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Holiday photos
I just finished sorting, processing, uploading and detailing photos for the first two days of my holiday. They are in the album Auckland Day 1&2 in the Auckland Holiday collection and it will be in chronological order if viewed within the album.
You can find the album here.
Still to come:
- Day 3 (and beyond)
- Turning 50
- Birthday Surprise
- Absent-mindedly almost 50
I’m hoping to continue the Auckland posts shortly but may do birthday/turning 50 posts before that since it’s still quite fresh in my mind.
Perhaps when I get caught up, I will think about creating a gallery for my trip on this website, probably with a pared down collection.
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Flickr
I’m been using Flickr off and on for several years now. I have photos going back as far as 2005 when I started my account. Back then I just used the free account as I wasn’t uploading a whole lot. Over the past few years, I’ve been taking heaps more photos and posting more on the website. It’s interesting to see how my photography skills have changed over the years. I also have been far more ruthless about keeping only a handful of photos most of the time rather than keeping 1o shots of the same thing. Well, I still sometimes keep multiple copies but oftentimes I delete far more than I keep. It’s usually just a matter of not being able to decide between photos.
Back in the early years, I didn’t have all that many views of my photos, aside from family and friends. Once I started uploading more photos, my views went up but then there would be many days where I’d have none at all. I’ve noticed lately that I’m getting quite a few views daily without even trying. What’s funny is the photos being viewed. Probably the most popular ones are the photos I took at our science museum, Scitech, a few years ago of several plastic bottle sculptures in an exhibit about plastic waste…I think… They aren’t great photos but the subject was interesting. People keep coming to see these same photos all the time. I guess they must be doing searches and my photos come up but it’s kind of funny they are the most popular when they are pretty mediocre overall.
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Back into photos
Last year was a pretty poor one with regard to photography. My main goal has been to reflect experiences and places and hopefully keep improving my photography. I realised last month I’d only uploaded a handful of photos to Flickr, then looked at my photos and realised there really aren’t all that many available to upload anyway. I did finally upload more photos but the pickings were slim. Many were just repeats of the same thing and many just weren’t very good.
I hope this year will be more fruitful. I have a new camera that I’m still getting to know plus my older, sort of fancy but not too fancy DSLR…Not to mention my iPhone camera for more casual photos. I started tonight to work on recent photos in preparation for uploads and have added at least a dozen new photos. These are all still from 2012 but maybe I will soon be working on lots of new ones for 2013.
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Photo fail
I seem to have lost the momentum I had from the beginning of the month. The camera hasn’t been put away but I’ve managed to miss a few days and I’m well behind getting samples posted for those that I have. So this month has not been a success but I’m not abandoning the cause. My challenge to the self was to get the camera out each day and photograph something and I did pretty well at that. It wasn’t to have photos to post for each day but I seem to have mentally added that requirement into the mix. Anyway, I have been trying to get through photos and will post more soon. I find the processing takes more time than it should because I fix many of them up, often with minor adjustments, only to then delete many of them. Obviously it would be more time-efficient to weed first…
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May Photo Challenge – May 11
I was feeling much better about my efforts today than I did yesterday.
We planted this, our first hibiscus plant, a year ago this month. It wasn’t much more than a stick with a few leaves when we put it into the ground. But it was flowering even back then. There have been plenty of flower buds over the past year but not too many of them have reached full flower, falling off before they properly opened. I’m hoping this one will hang in there and show it’s fully beauty before dropping off.Â
This is the same flower, just a different angle.
Another one of the many buds starting up on this bush. I might keep an eye on this one’s progress as it develops into a proper flower. Hopefully will won’t fall off too soon.
Our hakea laurina tree is absolutely covered with these seed pods. Most of them are looking old and grey but this lot of more brownish ones must be a bit more recent. I took more photos of the same pin-cushion flowers from a couple days ago but it’s quite difficult to get the focus right on them and they had to be binned.
Every autumn/winter, we have a couple of these plants pop up in our front yard. It eventually comes out with one or two pink flowers. I spotted this while revisiting our front yard gazanias and thought it might be interesting to track the progress of its growth. Hopefully the plant will be a bit more visible the next time. -
May Photo Challenge – May 10
My challenge for the month has been to get the camera out and take at least five photos every day and I’ve managed to get something out of it to post each day, even if it’s not always the most satisfactory effort. I’d say only a handful are ones that I thought were any good at all.
Today, I was in the position of having taken a couple dozen photos and having nothing that I really wanted to keep. But I did keep these two, just as evidence of my effort. Part of me felt like it was an exercise in futility. The more rational side says that it is still valuable experience.
This is just one corner of our clothes hoist, with a couple socks that have missed out on being collected. These appeared in several photos but I found it looked better to keep them mostly in shadow.
Of the various angles I tried, this was the one I found most interesting. This is kind of okay but not quite what I was looking to capture. Others would have been much better but a slight breeze kept moving it around, making for too many blurry photos. Obviously the low light and the movement are not a great mix when you aren’t prepared for it. -
May Photo Challenge – May 09
Today was another night-time rush to come up with some photos. I had taken my camera with me when i went out in the late afternoon but found no inspiration before dark. I also attempted some low-light photos outside but none of those worked out very well. I spied my lava lamp, hidden under my sun hat on my desk. It doesn’t get used all that much due to the time it takes to get it heated up and the amount of energy it must use. I tried lots of photos while it was heating up but couldn’t quite get a good angle or view.
This reminds me of those giant, curvy slides you sometimes find at theme parks. I particular remember them at Six Flags Over Georgia in my childhood. And also on the show The Banana Splits
I bought this lamp several years ago at Kmart on sale for about ten dollars. There were a few different designs and colors to choose from but I liked the curviness of this one. These are nothing like the big lamps I remember from my childhood. There was a girl in our dorm with one looking very much like one from the ’70s. I can’t recall whether it was an old one or not but it came to an unfortunate end and left a rather horrible mess.
While this isn’t quite what I wanted to photograph, It does have some interesting and colorful shadows. -
May Photo Challenge – May 08
I got a bit carried away eating chocolate today. We had a very big box of Malteasers (chocolate covered malt balls) and having that within arm’s reach was rather dangerous. Game Fanatic also baked some brownies using them for Mother’s day and our family ate the entire lot of them. So I must take a break from chocolate for a few days.
I was feeling a bit lethargic by late afternoon but forced myself out on a walk anyway. My first goal was to get some photos for but I ended up walking to our local markets to pick up some bulk goods from our favorite shop there. The sky was pretty overcast and the light wasn’t great but I hoped I’d find some thing to inspire me along the way.
I walked for quite a long time before any inclination came over me to take out my camera. I was walking around a shopping center and notice a bit of blue sky poking out from the clouds while looking down the alley way between two buildings.
This is from a different alley way. Neither of these were quite what I was trying to capture but I don’t think I had a clear notion of what I really wanted when I took them. Perhaps it was just a matter of getting started…
This was taken from another sort of alley way, also within the same shopping complex. There are several buildings next to each other but not technically connected. This is from the last section. I guess the one building that would be painted would likely be a graphic design center…if I am remember correctly. The end of the building opposite is painted but it’s an ugly yellow to represent the colors of the music chain that occupies that space. I had to crop this  heavily because it started out looking like a lot of sky/cloud/blue with a bit off to the left.
I took this as I walking towards home along a main road near the above shopping center. It isn’t quite as dark as it appears but it will be soon.
This is the view of the western sky from the main road, just near a major power station in our area. I still had nearly 25 minutes of walking ahead but about ten minutes of any light. This was fine along the main road with all the lights but my path was going to be considerably darker. I was also struggling with the heaviness of my bag, which now held my camera and too many bulk food purchases.A major hardware warehouse was just ahead so I stopped there and called home, asking the Scientist for a lift back. It was hardly any time at all before he arrived and soon I was home watching the end of the repeat of last night’s Doctor Who episode. Despite it being a repeat of such a recent episode, it was still pretty cool viewing.
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May Photo Challenge – May 07
I will admit from the beginning that I was rather lazy about taking photos today. I took my G11 camera out into our garden with hopes of using its macro function and took only a few photos. The pickings were rather meager for this set.
We have a grevillea bush next to our laundry door that has gone a bit wild. Some of its branches are attempting to move across to where our shed is located so I will have to get out there and do what I call bushwhacking. Even though it’s the middle of autumn, the bush has flowers popping up all over. This is one of the features of living in Perth that I like. Many shrubs and trees have blooms through the year, even in winter.
This orange honeysuckle flower is one of our many plants that have taken root and is difficult to remove. I remember my family moving into our house in North Carolina when I was eleven and having honeysuckle choking trees along the creek that ran behind it. I have no idea what I was thinking when we got the original plants, knowing what my parents went through to get rid of it all those years ago.
This is a pin-cushion flower from a hakea laurina tree that is growing next to our driveway. We planted one of these the first year or two we lived here. That plant grew tall and beautiful over a couple years. Then it suddenly died and we removed it. This tree grew from seeds that were dropped by the one we originally planted. Unfortunately it is growing mostly at an angle and I fear it will meet its end during one of our nasty winter storms. This particular tree blooms mainly in the winter but flowers have been emerging for a few weeks now. The “pins” normally have a cream color to them with a pink tip at the end but some will change color further along in their flowering cycle.
This is another emerging grevillea flower, from our sprawling bush in the front yard. This was one of the first shrubs we planted, a gift from my brother-in-law and his then girlfriend.
I have forgotten what this is called but we planted this and three other seedlings in hopes of starting some ground-cover plants. Two of the seedlings didn’t last the week as it was just too hot. They were all very small and we obviously needed to water a bit more often than usual until they were a bit more established. The other survivor is still alive but only just hanging in there.
After taking my photos, I went outside our fence with the large pruners and hacked off branches from a bottlebrush tree that is growing onto the fence. With winter coming I can just imagine tree limbs coming down and parts of the fence with it.
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May Photo Challenge – May 06
Day six had me out for another long walk, starting a half hour earlier than on Wednesday. My initial inclination was to only take my (Canon) G11 out because I had a planned stop at the grocery store on the way back and that would have been much easier to carry. I’m glad I changed my mind because as good as the G11 is, the (Canon) 500D worked out a lot better for these photos.
My walk this afternoon took me down through a parkway that runs through much of our suburb. I haven’t been the whole way through it for many years, following a particular distressing incident where a magpie swooped at me four times while I cycled through. I’ve generally taken other roads to avoid this last section of parkway since but today ventured into the area for the first time in ages. It was this tree that motivated me today. I’m sure I’ve seen it many times before but it was only now that I paid much notice to it. It’s tall with long, gnarly limbs reaching out from up high and further down.
It was quite dark below the tree even though there was still considerable daylight available. I found it tricky working out the light settings I wanted so tried out all sorts of combinations, hoping some would do the trick.
It felt a bit like peering up into a secret area while standing under the branches here. I was reminded somewhat of The Faraway Tree books by Enid Blyton (a very famous English writer of children’s books from early last century). The faraway tree reaches up into the clouds and magical adventures happened there. Obviously that tree couldn’t have been a gum tree, being set in England, but this tree does look as though it could reach up into the clouds.
Just a slightly different take on the previous one. It almost feels as though one is in a pit, peering out the opening here.
I found these climbing down from a fence along with a few other varieties further along on my walk. I might have used my G11 with its macro mode for this one but I couldn’t be too bothered pulling it out at this point in time. I don’t think it came out too badly.This last photo was taken along a footpath that I have walked through quite often and sometimes have felt as though there was nothing new to see. After this long absence, much of it seemed rather fresh and interesting again. I have some notions of walking along this road again soon, but in another direction. An extension of the road opened several months ago that leads to a major road and has some interesting views. Normally I am driving on the road so don’t have opportunities to use my camera. I almost ventured down that way today but thought better of it due to the quickly setting sun.
