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

Street photography – my version!

Something a bit different and my offering for this weeks Monochrome Madness Challenge.  Not the sharpest of images, but I was taken by their expressions just waiting patiently for their owners 🙂  Many thanks to Leanne Cole and Laura Macky for the great job they do with this challenge.

 

A&P

 

Strange but familiar…

This weekend I’ve been back to Pyalong – the first time since the end of summer.  I always get a jolt at how green it becomes with the first winter rains (as opposed to the bleached, sparse landscape of summer).  Later in the week I will post a colour image, but for today a b&w conversion taken late afternoon with the low sun casting strong shadows onto what is always a beautifully surreal  landscape 🙂

pyalong 1
Click for a more detailed view. I like the poor up-ended tree up on the hill.

 

Bringing work home…

Well, not literally!  I thought I would share a view that I look at most days during the week.  I have been wanting to capture the curve of the hill and trellis system for ages and now that the vines have lost their canopy the curve is easier to see.  This is the largest block of the vineyard (about 9 acres) and has a different trellis system to the other blocks. It slopes down towards the west and the curve is more pronounced on this eastern side.  I used a longer lens to compress the view (each row is about 220 metres long). These vines are now ready to be pruned – beats working in an office for me 🙂

row 47
Taken at 155 mm. Click for detailed view.

 

Web design!!

The day before yesterday saw a really heavy fog at sunrise (we didn’t actually see a sunrise!).  I knew that the spider webs would be beautiful and wasn’t disappointed, but from a photography point of view (excuse the pun), as the light slowly got better so the wind picked up.  This shot isn’t as sharp as I would like (also on an old DSLR)  but still an interesting web full of beads of moisture.  The reflections are dormant vines and the trellis system.

spider web drops
Handheld with Nikkor Mircro 105 mm, processed in SEP2 with cyanotype toner

A forest in the sand…

When I first saw these seaweed impressions left in the sand they struck me as looking like bare trees in a forest, or an art nouveau frieze.  I decided to convert it to mono to bring out the contrast a little more, as even though the impressions were quite deep, the light was comparatively flat.

sand tree1

A post note!  My husband has looked at this and said he thought water had made the pattern as it drained back out to sea – so I may have assumed the wrong artist, not seaweed!!

Sunbeams…

Yesterday was one of those beautiful late autumn mornings, fog filtering sunbeams through the trees at sunrise – just magical…

rays

Such a perfect tree…

Yesterday was an overcast day with many heavy rain clouds rolling in (for us winter isn’t far away) when I spotted this tree up on a hill.  It’s shape was so perfect… 🙂

tree a

Camel’s Hump…

I saw this the other day at the end of an afternoon with the sun low in the sky.  The scenery struck me as being very apt – the Camel’s Hump is a mamelon, formed about 6 million years ago when thick lava forced its way through a narrow vent…the clouds almost look like smoke from a volcano.

camels hump
…mmm I want a wider angle lens 🙂