Busy busy
Well still here in the Territory as you can see by the attire and not long before things are about to get alot busier! Yep baby number 2 on the way with one very excited little sister waiting, waiting.
I have been doing my usual photography work but due to being down to just a laptop I haven’t bothered to do much editing as I find the colours vary so much. So basically all I’m doing is filling up an external harddrive with loads of images that I will one day go through.
Nearly 38 weeks pregnant now so things are slowing down somewhat, but the pool is getting a work out thats for sure. Its really hot here this time of year, build up time erhhh. Plans to move to WA are still all happening we just thought we better have the baby first..then sell the house.
My mum has been very ill and is now out of intensive care and has been tranferred to her local hospital at Margaret River. It was a scary couple of weeks but things look to be improving, yet another reminder we need to be down that way asap.
So wish me luck hopefully back soon to post some newborn baby pics!
Cheers Jules
Long time No post
Outback Shed.
Above is an image taken from one of my favourite spots to photograph, Marrakai just a few clicks down the road from us here in the Northern Territory of Australia. I have finished a Photoshop course and have am happy to try out a few new tricks I learnt along the way, infact it was a reassuring course just letting me know I am already on the right track. This image has just been processed with the channel mixer and a texture added, too easy! Now I am up with all the tricks of CS4 I’ll have to start brushing up with CS5 soon enough!
New point n shoot
Well been busy getting the house ready for sale, painting for the last 4 months non stop and finally all is ready! Meanwhile I have signed up to do an advanced Photoshop course here in Darwin. Its been 10 long years since I was in a formal photoshop class so I figured I was well overdue and with a little one at home it’s alot harder to study online.I have been thinking (not surprisingly) alot about real estate photography recently…and with all the market research I have done the images that go with most house sales are really crap! Anyways before I buy my dream camera when we finally get to WA I thought a good travel camera for the family would be good so I bought a Panasonic LX3 and gosh I am impressed for a little point n shoot! I love the fact that it can be used fully manual and it has a superb Leica lens. To tell the truth I also got it for the real estate pictures as it has a wonderful wide angle lens and was cheaper to get than a wide angle for a DSLR. I wouldn’t have thought twice about getting a L series Canon wide angle lens but with the possibility of upgrading to a medium format camera I thought this the best option. Logic in the madness well thats what i tell my other half!
So below is one of the first images I took with the Lumix not a remarkable image by any means but not too bad either! My daughter and I watched these two crows smooching and preening each other at Fogg Dam. We don’t see too many crows up close so it was nice to watch. The second image is the Fogg Dam road a road I have seen many a tourist and local stand in the water to take photos which is super SUPER scary as there are crocs everywhere!!! Infact if they look around they’d see the very large croc trap set in the lillies trying to catch a fairly decent sized scaly handbag. Infact if you look closely at the last image (bottom left hand corner) you will see a little croc just sitting there, a freshie but a croc no less! Every tourist car drove straight past it oh how easy it really is to get eaten up here!!
Afternoon Light
Late afternoon light on the backfence of our property. Looking rather overgrown from all the wet season rain.
Croc Tails
So I braved my fear and agreed to go out in the boat, its been nearly 10 years since I was last in a boat of any kind and thankfully it was uneventful! It was when I worked for Paspaley Pearls in my twenties (some time ago) that I was thrown out of a boat at high speed. I had been working out at sea as a deckhand for over two weeks during a pearl harvest when I was tranferred to Kuri Bay to work. There was a few of us in the boat with our belongings (clothes, doonas, pillows etc) and I remember being so excited at the prospect of walking on land again as I had been at sea nearly three weeks.
Well anyway, the idiot skipper decided to have some fun with the boat next to us and with some serious high speeds and a few water boat donuts thrown in for good measure about 3 of us were thrown clean out of the boat. Unfortunately I was carrying my doona at the time, so first thing I remember was being underwater not knowing which way was up and completely entangled in my doona. What felt like ages I finally made my way to the surface to be nearly hit by the other boat!
I still have an area on the back of my leg where the muscle was pushed & mishaped from the impact of hitting the water, I had a purple leg for about two weeks from the bruise arhh, a reminder of my time with Paspaley. But dispute being thrown into croc and shark infested waters I am not overly worried about the crocs up here, so it was a pleasure to come across this old man croc on the bank.
I got out an old lens that is covered in mould esp for the journey, so don’t look too closely but you’ll get the idea. We saw quite a few crocs swimming about but this guy got our attention, laying on the bank as if he didn’t have a care in the world…well he doesn’t really does he? By the shape of his tail we suggest he would be about 60- 70 years old and no sooner had i finished taking the pics when he turned quickly to disappear into the murly waters, I didn’t catch this action as I was holding my daughter a little too tight by this stage.
Still thinking about what camera to get when we sell the house, CF is certainly making it difficult by showing the best of nearly ever camera brand out there!!
Dirty Dirt
This used to be covered in natural bush land and is an area I used to visit to watch wondering wild Buffalo, the place I spotted my first antilopine walleroo (which I thought was a ‘big red’ at first) and to watch various finches in the tall grasses (wishing for that 400mm canon lens). It is government land that is used to collect dirt for the new bridge that is currently being built in Palmerston. When I spoke to the guy that is in charge of the area (-as i asked to drive in to take images of dump track tyres for some ttv work) he reassured me that the land is fully regenerated and no one would even know they were there. Little does he know that I have been visiting the area for long enough to watch these 2-3 square kilometre areas get wiped clean of all nature and no, years later they do not look the same.Granted though, there is enough land available here in the NT to take what you want from it without any fuss but it makes me SAD as its MY area, less than 10 kms from my home and a where I can go to see everything the territory has to offer from wandering emus to wetlands to rocky outcrops.It is where most of my ‘Through the Viewfinder’ images have been taken that appear on this blog. Anyways I said my bit…good on you if you’ve read this far as i really just wanted to rant outloud. Oh and the pano is a 6 image stitch with PTGui with no colour manipulation just a little burning and dodging. Don’t care about pano correctness in this one-I know I’ve got alot to learn re panos:)Cheers Jules
