Rock Dolmens on a Field of Green

I have a hankering to get up early one morning when the sky is still dark and head out with the deliberate intention of getting lost. To find yourself out on roads you’ve never seen before, to explore the countryside, to pull over on the verge and grab your camera to explore some strange and wonderful vista – that’s what it’s all about. I think it’s time I called up to photographer buddies and pencil in a date. At the end of the day you can return to a place along your route to stand in the golden luminescence of magic hour as the sun dies in the sky and the light does all it can to negotiate one last hour to the clicking of the shutters. As a dark throw is pulled over the sky, to return home to a couple of beers and good company.

Definitely overdue.

Hunting Schrooms in the Forest

My cousins came to spend the Easter weekend with me. We got to explore around the Mt. Dandenong region, East of Melbourne, and went on some incredible forest walks. I spent the last 2 days field testing the Panasonic Lumix LX3 as a carry around camera to replace my dSLR on really big walks and apart from a few irritations which were more to do with me learning to use the new camera it stood up admirably and allowed me to take some really stellar photographs.

My cousins love mushrooms, preferably of the non toxic variety pan fried to perfection, and spent a good deal of time invested in learning about the edible English mushrooms while staying there. Hot on their list of Autumn activities is pounding the forest paths around Victoria with a guide book and their amazing knowledge of these little forest dwellers in search of all sorts of amazing fungi. I will be their designated photographer.

To be fair, until I got in on the action of spotting the little guys hiding under logs or in mossy alcoves I had no idea how fascinating they were and how many different varieties you could find within a couple of steps of each other. From spiky rough puffy ones which explode in a cloud of spores when you touch them to red topped delicate mushrooms with lacy gills the choice is seemingly endless. Getting up close involved lots of kneeling in the moist leaf litter and putting the manual focusing and macro abilities of the LX3 to the test.

It was beautiful to be out in the fresh forest air for the majority of the last two days. I can see the schroom hunting will provide us with some great macro photography over Autumn and in all likelihood I will have to take my SLR and my macro lens along for some of the future walks.

It really was great fun.

Land’s End

Title	Land’s End
Taken on	25 August 2008
	Cape Otway Lighthouse, Melbourne, Victoria
EXIF	f/4.5 1/320 ISO200

I Love a sunburnt country

I was asked on another photo-site, what the significance of this picture was; good photograph but what did the sign mean?

The above is a tribute, shot in the Australian Flora and Fauna area of the Melbourne Zoo, to a poem written by 3rd generation Australian poet Dorothea Mackellar called My Country.  The words on the sign, highlighted below are taken from that poem.

My Country

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes.
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins,
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft dim skies
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!

A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die -
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold -
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land -
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand -
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

Dorothea Mackellar

 More information on Dorothea can be found at the official website.

Cape Otway Lighthouse

Title	Cape Otway Lighthouse
Taken on	25 August 2008
	Melbourne, Australia

Big Australian Sky

Summer time in the Southern Hemisphere, as we hurtle headlong towards the commercial joviality that has become Christmas, is usually a time for the outdoors.  If you’re coming to Australia over the Christmas period you may want to take a few other factors into consideration.  I’m not talking about all those critters which can sink fang and tooth into you with lethal abandon, these are factors which are more prevalent, more pervasive, more … well inescapable.  

The light which is the first thing that seems to assault the senses of any newcomer; white fierce furious light which happily blow the hightlights on all your photographs and makes the eyes ache when they’re not closeted behind dark glasses (or sunnies as they are locally known).  It is the kind of overexposed white brilliance that Hollywood chooses to associate with encounters with aliens or the heavenly host. 

The second excess to cause extreme happiness is the heat, last December saw the days maxing out at 40+ degrees centigrade (or 104 Farenheit), caught in that head for an extended period of time makes you feel like an earthworm lightly frying on black asphalt.  Add to that the beautiful chunk of missing ozone layer overhead and you have a recipe for disaster.  I have seen more than one once pale tourist on the beach bright red and a little crispy looking startled and confused that the baby oil they use back home acted more like basting and less like protection.

The third thing which tends to catch the unwary or new visitor is the flies;  I thought they were part of the great Australian cliche along with the shrimps, ‘g’day mate’ and the roos – they’re not.  Hoards of annoying buzzing infuriating insect-kind which leaves you lurching spasmodically like an epileptic or running for cover in the air conditioned, fly screened inner sanctum of your house, a veritable biblical plague for about two months of the year.

But it’s not all that bad really because now is the time to wrap your beer in wetsuit neoprene holders, spray yourself with factor 50 sunscreen and insect repellent, fire up the barbie and make merry with friends and family.  It’s time to embrace excess and to spread your arms wide and really feel the stretch of big sky over your head.

In celebration of big sky and country I’ll leave you with one of the bigger panoramas I’ve taken; a wonderful composite of about 9 photos on a farm an hour north of Melbourne.  Clicking on the link will take you to a lightbox view, from there if you have the inclination and bandwidth you can open the original and enjoy an ultra-detailed view of the Australian bush.

Title	Big Sky
	Panorama – Melbourne, Australia

The Coming Storm

Title	The Coming Storm
Taken on	23 August 2008
	12 Apostles, Melbourne, Australia
EXIF	f/9 1/320 ISO200

Out on the observation deck of the 12 Apostles I stood and managed a couple of final photographs while watching a storm come boiling in from across the sea. We’d been battling a fine misty rain most of the way around the observation deck and the camera I’d been carrying was not weather sealed so I was walking around with my camera in my jacket, whipping it out for quick exposures.

Minutes later the heavens really opened and soaked us through but the rainy atmosphere was wonderful and the dark and threatning skies added so much to the mood of the pictures.  I was really glad to be carrying my Lowepro slingshot camera bag which comes with it’s own raincoat; I dried, my camera didn’t have to.

This trip and the drizzly rain has given much impetus to fast-tracking to the D700, that and all the low noise high ISO happiness which comes along for the ride.

Cape Otway Signal Station

Title	Cape Otway Signal Station
Taken on	24 August 2008
	Cape Otway, Melbourne, Australia
EXIF	f/8 1/160 ISO200 Aperture Priority