Colour after the rain

The soil is so wet that walking on the lawn covers shoes with liquid mud but Colin had told me that the little piece of frangipani that he brought home for me seven years ago had flowered and I just HAD to go and see for myself! Although I stepped slowly and very carefully I had to remove my shoes before I could get back indoors! But I saw it – the most startling deep red, almost a plum coloured bunch of florets.

 My photo actually does not show the true colour, it is darker than this. If I had made the flowers as dark as they truly are you would find the picture to be less striking. It is so beautiful. Now that it has flowered this first time it should now grow and have lots more flowers next year. I hope so!

Once outside in the garden with a camera in my hands I could not return indoors without finding a few more blooms to capture!

This little bush of blue daisies has been flowering non stop for weeks. I don't do anything to it but this rain has made it grow even taller!

For some strange reason the daylilies that come out in November have started flowering again.

I have several of these yellow and red daylilies out at the moment, rather than take the usual shot from above and looking down at the long pollen covered stamens I opted for an “under the lip” shot! The three corner palm stands in the middle of the garden and is providing the pattern of leaves in the background.

Since the rain the dahlias have taken off. It is not long since I cut them all back and had not had the time to lift the tubers, they are all very bushy and healthy and one has surprised me by producing a different coloured flower.

I thought that all of my dahlias were dark red – the same colour as the frangipani. But one is a pretty salmon colour. I know that I “rescued” a sick dahlia from Bunnings last year that didn't have a tag on it so maybe this is it! Its definitely not sick today.

Seeds that came from plants that grew here last year have produced marigold plants that actually need thinning – one of them is flowering already.

The splash of orange makes an almost luminous glow in the garden.

And finally one of my miniature roses – the rose bush refuses to be miniature but the exquisite flowers are not very large at all.

If you were to make a circle with your thumb and middle finger the rose would fit in there. The leaves are a bis of a mess but the plant is otherwise healthy and has lots of these little flowers – and a few baby grasshoppers too.

I do not use chemicals in my garden at all. We have lots of birds and lots of lizards and I have no desire to kill any of them so I do my best with companion planting and soapy water! Not as efficient as the chemical treatment but it keeps me happy!

AJ

In the red

Although it is still showery today after a week of rain and grey clouds and showers, there were enough bright times for me to venture out with  my camera and the new 720 IR filter that I had just purchased through Ebay. I tried to get to see the volume of water in the Little Nerang Dam, which is only a few kilometres up the mountain from where I live. Half way along the narrow, windy road leading to the Dam, an iron gate stopped the car. Access was denied! I turned the car around and decided that if I couldn't go to the dam then this would have to do for my first attempt. The sun was coming and going so quickly that I felt that I would not have many opportunities.
The beauty of the internet is that there is lots of information for those who look for it. I had read up several articles that had been written about how to use an infra red filter so I knew roughly what I should do.
The filter is so dark that it is impossible to see through it. All automatic features on any camera are useless. The advise I had taken was to set up the camera on a tripod, have a low ISO to avoid getting too much "noise" - the camera was already set on 200, so that is where I left it.
I focused on the scene without the filter and with the camera set to Manual Focus.
The IR filter was then carefully screwed into place without changing the position of the camera or the focus ring. The shutter speed was slowed down to 2 seconds - I felt  that I should start somewhere and slow the shutter speed further if the image on the LCD screen was too dark.
The Aperture I set to f/8

It looks pretty gruesome but this is how my first picture came out. I had been spot on with my settings and there was a good histogram shape from dark to light.
This was pretty exciting stuff! (don't you love experimenting? I do!)
I turned the camera around and took a shot in the other direction  - but before I show you that shot I will show you what Photoshop Elements allowed me to do with this picture.

I opened the picture in Adobe Raw to start with to brighten the dark area on the right and then in Elements went to Enhance - Convert to Black and White. There are several options and I chose "Infrared Effect" and tweaked the sliders to get this result. I moved the red slider much further than the automatic adjustment suggested. This feature in Adobe Photoshop Elements is usually applied to a naturally coloured picture and my picture was monochrome red.
Here is the same effect used on the second picture I took.

This also was a two second shot but after carrying out the same sort of adjustments I did one thing more. The sky was ultra bright so I selected Enhance - Color - Replace color and selected a sample from the sky and changed the fuzziness to make sure that it was only the sky that showed in the sample window, then I simply moved the "Lightness" to the left to darken it. I was surprised to see that there was actually a variation in the sky. The darker sky certainly made a difference to the overall look of the image.
Incidentally, that is the gate that barred the way to the Little Nerang Dam!
Off I went to another location not very far from this, where there is a small park containing a picnic shelter.
This is one of the shots I took there - this time the exposure was 5 seconds (light fading by now) but still reasonable results.

I am sure that using the more sophisticated full version of Photoshop CS5 that different results can be achieved with the shots that I have taken. I believe that Infrared photography works much better when the sunlight is really bright. So I will be having another try another day!
AJ

Wet and mouldy

You would think that living in the subtropics we would be well used to lots of rain - well think again! We love our blue skies and dry weather - how else can be get out and about and enjoy this gorgeous part of the world! But just lately the skies have taken to tormenting us with lots (and lots) of rain. So much that I am glad we did not put solar panels on our roof to provide us with electricity!
Saturday was a real "doozy" of a wet day.

It had rained for a week before Colin and I took ourselves off for a few days to Lennox Head and we were lucky to have some days that were not quite sunny, but pleasant enough to go exploring. We arrived home to   almost non stop rain.

These shots were taken from the protection of the back (upstairs) veranda where I ventured out to see whether the water would come high enough to get into our shed where we keep the trailer and Paul's hobby car - which is in bits. You can just see the shed on the left next to our rain water tank. The rain did not come above the ridge  by those two trees so no worry to the contents of the shed.
That green stuff on the surface of the water is a small leafed water weed, the fence between us and our next door neighbour's property was enough to act as a dam to hold it back. When the water does go down that week will remain but it will be a good fertilizer for the lawn! It will be a bit messy and rather slimey for a while but it will go eventually.

This shot shows more clearly the water week - those tree trunks mark the edge of the block of land, the actual creek is on the other side of them.
The next morning the rain had eased (a bit!) and with an umbrella in one hand and the little Samsung camera in the other I ventured down into the squelchy back yard with the two dogs to give them a bit of exercise and to see what fungi I could find. After rain the wood heap is a great source of fungi!

From the shiny nature of the wood you can tell that it is still raining! The wood is completely saturated. Everyday there are different fungi among the cut timber - they only last a few hours before they are gone.

This was a great find - but the photo is deceptive - the fungi are very small so to begin with I almost didn't notice them. Each of those little caps would be about the size of a finger nail - the camera was switched to MACRO mode to take them - the trouble with a point and shoot camera is that you cannot control the amount of flash. Being close to these delicate little things the flash has removed a lot of the detail from them.
What will I see tomorrow? Maybe nothing special at all - but I shall still venture out with the camera!
AJ

Unspoiled Rainforest

I mentioned a couple of days ago that Colin and I had visited a tiny patch of rainforest called Victoria Park. Today I would like to show you a few of the photographs I took there. The young man in the Ballina Information Office was quite passionate about this little park telling us how it was the only area left of the pristine rainforest when the timber men finished their destruction of the local cedar and pine trees that were used to make packing cases for the banana crops.

Rainforests are known for their huge buttress rooted trees and this one abounded with them.

For those of you who have not been into a rainforest, they are often quite dark, not overly crowded with leaves in the lower levels but the roof of the forest is a mat of leaves that shut out the sunlight to the ground below.

Knowing this I dug out the flash gun and extension lead and attached it to my camera before stepping out of the sunlight. It is a bit tricky using an unattached flash gun but I gripped it with the last two fingers of my right hand, guiding its direction with my left hand before that hand was used to support the camera. When you want something badly enough you work for it!!

There were patches of brightness along the way where large trees had been blown down by strong winds, these trees had crashed down tearing off branches of other trees on their way and leaving huge windows of light – and dead leaves.

Although the 300 year old strangler fig has long gone there is another that is growing up and will one day rival the first for size. The fruit from a strangler fig will be deposited in the angle of a branch of an established tree, either falling there or being dropped there by a bird or animal and starts to grow in the moist leaf litter that is caught there.

There were some great signs in the rainforest that were worthy of a photograph.

Without a person standing nearby it is not easy to see how large this tree is. You will have to take my word for it!

My last picture for today is also of a sign.

I thought the signs rather clever, I can't pronounce the names, I wonder if you can?

(Clicking on the picture enlarges them)

AJ

The angry sea

Although I am now in the comfort of my own home I have not stopped thinking about the things that were seen on my four days in New South Wales. This evening I am looking at a few of the shots I took while at Evans Head. There is a small trawler fleet tied up in a safe little rectangular port, they create a beautiful picture as they lie quietly in their safe patch of water.

The trawlers mostly leave to work through the night but with the sea as angry as it was on the day of our visit I would imagine that catches would not be worth the danger the boats would be in as they struggled to escape through the rolling water in the mouth of the bar.

A drive up to the look out at the top of the rise gave an even better idea of how dangerous the sea might be to small fishing vessels such as we saw earlier.

The Evans Head Bar has long been a problem to shipping and an excellent reminder of this sobering fact is the huge anchor that resides as an eye catching ornament close to the lookout.

The plaque near the anchor gives the story - I know it is a bit difficult to read but since I don't drive around with soap and scrubbing brush when exploring I was unable to clean it up to make reading easier!

Do remember that by clicking on the picture it will enlarge so reading this plaque will be a lot easier than it was for me at Evans Head! The sign is from foot to knee level - not the easiest height for reading!
AJ