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!
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New light on a gigantic plane tree
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!
Digital Solutions, a modern ghost sign?
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!
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
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 !
My new model!
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…
On the road to an aurora…
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!
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.
North Esk River Rockery on a cold grey day
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
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!
Towards the sun on a misty morning
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‘…
A once grand home in Invermay…
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…
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
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.