Hello everyone, I trust all is well 🙂  The image I am posting is from last weekend when we had temperatures down to -5C.  I am always astounded by the beauty of the formation of ice crystals and so this image is of hoar frost on barbed wire.  I also discovered this week that when you try and catch up on the reader, WordPress will actually prevent you from liking when you respond to ‘too many’ posts so apologies to those I have not ‘liked’, but I have seen and appreciated them all 🙂  Click in for a more detailed image.
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Wednesday was the 1st of June and the first official day of winter here in Australia.  This last week has been cold – the day before saw dawn temperatures down to -4 C.  I took this image just before work at first light, a beautiful sky and the promise of a cold but good day 🙂
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It is now officially winter down here in Oz and this last week was cold, dark and foggy (maximums of 6 C which for us is cold!).  I like the fog and the silhouettes it creates – these are evergreen Eucalyptus trees.  This is my submission for MM 2-14 hosted by the ever hard working Leanne Cole on Wednesdays – do have a look for a wonderful variety of monochrome images.
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…and nearly the end of pruning!  I apologise again for not having been on WordPress and liking or commenting on posts.  This is a snapshot of my working day at the moment – we will finish the major pruning this Thursday 🙂 🙂  Some interesting facts that went through my head the other day…approx 22,500 vines to prune but a double canopy so equivalent of 45,000 and each vine has four arms (cordons) held down by a total of 90,000 cable ties which takes around 3 months labour as all done by hand!!
Also my entry for MMC week 28 hosted and curated by Leanne Cole.
As always, click in for a larger view.
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I am flat out with work at the moment and so this is the first time I have properly logged into WordPress for what seems an age (well 5 days!!), and is likely to be this way for another week or so.  In turn, I am snatching photo opportunities when I can.  This image was taken last Thursday morning just after sunrise with the fog so thick you could look at the shape of the sun 🙂
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I took this image on my way to work this morning – very cold (-1C) and watched the colour unfold as I was driving.  I saw this dam with the wonderful reflections of the (very large) lambs against the increasing fog and warm pre-sunrise light – I had to stop and get out with the camera 🙂
Another high ISO as taken handheld about 30 minutes before sunrise. Click in for larger view.
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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 🙂
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Another image taken from the exceptionally hard frost last Sunday and my entry for the 23rd Monochrome Madness Challenge – a frozen blackberry stem…The challenge initiated by Laura Macky (wishing her well) and Leanne Cole (curator) is a weekly smorgasbord of monochrome images from photographers all over the world and published Wednesday mornings (AEST) on Leanne’s blog 🙂
Click for more detail, taken handheld.
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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.
Handheld at sunrise
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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 🙂 🙂
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