Southern NSW Plant Life

Our annual break took us to southern NSW, Hobart Beach, Bournda National Park to be exact.

In homage to the fact the park is a flora and fauna haven, this first set of shots shows some of the harsh places that plants call home.

In amongst the debris,

the rocks,

and the lichen.

But also in less harsh terrain

and where they shed the things that are so precious in this dry and arid land.

Twilight falls

We've have quite a lot of rain so after work I ventured to my favourite spot to see what was there.  On the walk down it was fairly obvious from the noise that there was a fair amount of water around.

This first shot is about half way down the falls I liked the little fern on the right it just broke up the rocks and of course plenty of fairly floss water...

This last image is just off the path at the lower viewing platform and is easy reach if you're not in the rock hopping mood.

The rain intensifies the colours in the rocks bringing out a colour cast almost like there is oil on the water.

The first weekend

The end of the first working week of the year got me messing around in the garden and always a good photo opportunity.

This handsome chap actually lives in the house this is our friend Leo.

Around the place we have lot's of lilies that just pop up, pity you can't post smells.

The drops of rain on the fuscia and the white roses in the background provides some interest in the background.

Bug hunting there were hundreds of these little orange bugs when I first pointed the camera there was a big clump of them but they scattered. this lone beetle stands out clearly on the aged wood of the compost heap.

Another on this head of grass (which is a bit long for summer)

Even the thistles get in on the act.

Far Away Lightening

Wednesday night ended with lightening, hoping there was plenty of rain with it I headed in a direction that I thought I should get some views.  I made the right choice.  I found a spot with far reaching views.

Unfortunately the lightening kept it's distance from where I was, this was the best shot from my new favourite spot.

On the way home the lightening was a little closer.

A Beautiful Morning

After the break it's back to the proper job with photography taking a bit of a back seat, however when you wake up in the morning sunlight with mist and golden hues what can stop that impulsive "where's the camera" behaviour.  With a 70-300mm lens I did some telephoto landscape photography.

The mist gives a golden glow to the long grass in the next paddock, the conditions were rapidly changing and I could have lowered the iso on these shots but didn't want to miss the shot whilst fiddling with settings.

A quick look over the valley saw the mist rising and falling with these tree tops just poking through.

T'was a hot one today at 40 degrees and with no air-con in the house and none in the car thought I'd get out in the heat and wind down at the water.

Been meaning to get to this spot for a while, need to come back when the tides in and the wind is down.

A little up the beach there are a few sticks in the water.  After looking at this on the PC I need to work on my "Tripod shakes in the wind" techniques.  Did I mention it was windy?

The change came in from the West, didn't come with the lightning but you can't have everything and whilst it may make for good images there are associated issues with lightning at this time of year.

The full set of A to Z that I completed on Boxing Day.  It was an interesting exercise and I have a great deal more understanding of the effort required in managing to post a selection of photo's each day in a similar way to +Andrew Thomas

Andrew is a Ballarat based photographer who has very similar tastes in landscape photography.  I met Andrew in October on a trip organised by KPS and if there was one thing that I learned on the trip it was there is never a time that you can't take a photo and some of the more challenging conditions just need a little more imagination.

It was his projects that really inspired this self imposed challenge you can check out his work @
Andrew's Blog

Of my images there are a few that were rushed and as a result are not great in either subject or execution "Vista" springs immediately to mind.  Others were surprising in content and I'll be revisiting those subjects with a different approach.

"Ice" indicated what can be done in post processing (Lightroom) and will definitely be on my to do list to use different lighting conditions (the blue and yellow in the images is mainly post processing and pushing the contrast and saturation to silly levels).

Off to take some pictures...