Category: Australia

Puddle Ice – Monochrome Madness.

This is the last image I will post for now taken during the sub-zero morning we had a week ago.  It’s a puddle with many frozen layers which created these beautiful patterns (and the wonderful physics I can only start to understand) .  It is an image which I both like and dislike, it was difficult to capture as there were many layers of ice of different opacity and sharpness but I liked the overall pattern. This is my entry for the 24th Monochrome Madness Challenge posted on Leanne Cole’s blog, initiated by Leanne and Laura Macky.  Thanks to Leanne for her precious time and effort that goes into the challenge 🙂

puddle ice1

Impressions of the wind…

Something of a bit of an experiment today.   A couple of weeks ago we had a day where the wind was averaging 75 kph (47 mph) with frequent gusts well over 110 kph (68 mph). I watched the tops of these gum trees which have newer growth being bent sideways in very harsh sunlight and was fascinated by the almost painterly like strokes they created as they moved back and forth.

winda
As always click for larger view.

Glowing Gorse…

Yesterday was an extra post because of the excitement of the snow 😛  This morning saw one of the hardest frosts I have seen in years so I was out before sunrise to capture the magical ice crystals – I wasn’t disappointed 🙂 This is a little Gorse bloom (considered a noxious weed here in Australia) with a wonderful covering of frost, backlit from the rising sun – click in for more detail.

glowing gorse
Handheld at sunrise

Snow in the woods…

I took this image yesterday after work at Mount Macedon (luckily for us only 10 minutes away).  I know that for people that get to experience winters much, much colder than ours, this image may seem unremarkable!  Where I live we frequently get sub zero temperatures in winter, but that means a very severe frost, not snow.  This lasted for over 24 hrs and since the last time I saw it like this was 2007, one of my first ever digital images of snow 🙂 🙂

snow in the woods

 

Feathers in a flower…

Today I visited a new florist (Flowers in a Vase) and spent some time drooling over various stems and flowers.  I came away with a few different specimens which I spent the afternoon photographing with the macro lens 🙂  Here is the first, a type of Protea which is native to South Africa but apparently grows quite happily here in Australia.

white b
Taken using natural light

Silhouettes in the fog…

This image sums up the last few weeks of weather for me – foggy, damp and cold.  I took this on my way home from work last week with only about an hour left of any daylight and the fog getting thicker by the minute, manually focused as the camera struggled.  There were trees that I had never noticed before, all in beautiful silhouette because of the fog 🙂

fog
Click for more detail.

 

 

White-faced Heron

The weather has continued to be very wet, cold and miserable this last week with some of the strongest winds I’ve seen since last summer so no photo opportunities 😦  I saw this heron early in the morning looking for a meal when we went to Anglesea for the day at the start of last month.  Click on the image for a better view.

looking for breakfast

First Light – Monochrome Madness

I really enjoy seeing the work of others in the Monochrome Madness Challenge hosted by Leanne Cole.   Here is my offering for this week.  I haven’t had very much experience doing longer exposures in digital and something I would like to do more of.  This was a shot from our trip to the coast last month taken on the first morning where rain quickly followed and the sunrise didn’t really happen.  The second day was much more successful for a colour image and can be seen here.

First light wp

Dead wood…

The last week and a half has been utterly miserable, low cloud, drizzle and bitterly cold (for us!).  Tonight there has been a severe weather warning issued – well I guess it is winter!  After choking up my hard drive (again!) I am sorting through old files, and found this one.  Taken last summer at Pyalong, the original taken with a polarising filter, has a really, really deep blue sky with the dead tree which is silver grey.

wood abstract