Michael Ward | Creative
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!