I know where the Ent-wives went. This weekend while meandering the forest trails around Mount Dandenong I had the strangest feeling I was been watched. Turns out I was.
I bowed, asked permission of Fembrethil to take her photograph and quietly took my leave.
Who would have thought?
This was just the most fantastic spot to sit and soak up a little bit of ‘the great outdoors’. I love trees and bonsai has long been a passion of mine so I sat for a long time wondering how I could bring the elements of this wind-swept beauty into the realm of the miniature. The tree I buy for this will have to be shaped from a very early stage to ensure the correct kink low down on the trunk; I’m thinking of rocky outcrop tapering away to one side within a long, flat bottomed dish. Maybe this will be a long term bonsai project for 2009.
Respite
For all my readers, I wish for you a cool respite from the rollercoaster year that was 2008. May you all find happiness, peace, economic stability and quality time with the ones you love in 2009.
Happy New Year.
Stuart
Santa is coming to fill up the empty spaces beneath the tree. While I’m waiting for my son to fall asleep I thought I’d take a couple of long exposures of the tree – here is a nice 20 second exposure to say Merry Christmas to all of you, hope Santa brings you all the goodies your heart desires.
I have looked after the little trees for well over a decade now and had some incredible African trees in my care. When we moved to Australia I gave my collection of 15 trees to someone who was an expert both in bonsai and orchid care; they are being very well looked after but it was a heart-breaking thing to have to do. I have gone right back to the beginning, for the first time in 15 years I have bought my first bonsai.
This pretty little Juniper is a lovely specimin of a tree, suffering a little from a lack of bonsai specific knowledge but it’s nothing a little love and time won’t fix. The wire bindings are not too tight and will take another year of growth before they come off. I will repot the tree and trim the roots come Autumn however I think I’ll keep the pebble bed; it’s a little different from the rocks and moss I am used to but it works for this wind-swept look. The proportions of the tree are a little off as well; a little top heavy and thin in the middle but come first trimming we’ll fix that.
Great times ahead.
These days I rarely go anywhere without my SLR which means lugging a bag with a heavy camera, lenses and very often a tripod across rugged terrain and into places where you’d rather have your hands free to hold on to stuff. Most of us get into the mindset that when the light is right you want the best possible bit of kit to capture the magic and on the whole that is a noble, albeit weighty and ofttimes cumbersome aspiration.
I was flicking through some of the photos of my 2006 safari to the Kruger Park when, for one reason and another, all I had with me was this:
It was one of the first digital cameras on the market and suffers from all the lovely shutter lag that marred that generation of cameras; press the shutter release and hope and pray that your subject doesn’t get bored and meander out of the scene.
In today’s age of mega-pixel madness where ‘more is better’ (except if you know better) you may wonder how useful 2.1 mega-pixels actually was but let me say that even now this camera takes some pretty solid photos and offers the wonderful wide-angle magic of most compact cameras.
I was not in any way displeased at how this little machine performed on a difficult backlit silhouette of my all time favourite tree in the world; the African Baobab.
| Title | Baobab Sunset |
| Taken on | 14 August 2006 |
| Kruger Park, South Africa | |
| EXIF | f/8.7 ISO100, Fujifilm Finepix 2400Z |
There is a mixed bag of opinion about what is going on when you lie looking up at clouds floating overhead and see faces and animal shapes in them – you know, by guys in white coats holding little bits of ink-sploched paper who seem very interested in your feelings towards your parents.
Finding shapes in things is something I loved doing as a child, we had a house built up on a hill and I used to lie up on the flat roof with huge empty sky above me and pick out shapes and faces and all sorts of fantastical things. It is still an ability which comes pretty easily, you can’t put me in front of wood-grain or stone without me seeing a menagerie of the imagination hidden there.
Sometimes though you find yourself in places where your imagination can, like a hyperactive 5 year old on too much chocolate, run riot.
The wet dank forests of Southern Victoria are amongst the most beautiful places on earth and they have the most wonderful trees, the one below I call ‘the howler’ tree and even the most underdeveloped imagination can probably pick out the cavernous maw and slitty eyes. If this were Middle Earth I could quite believe that in the dead of night under full moon it would lumber up out of the damp, wet mossy earth perhaps ruminating thoughtfully on any stranger unwise enough to have looked for shelter within the inviting hollow.
| Title | The Howler |
| Taken on | 25 August 2008 |
| South Victoria Rainforest, Melbourne, Australia | |
| EXIF | f/4.5 1/30 ISO200 Manual |
With full kudo’s to the dark fairytale by Guillermo Del Toro it is in places like these that one finds inspiration and the embers of the imagination are stoked. About halfway along the rainforest walk we came to this tree with its gnarled and twisted roots forming a natural focus for the photo. The scene works well in colour however the vivid greens of the foliage and the purple hue to the roots somehow detract from what I had intended with the picture; the black and white brings back the slightly magical, slightly eerie feel that I experienced in the dark shade of that tree.
| Title | Pan’s Labyrinth |
| Taken on | 25 August 2008 |
| Melbourne, Australia | |
| EXIF | f/4.5 1/8 ISO200 Manual |
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