Southern NSW - Dalmeny

 Southern NSW - Dalmeny

Last weekend I went to Dalmeny on the NSW southern coast, about 1 hour south of Bateman's Bay.

It's a mid-sized town as far as coastal towns go, with the major industry seeming to be holiday homes for people who want to spend their time at the beach.

The sandy beaches in this part of Australia seem endless, with towns randomly placed along them.  You can see from the following photo that the beach extends several kilometers to the next headland.  The town is to the left and behind the direction of the camera.  I didn't take any pictures of the town itself because it consists of lots of holiday homes and a few shops.

 

Here is a pedestrian bridge over the river that takes you to the beach.   When I was there the river was dammed by the sand and blocked from reaching the ocean.

The water was very clear and I could see the fish below.  I attached a polarising filter to remove the glare from the water.

Not a lot of wave activity

Not many people there as the school holidays have finished.

Looking over towards the pedestrian bridge

As I was driving past here on the way to Dalmeny I saw some interesting trees to my left.  So I stopped on my way back to see if I could get any good photos.  There was only a narrow strip of ground to the side of the road to get there.

Climbing Mt Majura

 This is a small mountain in Canberra - the equivalent of a 44 story building from the carpark to the summit.  On the top is the major approach radar for the Canberra region.

It takes about an hour to climb to the top and it's a pleasant and not dangerous climb.  There are no cliffs to fall off.  You'll need water and good shoes as the trail can be quite steep in parts.

Today I took my OM-5 with a 40-150mm telephoto lens as its one of my lighter lenses.  The downside was that I often had to move back quite a lot to get the image I wanted into the frame.

At the bottom

View half way up

The gradient you are climbing

View from the top

Trig station at the very top

Heading back down

Sponges at Bateman's Bay

The water at Bateman's Bay was freezing cold last week, being only 13 degrees above freezing.  This is one degree above my coldest dive ever.

I'm trying a different camera rig at the moment, replacing a camera flash with a video light.  I'm trying this because I'm tired of processing photos at home to find that the flash has overexposed the photo, even though I've got the flash power at minimum.  It seems that the flash on the Canon G15 is just too powerful for close-up or macro shots.

This time I attached a fabulous little QUDOS underwater video light.  It is designed to attach to Go Pro cameras, but it was pretty simple to configure a rig that would attach to my Canon underwater housing.  It is designed to go down to 40m underwater.  It puts out 400 lumens that is more than adequate for the type of close-up photography that I need a light for.

 

The light has 3 modes from spot to wide-angle, with high and low power on each.

I left the camera in Program mode, but unfortunately the Canon gives preference to Aperture, which means that most of the time it was using f1.8 with a shutter speed of 1/30sec to 1/60sec which is too slow for somebody floating around in the underwater surge.  As a result, most of the photos were slightly blurred.   Next time I'll set a shutter speed of about 1/125 or above.  Regrettably the Canon underwater housing doesn't give you access to the dial that changes the shutter speed, so I'll have to set this before mounting the camera in the housing.

Here are the best pictures of the day: a sample of soft sponges.

More photography

I had a chance to do some more photography today.

Firstly, I went back to the Botanic Gardens where I photographed yesterday.  After looking at the photos on the computer last night, I realised that some of the photos showed too much light reflection off the leaves, so today I went back and took some more using a polarizing filter.  Unfortunately, even though the filter was effective, the afternoon sun didn't provide the same "fresh" green as I captured yesterday morning.  Oh well, I learn something each time.

Later on, I drove up to the top of Black Mountain to see what was available for picture-taking.  The Botanic Gardens are at the base of Black Mountain, so this involved driving out of the Gardens, turning right, driving about 100m, then turning onto the road that goes to the top of the mountain.

I didn't want to catch the lift to the observation deck as I expect to do that in a few days time when Fay's friend arrives to visit for a few days.  So I was content to just wander around and snap a few shots.

This was taken from a lookout, overlooking Lake Burley Griffin.  The Captain Cook water jet is to the left of the Commonwealth Avenue bridge.

This is the Telstra Tower at the top of Black Mountain.  The sky looks really blue because I was using a circular polarizing filter.

Here is a close-up of the tower, standing just outside the entrance at its base.

Catherine's Year 12 Formal

The daughter of a friend of ours was having her Year 12 formal, and I offered to come over and take some photos.

I really had ulterior motives.  You see when I did a photography course a few years ago, we did a module on portraits.  Now to do take a portrait, you need a subject.  In my house, both Karyn and Matthew refuse to have their photos taken normally, so getting them to sit for a portrait shot was impossible. I ended up having to use one of our dogs for my portrait photo.

Catherine is extremely photogenic, so she agreed to pose for some shots before going to her Formal.  I took lots so that I will have plenty of material to practice my Photoshop skills in the coming year.  I learnt a lot from the process, including how difficult it can be to get a good picture during a social occasion with people all around, the problems of taking photos in the very late afternoon, the difficulty of finding a nice background, and how you can't trust some photo printing places to accurately print the right colours.

Anyway, it was nice of her to give me the opportunity to practice.