Mt Coot-tha Botanical Gardens came up with the goods today, including some awesome spider / spiderweb shots.
Itsy-Bitsy Spider
Monthly Archives: May 2011
Panoramic Fun
A photo shoot is just the thing when trying to distract oneself from annoying things like a broken dishwasher (disaster!). I went for some city shots today. I took some images with the intention of stitching them together into panoramic pictures. This worked well but the resulting pictures have odd proportions and hence don’t look good if viewed as a thumbnail. This is why I inserted the images directly into the text.
Here’s a panoramic image of Story Bridge. Photoshop Elements is your friend.
Then I tried the same thing vertically with a skyscraper. 111 Eagle St; they’ve just completed the full height. I was disappointed to learn the height is not 111 stories. A missed opportunity, I feel. That would have been so neat!
I liked the church peeking through between two tall towers.
- Church with sky scrapers
While I was in the photography mood I did today’s Daily Shoot as well:
And here’s the fun bit: Some city buildings formed pleasing shapes, just begging to be post-processed into Art with a capital A. This is what Aperture is for!
Brisbane Wheel
Today we planned a pleasant afternoon out in the city, given that the weather looked like rain might be on the way sometime soon. A civilised ferry ride to South Bank, maybe a restrained beer or two in several establishments, home. That was the plan. So how did we end up on top of Brisbane’s major tourist attraction?
Ambling aimlessly through South Bank after our ferry ride we found our favourite ice cream shop: Mövenpick. An obligatory ice-cream made the sun come out. Then we ran into a “lifestyle market”. This is the sort of thing I love looking through, without actually buying anything. It was coincidentally right next to a pub, so a beer suggested itself. The weather improved further, including a rainbow, situated right next to the Brisbane Wheel. A thought occurred to Someone Who Shall Remain Nameless: “Want to go up?”
“Erm,” I say. But, the weather is, for the moment, nice. There is no queue. What the hell. We fork over some beer tokens that amazingly are also accepted for non-beer purchases. The amount is clearly aimed at fleecing the tourist market segment. We got a gondola to ourselves, and up we go. The views were awesome over three or four revolutions of the wheel (or, 15 minutes) and we had an excellent time!
On the way back the heavens opened and we watched the expected major squall come in, sitting safely and dry in the Bavarian Beer Cafe. And a nice afternoon was had by all.
The world’s most active koala
Today we went to Daisy Hill again, so that the Obsessive Cyclist could indulge in a mud feast. Meanwhile I went to find some koalas in the Koala Centre. The same two koalas were there as last time, though they had shifted position slightly in the intervening fortnight. Imagine my surprise when one of them actually started moving, looking around and taking an interest in the world! I got a shot just as it was looking at my camera. A few moments later it went to sleep again.
I also found the world’s most awesome sign on the picnic tables scattered around the park: “Don’t feed the kangaroos.” Made me giggle, anyway.
I shall not regale you with further descriptions of mud. A single picture will do the job, I think. Enjoy.
Mangrove Boardwalk
Today is Labour Day. As we discovered to our cost, this means that everything is closed, including supermarkets. This causes a certain problem for dinner arrangements. But on a fine day that could be in summer, who cares? It’s local November and the daytime temperature was 27C and sunny. Â We drove to the Mangrove Boardwalk in Wynnum, 15km east of Brisbane, taking photographic gear. It was awesome!
Mud!
It’s a three-day weekend, hot on the heels of last week’s five-day weekend. One wonders why fully half of all public holidays fall into April. Well, Labour Day is technically in May but only just.
Anyway… Yesterday was Shopping Day. Shopophobia of Certain People notwithstanding, we drove to what must be Brisbane’s biggest shopping centre, Westfield Chermside, on the northern fringe of the city. This unnatural acquiescence to the suggestion of shopping is explained by recently-acquired knowledge: Brisbane has an Apple Store after all. At Chermside. (In fact it has two, the other is in Robina, close to the Gold Coast. To get there one passes perilously close to the local Ikea. But I digress.)
The Apple Store in Sydney is just about the only thing we were missing up here. Finding one after all caused feelings of happiness and joy, especially in people whose current iMac is three years old. Being remarkably good, we resisted the temptation of an impulse purchase in the form of a 27-inch iMac with a terabyte of disk space and 8GB of RAM. But the seed of a thought is germinating… Let’s see how long it takes to blossom…
So, I made the most of being able to investigate a huge shopping mall, and got away with only a couple of tiny little purchases to help me through the cold winter. Evening temperatures regularly drop below 20C by now so warm clothes are a necessity.
To balance out yesterday, today was Mountain Bike Day. Daisy Hill again. In a guide book I had spotted a trail called “Nirvana”, which was declared to be “famous”. It neglected to say what it was famous for but since it’s quite close we had a look at it. I got about 10 meters in, pushed over a log, walked through some mud, then looked at this steep drop without any kind of guide rail and said “nope, shan’t”.
Back we went towards the car — a one-hour ride on hilly, muddy tracks is quite enough for me anyway. I suggested a race: I would take the wide track back while less mud-averse people would take the single track that we’d discovered last week. I won! (Yes, ok, single track is harder snd at least an extra km etc.). When we met up again, this vision in mud greeted me with a huge grin. I’m rather glad I didn’t ride that trail today.
Back at the car I swapped my bike for my camera while the Intrepid Mountain Biker set off to achieve Nirvana. Birds were not shy at all.
And if you have ever wondered how muddy it is possible to get riding a mountain bike, this is the answer.
I also had an opportunity to craft a picture for today’s Daily Shoot. Green is not hard to find in a forest.
