Spring Blossom

 I went for a walk yesterday to capture some Spring blossom.   I only took my OM05 with a18mm f1.8 lens as I wanted the challenge of not using a zoom.  

There's a lot of blossom around at the moment, but it seems to not last very long - the flowers in the full sun are already starting to dry out and wither and this is only the first day of Spring.

I wanted to include the sun that was backlighting the flower.

This one I wanted to contrast against the blue sky

You can't forget the wattle as well

Trees on the golf course in blossom

Little Mullligans

 This is a nature reserve close to the Mulligans Flat nature reserve. While not as large as Mulligans Flat, it seems to offer a wider variety of scenery to photograph.

I particularly like the fact that there aren't any prepared trails through the reserve, so you have to find your own path through the reserve.  This means that when climbing the ridge, you have to plan your path to avoid the more dangerous ground.  According to my smartwatch the climb to the top of the ridge is the equivalent of about 20 stories.

We hadn't had any rain for a while

There isn't a lot of scrub to fight through

Some of the dams still held water for the wildlife

Tree sap illuminated by the sun

The view from the ridge line

The border with NSW - the state to our north.

Heading down from the ridgeline

Tong's Hole

This is a new trail that has been opened up that takes you down from West Belconnen to the Molonglo River.

I had a quick trip there to explore its possibilities, so I just took my OM-5 and a 12-100mm f4 pro lens.

The trail starts off with a slow descent but then becomes steeper as you approach the river.  The trail takes you to a swimming hole that seems quite protected.   There isn't a lot of beach space, but it looks like it would be good on a hot day.

Next time I will take my tripod to take a panorama.  Because of the steep cliffs opposite, you'd need to take the panorama in portrait orientation with a wide angle lens.

Looking up-river

Hand-held panorama

  

Looking down-river

Molonglo River Park

 Time to restart this blog!  It's only been 10 years since I last posted.

Today I went for a walk in the Molonglo River Park.   I wanted to see it in Autumn on a nice cloudy day because it's hard to capture a nice forest when there's bright dappled sunlight around.   For the first half of the walk, it was nicely overcast but then the sun came out and made it more difficult to take photos.

Photos were taken using an OM System OM-5 with a 12-100 f4 pro zoom.

Next time I'll explore the riverbank rather than the forest.

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.