Botanic Gardens

Last weekend I went for a walk in the Botanic Gardens, where I haven't been for a long time.  Not only were the rainforest plants interesting, but the wildlife too.

I first walked through with my Canon 70D with a Tamron 17-50mm f2.8 lens, but I found the short focus distance a bit limiting when hunting down the water dragons. So I changed over to my Tamron 18-270mm zoom lens and went hunting again.  This time I could get closer to the dragons who were quite skittish near people.

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.

Night photography

Last night I decided to see if could get some different night shots.

I went down to the Lake, and there was a fog starting over the water.  This explains the white misting beyond the pier.  Unfortunately some folks turned on some flood lights which ruined any further photos from this location.

But just as the fog was getting heavier I took a photo upwards.   You can see how the floodlighting illuminated the growing fog.

I moved to a nearby dam which, to my surprise, had lights illuminating the dam walls.  This had an interesting effect on the fog.  I wanted to try and get a picture of car rear lights disappearing into the fog, and this was the best of the bunch because most of the time there was a car approaching which ruined the effect.

A zoomed-out view of the road over the dam.

From the same place I could see the Black Mountain communication tower, with the car traffic nearby illuminating the fog.

It was well below zero, so I decided to cut the evening short, but as I got to my car I caught this view looking over the zoo that seems to have been well lit.

Dive at Bateman's Bay, NSW

Lake Cruise

Last weekend we went on an evening cruise around the lake.  For these photos I used my Tamron 17-50mm F2.8 because I was anticipating a low-light environment.

Fireworks

I had another go the other evening at taking photos of fireworks.  It's harder than most people think, because you need to anticipate the fireworks going off.  For me, I often only get perhaps 1 decent photo out of 20.

One of the problems this time was the lack of wind.  This meant that the fireworks left a lot of smoke lying around and this tended to be illuminated by the exploding fireworks, so many of the shots had a white mist effect.  It is much better to get a clean shot the the fireworks against a jet black background.

But as I mentioned earlier, the difficulty is that you need to use an exposure time of about 1.5 - 4 seconds.  To get a clean shot you therefore need a tripod and a shutter delay so that your finger pushing the shutter release doesn't bump the camera.

This means you have to watch out for fireworks going up in the air, so you can trigger the photo and have the firework blossom while the shutter is still open.  Often, though, you get the timing right, but the firework is out of the frame.

Early morning at the racecourse

It wasn't really early in terms of a normal racecourse day, but somehow it's harder to get up at 6:30am on a Saturday than it is during the week.

We went to the racecourse to look at a prospective new horse and watch it in a gallop.  It's still early days into its training so you only get an indication of performance.

It raced another horse down the straight.  But I wouldn't be surprised if it was allowed to win because we were watching.

Having a shower after training.