Michael Ward | Creative
Remembrance Day is always a day that is etched on my mental calendar even though this post is two days late. Both my father and mother served in the Army in WW2 and one way or another both suffered what we now call PTSD. Wether it was coincidence or destiny I don’t know but my Dad died on Remembrance 2008 and some of my last words with him related to his past, so its one day I will never forget…
Captured on Fujifilm Superior 400 Canon 7 (SLR)
A poppy grown from seed, Its petals are emerging from its perianth to become a full blossom Just in time for Remembrance Day
Brush tail possums carry their offsprings around on their backs this joey I feel sure is coming to the end of mum being its transporter. Yet still it clings on for dear life even to the point of pulling bundles of fur from its mothers back!
I’m no expert when it comes to Tasmanian wild life but thus far in my gaining of knowledge about the animals that we see every night on our walk through the Cataract Gorge I often see the same wallabies pademelons and possums. We stop and observe and many of the wallabies and possums in particular seem to remember us. Often if we stand very still they come very close and have a sniff to just to check us out. It’s a funny thing but it is a very satisfying feeling to recognise and be recognised by an absolutely wild creature.
A gigantic Plane tree that I walk past most evenings but tonight is different.
A modern marquee bedecked with thousands of coloured fairy lights has been erected a few meters away for a large private party. The lighting is so extensive that it illuminates the plane tree from top to root offering me a photo that I could never have captured otherwise!
Renunculus grow from bulbs one of my favourite genus, both as flowers and vegetables the main sorts being onions, garlic and leeks which my garden has a place for all the year round.
I have three Renunculi in my bulb bed all of which are red and have been growing for three seasons. Each year their colours seem to vary this year they seem to be lighter in colour, it would be interesting to learn if this is normal for the species?
A first time experience with a Blue Tongue Shingle back or Bob Tail skink rewrites most of the common expectations of reptiles. For gardeners they are welcome in my garden anytime as they eat slugs snails and insects, but last year I found one trying to climb a tomato plant to eat cherry tomatoes. I’m quite happy for him to eat the windfalls in return for his work eating all the gastropods, but most of the time they just seem to sleep!
I photographed this one in W.A. with a Canon AE1 and a 100mm lens. He was atop of a retaining wall, so just a bit below my eye level. Like many other creatures surprised at meeting a human he made a definite hiss and I could see the full extent of his colourful gob and for his size a cavernous throat… Then I caught a whiff of his terrible breath!
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!
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…
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!
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 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.
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 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…
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!
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, 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.
From the ancient Gondwana land these rocks came as exceedingly hard and heavy dolorite similar to basalt from the very core of this planet and only softened by millions of winter floods is as we see them now.
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!
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!
An early walk through the morning mist in the Gorge the sun shatters the light from every rain drop that gathered on the trees and shrubs over night. As might be imagined the French mange to say the same thing so much better in just two words ‘Contre jour‘…