Digital Solutions, a modern ghost sign?

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Kodak Express lost in Hobart

More or less in the centre of Hobart Tasmania Sits a fine Art Deco building which harks back to the days when Kodak was one of the largest companies on the planet and at one point even had a factory in Melbourne that employed 2300 people. How fitting that this building adopted by the company in the early days of this century looks as if it was a cinema from the 1930s! As it happens only the upper part of the building remains in the indelible Kodak yellow, the lower part not visible from its side of the street is a Chocolate shop and more appropriate the upper story is now an architectural practice. Sadly there is only 2 shops in the whole of Tasmania that even sell Kodak film!

Awe Mum let me jump out and play!

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Awe Mum let me jump out and play!

A young Bennetts wallaby mother lets her Joey take a look at the world. In another couple of months this eager joey will have all its fur and be able to hop along with its mother on the nightly foraging excursion. But the nights in Tasmania are still close to being cold with strong gusts of wind so for now mums pouch is the best place to be…

Just hanging out with Mum!

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Just Hanging out with mum!

Tis’ the season when there are lots of marsupials carrying new offsprings around in their pouches and at dusk they all come out to feed. This little guy or girl is having an evening meal was captured with a headlight and my Fujifilm XT2…
My first Fuji was an XPro1 it replaced a stolen M9. I loved that camera but after four years its age was really showing.
Technical specifications advanced at an exponential rate in those years to the point where its lack of speed was becoming a hinderance to my work. So with much regret I traded it for an XT2 which I have to say is perhaps the best working digital camera I have ever owned, everything about the Xmount cameras just fits the way I interact with a camera. The exposure compensation dial is exactly where it should be, it just works so darned well. So another seven years on with all these tantalising rumours of an XPro4 slopping around the web my palette is wetted… I just hope the new XPro is as light as the XPro1.
I generally like rangefinders and the XPro1 was the first one that I could easily do close up work with. I did try the Leica reflex thingamabob on an M2 once but went back to a Pentax very quickly – to much fiddling. Apart from close up work I found rangefinders very good for garden magazine photography they allow one to see outside of the frame, a bigger picture so to speak, the Xpro1 did it all very very well!

Mist on a sunny Sunday

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A sepia warm feel to a photo taken on a cold sunny but foggy day

For some reason I nearly always feel very comfortable using a TLR and the Rollei T in particular. The camera I used through my Art school years was a Minolta Autocord II that focused with a leaver beneath the taking lens which was almost as good as the Rollei left hand focus wheel (knob) The disadvantage was that in cold weather (for me) it was too easy to catch the shutter if the leaver happened to be on the RHS at the start of focusing. Other than that the lenses and the film advance is much the same. Like really the linking of the aperture and shutter speed on the T and peculiarly I think the Rollei T is the only TLR that has that feature. Several TLR’s have 645 adaptor mask and counter wheels but as far as I know only the T in the house of Rollei. I’m going to put some fast 800 colour film in it next something that I have never used in medium before !

Cyclops the possum

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Cyclops is a brush tail possum he left his mothers pouch late last year or early in 2024 he or perhaps she has a damaged right eye the fur is thin under the eye showing some scar tissue. I’m guessing it was caught by a claw from another possum or animal although most other creatures tend to avoid possums but I have seen larger male pademelons take a swipe at them and they also have formidable claws. From observation of Cyclops’s movements my guess is that he is totally blind in the right eye he is also much smaller than possums born in the same season and when we first encountered him he was not in the best condition. Even though he can climb trees very quickly he is at a disadvantage I have noticed that when climbing he has crashed into branches in his path. Possums are much maligned in Tasmania because they certainly cause damage to any fruit or nut trees. In urban areas they do like to break into attics and are often to heard chasing, fighting and bonking on roofs. As a result their major predators are humans, dogs and even cats when young.

My new model!

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A Bennetts wallaby happy to pose for a quick snap no model release required!

Met a new model on the evening walk a very willing to pose Bennetts wallaby. Sadly these wonderful often quite skittish animals are killed in their hundreds on Tasmanian roads especially as they freeze in the headlights, in this case it has been frozen with a TT artisans mini LED which I received yesterday. For USD$ 7.00 this is a remarkable little light it has 3 Color temperatures: 6000K/4500K/3000K with a CRI 95+ for accurate colour rendering, the print is illuminated below is set at 4500K and taken on an iPhone its pretty darned good for the cost. I have been using mini LED’s from Lum X and Joby for about five years now and they just keep getting better and better and halving in cost every few years. For small scale studio work I honestly don’t think I could ever go back to speedlights. I’ll try this one with some colour film over the next few days. I have previously made captures like my new best friend (above) with a fairly high powered headlight in the past, but framing the photo and aiming a head light simultaneously is often quite a tedious process.

TT Artisans the Chinese company that has produce some wonderfull lenses have come up with a remarkable tiny shoe mount light, its ideal for evening walks

TT Artisans the Chinese company that has produce some truly wonderfull lenses have come up with a remarkable tiny shoe mount light, its ideal for evening walks, or even small scale product photography!
Yes a series of Autumnal prints will be available for sale from my gallery in a few weeks…

Aurora through a fog…

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By the time 11:00pm rolled around the fog became quite thick

By the time 11:00pm rolled around the fog became quite thick not quite pea soup (a few older poms will know that expression) the temperature had dropped considerably. The little OM had been sat on a tripod since 8:45 and had ceased becoming a magnet for condensation but I had left a protection filter on the lease just in case. However the tripod for some odd reason was dripping wet, something to do with the calf high grass perhaps?. Directly above the sky was clearer and a deep crimson that faded off in to the deep blue night sky. The moon was still quite bright in the north but the light hardly reached the ground to illuminate any detail. All told as the fog moved around it was like existing inside a JM Turner painting, quite an experience!

On the road to an aurora…

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Aurora visible from Northern Tasmania

Last night was a very good night for sky watching the southern aurora glowed with brilliance and delivered many changes in the two or so hours we could stand, gaze and tolerate the cold. Within an hour a thick fog had descended to treetop height and the temperature dropped further. Compared to the last solar storm in May the colour was visible much higher in sky and the colour seemed to streak both vertically and at a lower angles. I used an OM systems EM5 with the pro zoom the RAW files were processed in DXO pure raw, finished in Affinity Photos 2 and sharpened in NIK.

Henty House, Brutalism in Launceston!

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Henty House A brutalist office building in Launceston

Henty House, in a town famed for its Georgian and Victorian architecture, the stark concrete mass of Henty House once built to contain state government offices was recently sold to a private syndicate. The brutalist building built in 1983 and designed by architect Peter Partridge is in sharp contrast to Macquarie House a Georgian building a few short metres to the left (north) of this photo. I had reason to enter this building on numerous occasions and have been impressed with the spatial feel of the building it must be a wonderful building to work in.

A rainy night in Launie

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A rainy night in Launie with apologies to Brook Benton

A rainy night in Launie with apologies to Brook Benton. With a voice as rich and as smooth as oiled mahogany ‘A rainy night in Georgia’ epitomises the sheer haunting beauty of the black soul voice.
As for my picture the digital camera can do things which become tediously trying with film and these days expensive. Even with practice experience there are only two films I would consider for night work Fuji ACROS and Ilford 3200 rated at 1600. The former because ACROS film is unique in as much as one doesn’t have to account for reciprocity failure and the Ilford film because it can be pushed to 6400 and beyond (12500 anyone!) with acceptable results when developed in Ilfotec DDX, which sadly is perhaps the most expensive developer available in Australia… The above was made on an OM systems EM5 and the reason how I could capture this is the absolutely remarkable image stabilisation that the camera offers. No tripod needed!

Jonquil’s the first of the spring flowering bulbs

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Bulb culture, from garlic to the rare and often difficult to propagate (in Au) Fritillaria imperialis, yours truly loves bulbs! This year my Jonquils are early which is surprising considering the average temperatures that Launceston (Tasmania) has been experiencing for the last few months. With a slight breeze the individual flower heads bob around as if they are chatting with each other. Wallabies and Pademelons also do not eat them which is a bonus, one less plant that needs to be protected with guards!

A once grand home in Invermay…

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A grand home in Invermay has had a once equally grand garden chopped off in pursuit of progress. Our planning regulations seem to be something of a nonsense when this kind of planning is enacted. This is not planning this is an ill thought out wrecking ball of a solution to the housing crisis. This is divide and profit leaving the area with a miss mash of private spaces with no thought given to community or street scape aesthetics for the common good. With good planning this old elegant home could have been incorporated with new buildings, planed private and shared space to form an appreciation of our heritage for now and attractive places for the future. Instead what we have is the realestate equivalent of our mining activities ‘dig it up and ship it out’

Through the Scotch pines…

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Tasmania’s climate and soils are such that they can with a bit of care support plants from the sub polar to the sub tropical so its no surprise that the first migrants brought with them the plants that were part of their diet or part of their cultural heritage. Trees have for many been part and parcel of both, those they need to use, like to look at or eat the fruit from. As a result the Cataract Gorge being a park both botanical and recreational has many of those trees that were familiar to the first settlers from their former homelands and those they passed through on the way to this their new home. Most of the parks and open land in Launceston illustrate this occurrence with the huge variety of species purposely planted. We are still fortunate to have this legacy, however the pressure and the need for more residential homes is threatening so many of these magnificent and in some cases rare species of trees…

A foggy morning in the First Basin

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A foggy morn in the first basin of the north esk river Launceston Tasmania

The North Esk River flows into the Tamar River via Cataract Gorge. The North Esk is a massive drain for a huge area of land that runs from the Western Tiers (the Great Western Mountains) to the City of Launceston in Tasmania. It is prone to flooding in fact the place where I stood to make this photo is now under three metres of water after only a few days of rain.

Osteospermums… Marsupials don’t eat them!

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Osteospermums the one flower that our marsupial friends won't eat!

Osteospermums are a wonderful group of mostly South African flowering small shrubs that produce huge numbers of flowers over a period of as long as five months in the right conditions. There are dozens of varieties available in a huge range of colours. All they seem to need is a bit of blood and bone once a year followed by a dose of GoGo juice or any seaweed wetting agent. I water mine every two to three weeks and then clip back at the end of the flowering season. The main reason why I like these lovely plants is that the marsupials that call my garden home don’t eat them!

Wandoo Forest

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Wandoo Forest Western Australia

The Wandoo forest is located between Chidlow in the Darling Ranges and York in Western Australia. It’s a special place where these magnificent beige bark eucalyptus trees (Eucalyptus wandoo) grow the canopy is more open and the trees smaller than the Jarrah forests thirty km to the west. The understory plants on the forest floor are also different with many other species plants to that of the Jarrah forest here there is less rain, the earth is dry and new growth ceases until the next rain.

A reason for it all. This is the third blog I have authored under this, my original URL. The first began back in 2001 and grew out of my first website created in Claris Homepage and Page Mill from 1990. It began in a much tinkered with HTML way. It ran for twelve years with almost 3000 posts… Over the course of that period it evolved into a wonderful “modern” hand coded CMS program written by a friend of my daughter. This morphed into a WordPress site in 2007/8. After a hiatus of ten years due to a trans continental move, a few health issues and the creation of a new garden I now have the time and inclination to photograph, draw and paint my way through what is realistically the last phase of my life. TBC…