For some time, a prominent local department store has been advertising their Christmas parade and pantomime. Tonight we went into town to have a look.

Queen St Mall is a pedestrianised shopping zone. We arrived with time on our hands and promptly fell into the nearest beer-dispensing hostelry. Since it was right in the middle of Queen St we reckoned we couldn’t really miss the event from there. While still largely preoccupied with drinks, suddenly, a donkey! And shepherds, complete with tea towels. Hard on the heels of the donkey, three elaborately-adorned camels. With riders in robes and costumed guides leading the camels. The last one had a shovel with her, in case of animal-related incidents.

Having finished our drinks, we followed the camels. The parade was just getting ready, and we got an excellent view of every scene. The procession was an eclectic mix of folklore. Santa made an appearance, donkeys, sheep and camels, and groups of performers singing and dancing. A bit of Rio-style Mardi Gras was evident in the elaborately-decorated floats. And, only in Australia would a Christmas parade include snorkeling gear and a barbecue! It was fun.

This blog post was written on my iPad, so the pictures aren’t arranged the way they normally are. I hope you enjoy them anyway!

After an excellent night out, a night-time walk from South Bank through the CBD produced this set of lovely night photographs, taken with my Canon S95 (which I’m starting to like more and more!). All were taken without a tripod.

The Mangrove Boardwalk has, so far, come up with something new every time I’ve been there. For instance, recent highlights were egrets and herons. On Sunday we were treated to a very rare sight: A bar-sided skink! They do live in the mangroves but are rarely seen. This one sat in the dappled sunlight, enjoying the warmth, for quite some time. Enough time to switch to a telephoto lens and set up a tripod.

While the skink was the highlight, we saw plenty of other flora and fauna. Enjoy this selection!

New mountain bike trails are always a welcome find. It turns out that 15km north of Brisbane is another Conservation Park, similar to Daisy Hill, with another 10 mountain bike tracks. Not being the adventurous type, we ventured there on foot first, to assess the difficulty level. That was just as well, really, since I decided within the first 20m that no way am I going to ride a bike over that. The Obsessive Mountain Biker, however, is another matter, recent injuries notwithstanding. Anyway, we left the tracks to one side, drove to the main picnic area and walked around the Tree Discovery Trail. It being a forest we discovered rather a lot of trees.

We took a lazy long weekend last week with plenty of photographs but the photo editing session was somewhat terminally interrupted by the Rainforest Leech Incident about which the least said the better. Hence I have only just got around to selecting the crop of the photographs. So, here are some highlights from Jolly’s Lookout and Mt Coot-tha Botanical Gardens.

Today I set myself a special photography challenge: What kind of pictures can I take using the camera in my new mobile phone? No editing allowed except what is possible with Photoshop Express on the mobile phone itself. The mobile is an HTC Wildfire S, an entry-level Android handset, which has a 5MP camera. The light conditions were pretty typical for Brisbane in spring: Bright sunshine with broken clouds.

First up, the obligatory shot of Story Bridge from the ferry. Learning points number one and two presented themselves immediately: It is really quite hard to see the soft-shutter button on the screen in direct sunlight, and it is extremely easy for part of your finger to cover the lens while trying to keep a secure grip on such a tiny device. It took me a couple of goes to sort that out, resulting in this pretty decent picture. I was especially impressed by the details in the sky.

Trying to get the yellow and purple blossoms properly exposed did however result in a blown-out sky:

Things I like a lot: The tap-to-focus feature. This helped enormously in controlling exposure. In high-contrast situations (such as a partially-shaded park in the subtropics at midday), I could get adequate exposure by tapping where I wanted the focus to be. This can be clearly seen in the following two pictures: Choose a white flower as the focus and the picture overall gets darker with highlights properly exposed but shadow detail lost, choose a dark-red one and the picture overall gets brighter with shadow detail available but highlights blown out.

However, absolutely nothing could compensate for trying to photograph a yellow flower in direct sunlight. The result were totally washed out highlights, as expected. Compare this with the right-hand shot of a similarly-coloured flower taken in the shade.

Things I don’t like: The on-screen button for the shutter, especially in conjunction with the delay between pressing the shutter and the picture being taken. On occasion that led to camera shake, purely because I thought it had taken the picture when in fact it hadn’t. I tried capturing a moving subject (a lizard moving into the undergrowth) but no way!

I’ve read some reviews of this phone camera that in parts verged on the vitriolic, which seems a tad unfair to me. It isn’t a DSLR, nor even a dedicated pocket camera and shouldn’t be expected to behave like one. It’s a small camera added to a mobile phone. Overall it behaved exactly as I had expected: Reasonable pictures with really quite decent colour and detail when the lighting was right, a really nice feature in tap-to-focus, and perfectly good enough quality for snapshots for when one doesn’t want to carry around a DSLR.

Will I leave my DSLR at home in the future? No, of course not. If I go out with the intention of doing photography I’ll take the DSLR (and in all likelihood also the tripod, the filter, the cable release, the two spare lenses etc). But if I happen to come across a photographic opportunity unexpectedly, or if I want to capture and immediately share something, I’ll gladly use the camera phone.

I leave you with a not-entirely-sharp picture of a lizard, sun-bathing. They do that.

For some reason, unsuspecting birds have been appearing in front of my camera lens with unusual frequency lately. This heron was the product of the weekend’s sortie to Daisy Hill. While Fitness Fanatics rode the trails in 30C heat, I planned to sit next to a billabong with my ND400 filter. It turned out that that was a non-starter due to the total absence of any wind — there is no point in long exposures if nothing moves. However, this heron turned up and calmly spent 30 minutes fishing. Enough time for me to switch to my telephoto lens, mount it on the tripod, and get some excellent portrait shots.

And these shots were taken today, with my pocket camera. You know how I said I’d never have to take another cormorant shot ever again? Turns out I was wrong. This one was too cute to ignore.

Do click on the thumbnails for a proper view!

Spring has finally started in earnest, with temperatures in the high 20s, bright sunshine and azure skies. Water quality also looks like it has improved noticeably; Moreton Bay now shimmers in a brilliant blue rather than the post-flood muddy brown that persisted for months. So I thought taking pictures of mangroves at high tide, using my new ND400 filter, would be just the thing. This time I remembered the sunblock as well as the hat. Learning from experience etc.

Established mangroves shelter the boardwalk from the sun, and the high tide and light breeze mean attractively-rippled water just waiting to be smoothed out by long exposures. Excellent reflections could be had where pools were sheltered from the breeze. Enjoy!

On my travels through the Brisbane suburbs of Bulimba and New Farm I encountered an unexpected bonus today: A cormorant, on a rock close to the footpath on an ebbing tide, happily fishing and ignoring people pointing cameras at it. I sat down on the edge with my feet dangling near but not in the water (this is why it is important to always know whether the tide is ebbing or rising!) and took shot after shot, oblivious of the burning sunshine. (Not oblivious to the aftereffects right now but Artists must suffer, or possibly remember to take sunblock. At least I did remember a hat this time.)

While I was watching the cormorant had a bit of luck, and caught a fish! Quite a big one, compared to the diameter of its neck. And I caught the whole sequence on camera. I shall never need to take another cormorant picture ever again.

Yesterday I decided to treat my new ND400 filter to an outing to the big Botanical Gardens at Mt Coot-tha. Three lakes and several waterfalls beckoned. It was a bright, sunny, cold, and very windy day — so windy that for the first time ever one of the chairs on our balcony was actually blown over. Wind equals lots of movement for things like leaves, flowers and water. Wind also equals danger of tripod falling over when left unsupervised right next to a waterfall. But, to minimise that danger, I had my Key Grip with me, who uncomplainingly trailed behind me, carrying all my gear. It’s not easy being an Artist.

This is my favourite picture: A lake surrounded by a shallow waterfall and trees. I managed to get in a 2min exposure, resulting in nicely blurred leaves and the soft sheen to the water that I currently like so much.

Here are more waterfalls and lakes.

And finally, I caught a bee in flight, just hovering over a flower to choose the choicest ones. Not taken with a long exposure, obviously.