don't succeed, try, try and try again!" That certainly applies to me!

One of the Water dragons sat up at the edge of the track and I knelt down and took his picture - and a group of people walking from the opposite direction marched all the way past him - making him scuttle off into the bush - and hadn't even seen him! I don't know what they thought I was aiming the camera at! The couldn't have missed seeing me crouched down in front of them with a camera! Maybe they thought I was taking pictures of them!

The water dragons in my back yard are more than twice the size of the larger of the two shown here - the one on the track - and they have very large and bulgy tummies. There must be plenty of good "tucker" in my yard! As you can tell from their name, these lizards can always be found near water. They are good swimmers and they can sit under the water hiding from danger for up to ninety minutes!!!!!! I used to be able to stay under water for ninety seconds.

The final image today is of a native turkey that is either called a scrub turkey or a bush turkey. They stand about knee height and scratch a huge mound of leaves and debris when they make their nest. They are among a group of birds that build an incubator for their eggs. The leaves rot down and create heat so the turkey scratches away the top leaves to let some of the heat out. at night the leaves are scratched back over again. During the mating season the males show off by letting their red and yellow throats bloat out and then dangle down in front of them. They are quite ugly (to us humans!)

AJ

Coast green patches

The Gold Coast in South East Queensland is known as a holiday destination with great beaches and lots of nightclubs. However the Gold Coast has much more than entertainment for the transient visitor. On Saturday I dragged my very patient husband along for a walk in one of the four National Parks in the Gold Coast region. The park we visited has views of the beautiful bays and beaches of the 'Coast and is very popular both with walkers, like ourselves, and surf enthusiasts with board tucked under one arm as they make their way along the paths to access to the rocks below the headland. This park is known as Burleigh Heads National Park.

In spite of the constant flow of people on the one track around the edge of the headland the bush is quite unspoilt - except for patches of asparagus fern that must have been brought in as seed by visiting birds.

A spectacular feature of the park is the sight of so many huge rock columns tumbled about in the trees and undergrowth. The headland is formed of Basalt. For a long time I understood these shapes to be "Crystals" but basalt is not a mineral so these six sided shapes were formed not by mineral growth but by lava from a long extinct volcano, cooling and cracking.

My purpose in visiting this National Park was to take photos and being fascinated by rocks and minerals I could not resist taking a couple of shots. In heavy rains the rocks are inclined to change their position on the hill so I could not resist taking a shot of the warning sign. Last night there was an exceptionally heavy fall of rain so I would imagine that the park gates would have been locked today to prevent the public from walking past what must be a very unstable hillside.

Tomorrow I will share a couple of shots I took of the wildlife that I saw on this walk on Burleigh Heads National Park,

AJ

Damp morning

As usual in the morning I sat outside on our veranda eating my breakfast when I chance to look over my shoulder and spotted a large spiderweb decorated with raindrops. All thoughts of food were driven from my mind and I dashed inside to get my camera. Too often shots appear and there is no camera handy - but when I am at home; well! I am spoilt for choice!

So out came the Olympus with the 40-150mm lens attached and after a couple of bad starts managed to get both the exposure correct for the dull day and the dark background and the focus "somewhere near" correct. I wish I had the eyes of a teenager!

Because of the tele lens - I did zoom in - I was able to throw out the background focus to what has become known as "bokeh" and keep the pearls of moisture on the web clear.

F3.5 shutter 1/125 second 96mm

With a point and shoot camera the separation of foreground from background can still be achieved although maybe not with such a bokeh effect of the background - use the zoom no matter how small - it will change the automatic exposure which is the same as changing the "f" number on an SLR to a smaller number and this reduces the depth of field (so not EVERYTHING is in focus). Aim the camera so that the spot focus grabs the web then, with the shutter half pressed in to hold that focus, realign the camera so the framing of the image is the way you want it to be.

AJ

Using a shareware program on photos

I love experimenting with new programs - I downloaded a shareware program called FotoSketcher and had a play with it. This is the idea of "Shareware" you can try before you buy. There are so many presets that do an amazing job of a photo it seems silly to move any of the sliders to create more - but of course I did! I am first showing the original picture - the one I selected at random to test the program. I actually do not know what I would do with any one of these effects but I must agree that it was fun creating the following pictures!

I have never really wanted to create a watercolor or an oil painting effect from one of my photos but this little program can do that quite effortlessly - and you can select the texture of the material the "painting" has been created on! Those effects I did not show - or this mail would be as long as your arm!

Here are just some of the different variations that FotoSketcher can give.

As you can see the variation each have their own appeal. Do a "Google search" for Fotosketcher if you are interested in having a go! The programmer is in the USA and it is not an expensive purchase if you want to keep it.

AJ