I’ve had a couple of good days for spotting wildlife. I saw this fellow sunning himself on a rock as I was walking home from work today, just 50 metres or so from where I saw the brushturkeys yesterday.
This is an Eastern water skink (Eulamprus quoyii). It was maybe 40 centimetres long. I managed to poke my camera fairly close before it scooted away.
Following up my urban bird post of the other day, I was astonished this morning to come across a pair of Australian brushturkeys while walking to the station to catch the train to work. I know these birds are around the city, but I’ve never seen some so close before, nor so close to my home.
They’re very territorial, so I’ll probably see them again in the future if they’ve moved into the area. At this time of year they’re probably either building compost mounds to incubate their eggs, or already looking after a clutch of eggs or chicks somewhere nearby.
I recently got an ND400 neutral density filter for my lenses. This is an almost black filter that cuts the available light by a factor of 400. It looks black, and lets through only the barest amount of light, like welding goggles. With it, you can take really long exposures when there’s too much light to do so otherwise. This is useful for things like ocean scenes, when you want the waves to blur out into a misty ambience. It’s best around sunrise or sunset, but I went out today in the middle of the day to test it out. Here are a couple of the results.
Yesterday when I went out to take photos of the sunrise, I arranged to meet my friend Andrew at the beach, since he’s keen on photography too. We shot various things with our cameras, wandering around and taking photos from different places. At one point Andrew suggested we set up our tripods right next to each other, on the rock shelf that we were currently standing on, and take photos of the same scene at the same time. Then we’d each process our photo and post the results so we could compare how we’d approached rendering the final photo.
The small shot on the right here is my version of the photo, as it emerged direct from the camera, converted from RAW format to JPEG using all the default settings. Below are the final photos after processing, making various artistic choices to achieve a final photo we were happy with.
Andrew’s version is on top – he went for a darker approach, elected to use black and white, and went for a shorter crop to give a wider aspect ratio. My version is on the bottom – I chose to emphasise the colours and the foreground. I notice we both enhanced the contrast, and by a similar amount.
I planned to get up at 5:30 this morning and head out to the beach to take photos of the sunrise. Doing this is always a risk, because you can never tell what the weather will be like, and it’s difficult to tell when it’s still pitch black outside. I checked the rain radar and there were a few tiny specks around, but it was mostly clear. So I went out.
On the way to the beach (a 20 minute drive in the pre-dawn lack of traffic) it started raining. I parked at the beach and sat in the car for a few minutes. The rain eased off and stopped, so I ventured out. The sly was gloomy and the sun never showed its face through the hanging grey cloud. But I got some acceptable photos. There’s a stormy feel to them, which is fine, I guess. You can’t have a perfect sunrise every day!
I tend to have quite a few projects going all the time. I thought I’d take a couple of minutes to list them all in a note-taking program. I was somewhat surprised with how long the list turned out to be. So I thought I’d share, so you have some idea of what sort of stuff I do in my “spare” time.
To close this post, I’d just like to say one thing. If your reaction to my list is to think, “Man, you have too much spare time,” then you are wrong. Please read this essay I wrote about creativity and spare time. I don’t think I can say it any better than that here. :-)
On Saturday I went out to a concert – the Sydney Symphony playing Carmina Burana – and so got home late. I wanted to get up early on Sunday to go photograph the sunrise (best time of year for it right now), but I was tired. So I decided not to set the alarm, but if I happened to wake up before 5:30, I’d get up and go out.
I slept solidly and when I woke up it was still dark. I turned to look at the clock… and it said 5:29.
So I got up and drove to Mona Vale, which is possibly my favourite beach and ocean baths for sunrises. It wasn’t a great sunrise, but I think it turned out to be worth it.
I’m back from three and a bit days in Tokyo. Most of it was business, with meetings and stuff, but I got some time off to do some sightseeing. And there are a lot of sights to see in Tokyo. Here’s a photo from each day.
Tuesday I arrived after sunset. This was the view from my hotel room window in Shinagawa.
Wednesday I went to Shimomaruko for business meetings at Canon Inc. headquarters. Shimomaruko has a much smaller “village” feel than skyscraper feel, with detached houses and little fruit stalls and stuff in the streets.
Thursday I had a few hours free before meetings to tour Meiji Jingu, the major Shinto shrine in Tokyo.
Friday I went to the National Museum, and spent some time in Akihabara, which is the major electronics retail area. It’s insane!
Four very different flavours of Tokyo in four days.
Friday night, dinner out. We went to Garfish at Crows Nest, a really good seafood place about 15 minutes walk away. The weather was really hot (new record all-time high temperature for Sydney at 45.8°C), so I opted for the beach feel with the simple fish & chips from the menu that includes a lot more fancy stuff than that. It’s really good fish & chips. And the wine was Brindabella Hills 2011 Riesling, from the Canberra wine district. Really nice, lemony, a bit of residual bubble, and a bare hint of the usual riesling stoniness. It went really well with the fish on a hot night.
The swimming pool at my work, with a view to the main satellite dish which I believe is used by Foxtel to uplink subscription TV broadcasts to their satellite. I went for a swim this morning. The pool is only 12 metres long, so I did 84 laps for a total of 1008 metres.
