Thredbo Blues Festival 2023

Thredbo Blues Festival 2022 took place over three days and nights on a weekend at the end of January.

Below are images and links; each band has a JAlbum slideshow link under their images.

Also at the bottom of this post there are links for all bands, top 25 (colour), top 100 (colour) and selected monochromes. (After a skin update, images should appear correctly sized on all screens.)

At the top of each JAlbum page you will see links to each of the 18 years I have covered Thredbo Blues Festival since 2006 (I missed 2018 because I was in Ladakh and 2021 due to Covid). There are also drop down lists for each band for each year. Alternatively, you can view the Thredbo Blues Festivals blog page from a link at the bottom of this post which has links to all those performances. Note that previous years may have smaller sized images, 640×640 from 2006 to 2011 and 1024×1024 from 2012 to 2021.

The bands in this post are ordered according to when I saw the performances in the festival; the order of bands is alphabetical in JAlbum. If you are on a PC and click on any of the images, you will see it larger (2000x2000px). This is the same size as the images in JAlbum, where you can drill down to a selected image and go through one by one or run a slideshow.

Yanya Boston.
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Karen Lee Andrews.

Karen Lee Andrews (20 images).

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Christian Marsh and Rory Ellis.

Rory Ellis (2)
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Foreday Riders.

Ron King.

Foreday Riders (14)
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Mal Eastick.
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Peter Gray.

Mal Eastick (15)

George Rigatos.
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Katherine Vavahea.
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Craig Lyons.

Marvellous Hearts (23)

8-Ball Aitken (15)

Piper Butcher (2)

George Bibicos.
Toni Swain Band (15)

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Mitch King (3)
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Dan Sipple and Shaun Wessell.
Shaun Wessell Duo (3)
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Pete Cornelius (12)
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Nathan Cavaleri Band.
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Nathan Cavaleri.

Nathan Cavalleri (18)

Genevieve Chadwick.
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Mick Malouf.
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Davo Fester.
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Genevieve Chadwick Band.

Genevieve Chadwick (21)

Stewart D’Arietta.

Stewart D’Arrietta (5)

Simon Holmes.

Pete Cornelius 8-Ball Aitken Jam (17)

Divine Devilles.

Divine Devilles (12)

Stewart Wauchop and CJ Raggatt.

CJ Raggatt (3)

Illya Szwec.
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Dan Sullivan.
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Greg Clark.

Tomcat Playground (18)

Murray Cook’s Soul Movers.
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Matt Crawford.
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Crowd at Murray Cook’s Soul Movers.

Murray Cook’s Soul Movers (22)

Dom Turner and the Rural Blues Project.
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Rosscoe Clark.
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Dom Turner.
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John Gauci.

Dom Turner and the Rural Blues Project (20)

Andrea Marr.
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John McNamara.
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Andrew Houston.

MacnaMarr Project (26)

Craig Marshalsey.
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SunBears.
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CC Hall.

SunBears (18)

Christian Young.
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Blues Power.

Blues Power (17)

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This, as usual, was a significant exercise. I took 3,000 images and produced 323 colour images in individual band portfolios, and also 40 monochrome conversions. I used Lightroom to select and catalogue images, including preliminary processing, and mainly processed images in Capture One.

Top 30 (36)

Selected Monochromes (40)

Top 100 (108)

All Thredbo 2023 images (363)

On the Thredbo Blues Festival Page you will find links to images from all Thredbo Festivals I have photographed since 2006 (but then there are links at the top of the JAlbum pages).

There are now over 11,000 images linked to on this Blog for Live Music Festivals (mainly Blues Festivals).

For other images of a particular band I may have taken since 2006, see the Musicians and Bands Page . …

Blues, Brews and BBQs, Tumut 2023

Apr5

Blues, Brews and BBQs 2023 was a one-day Blues Festival at Tumut which is west of Canberra and about a 2.5 hours drive. It was a very friendly and laid-back event with many locals and visitors as well as people from out of town. Here is a selection of images from each of the eight bands. There are also links to JAlbum slideshows for each of the bands, monochromes, top 100 images and top 25.

Click on any image to see it larger (if on a PC at least). Alternatively, run the Top 30 slideshow from the link at the bottom, because these are the same images as those in the post.

The first three bands were locals. First was a local duet, Az N Daz.

target=”_blank” rel=”noopener” Australia, Blues, Blues Brews & BBQs, Blues Festivals, Live Music, Photography, Travel, Tumut
Darren Jaynoy and Aaron Somner.
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Az N Daz images.

Next band was Captain Jack:

Nicole McIntyre..
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Adam Garner.
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Nicole McIntyre’s boots.
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Captain Jack.
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Captain Jack images.

The third band was Velvetsmyle, also with a number of guests, showcasing the talents of local musicians.

Velvetsmyle.
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Clayton Denson.
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Emma Peacock.
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Billy Barnett.
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Laura Rampling and Natasha Proos.
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Velvetsmyle images.

Next came the bands from outside Tumut. First was James Southwell band.

James Southwell Band.
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James Southwell.
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Alec Coulson.
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Next, Roshani:

Roshani.
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Roshani.
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Roshani.
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Owen Campbell Band, and as it gets later, the lighting slowly start to improve:

Owen Campbell Band.
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Owen Campbell.
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Jamal Salem.
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19 Twenty:

John Gwilliam.
. Jeremy Berg.
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Kane Dennelly.
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19 Twenty and Roshani.
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Kane Dennelly.
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Last band, Joe Camilleri and The Black Sorrows:

Joe Camilleri.
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Tony Floyd.
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James Black.
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The Black Sorrows.
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Black Sorrows Crowd.
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Joe Camilleri.
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Claude Carranza.
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The Black Sorrows.
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Selected Monochromes.

Top 30 (these images)

Top 100

All images by band

Some of the people who attended the festival will have seen these images on Facebook. This post also allows them to become available to people who do not use Facebook.

For regular readers of the Blog: I have another Blues Festival to post next (Thredbo). Then I will be able to resume regular posts from North Queensland.

Goulburn Blues Festival 2022

Jan1

Goulburn Blues Festival 2022 took place over three days and nights on a weekend at the end of November. Here is a selection of images, and links at the bottom to more.

Click on any image to see it larger (if on a PC at least). With many it makes a big difference.

This is a free festival and I had not organised in advance to cover it. I had intended to photograph just some of the non-Canberra bands I was less familiar with but I ended up effectively covering the festival. However, although I photographed thirty-two performances, I missed some of the earlier acts including Guitar Case Troubadors, The Honey Sippeers, Matt Ross and Johnny Reynolds Band. This post presents a selection of images, I have not tried to include each performance. However, as it happens the only ones without an image here are Catfish Soup, Key Grip, Piano Wizard, Lying Cheating Bastards (though the boy under the table was during Key Grip).

Paul Leeder with Chris Harland Blues Trio.

Mats Marklund with Boneyard Blondes.
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Don Hopkins.

Isy Cappo Band.

Minnie Marks.

Katherine Vavahea with The Marvellous Hearts.

Craig Lyons with The Marvellous Hearts.

Chris Harland and Liam Macalister Jam.

Thomann King Band.

Lead singer, Killwater.

Sheltering from the rain in front of the band (Key Grip).

Frank Sultana, Ben Wicks and James Southwell with Sultana Southwell Roulette.

Sultana Southwell Roulette in the pouring rain with people dancing under umbrellas.

Owen Campbell Band.

Owen Campbell.

Young bass player. This and next four from Goulburn Club jams.

Ross Buchanan.

Daniel Fernandez.

Frank Sultana, James Southwell, Johnny Tesoriero, Jarrod Cockman and Ben Wicks.

Johnny Tesoriero.

Ben Jansz.

Dave Blanken, DJ Gosper and Ali Penney (Divine Devilles).

Dave Blanken with Divine Devilles.

Frank Sultana.

Davo Fester and Al Britten (PJ O’Brien Band).

Al Britten (PJ O’Brien Band).

Davo Fester PJ O’Brien Band).

PJ O’Brien Band.

Howlin’ Mitch.

CC Hall (Sunbears).

Craig Marshalsey (Sunbears).

Simon Kinny-Lewis, Tony Boyd and Christian Young (Simon Kinny-Lewis Band).

Tony Boyd (Simon Kinny-Lewis Band).

Simon Kinny-Lewis.

Chloe Kay and the Crusade.

Drummer, Chloe Kay and the Crusade.

Chloe Kay Richardson.

The Other Blues Festivals page in this Blog includes an overall link for Goulburn 2022 as well as links for each performance, top 100 images, top 30 images and selected monochromes. (That page also has links for thirteen previous festivals, including five previous Goulburns. There are also other pages for Thredbo, Sydney and Narooma Blues Festivals.)

The festival was six weeks ago but I have just finished processing, albeit not on a fulltime basis. I took 3,000 images and produced 360 colour images in individual band portfolios, and also 30 monochrome conversions. I used Lightroom to organise and select images, including preliminary processing, and processed images in Capture One.

(There are over 10,000 images linked to on this Blog for Live Music Festivals (mainly Blues Festivals) and 13,500 for all live music (I still have to add links for about 750 images from last year which I shall do soon). For images of a particular band I may have taken since 2006, see the Musicians and Bands Page .)

Thredbo Blues Festival 2022

Mar13

Thredbo Blues Festival 2022 took place over three days and nights on a weekend at the end of January. Here is a selection of images, and links at the bottom to more….

Click on any image to see it larger (if on a PC at least).

Darren Jack.

Fran Liddle (Big Mama and the Hanged Man).

Genevieve Chadwick (Genevieve Chadwick Trio).

Ron King (Foreday Riders).

Lloyd Spiegel.

CJ Raggatt, wife, Brian O’Kelly, listening to Lloyd Speigel in the rain.

Wes Harder (Kate Lush Band and Darren Jack Band).

Kate Lush

Steve Edmonds (Kate Lush Band and Steve Edmonds Trio).

Simon Kinny-Lewis.

Simon Kinny-Lewis Band.

Jeremy Berg and Kane Denelly, 19 Twenty.

George Rigatos, Michelle Van der Meer, Rosscoe Clark, Mike Rix and Alison Penney, Michelle Van Der Meer and the Midnight Ramblers.

Marty Ferugia and Mike Raper, Ray Beadle & The Hi Tones.

Ray Beadle & The Hi Tones.

Rory Ellis.

Adam Lang, Steve Edmonds Band.

Tony Boyd, Kate Lush Band.

Craig Lyons and John Morris, Blues Preachers.

Robert Susz, Continental Blues Party.

Mike Elrington.

CJ Raggatt, James Hauptman and John Tweed, C J Raggatt Band.

Fiona Boyes.

Phil Jenkins, Fiona Boyes Band.

CC Hall, The Sun Bears.

Dylan Harding, The Sun Bears.
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This, as usual, was a significant exercise. I took 3,000 images and produced 400 colour images in individual band portfolios, and also 100 monochrome conversions. I used Lightroom to select and catalogue images, including preliminary processing, and processed images in Capture One.

There are many more images. On the Thredbo Blues Festival Page you will find links to images from the 2022 Festival, as well as thirteen previous festivals . These are mainly colour images. Links for 2020 include top 100 images, top 30 images, selected monochromes and the 23 performers or bands.

Alternatively, there is also a direct overall link to all Thredbo 2022 images in JAlbum (with overview images and images by band organised by folder).

There are now over 10,000 images linked to on this Blog for Live Music Festivals (mainly Blues Festivals).

For other images of a particular band I may have taken since 2006, see the Musicians and Bands Page …

Next post will be on Thira (Santorini).

Out of the Blues

Jan27

Images from a small exhibition (of A3+ prints in an Album) prepared for Thredbo Blues Festival (which I’m about to attend as Official Photographer).

Next post was to have been the Agora in Athens and that will happen in one to three weeks…..

(Click on any image to see it in a larger size, if you are on a PC or tablet at least.)

Dutch Tilders

Rose Cottage, Canberra 2008.

Pearl Noire

National Press Club, September 2010.

Michael Hardy

Canberra Blues Society Christmas Party 2012,

Best Image, Australian Photographic Society Interstate Comp 2013.

Ray Beadle

Thredbo Blues Festival 2011.

Chris Wilson

Narooma Blues Festival 2009.

Ian Moss

Sydney Blues Festival 2012.

Darren Jack

Thredbo Blues Festival 2012.

Genevieve Chadwick

Sydney Blues Festival 2012.

Rory Ellis

Thredbo Blues Festival 2013.

Pat Powell and Continental Robert Susz

Keller Jam, Thredbo Blues Festival 2013.

Vito Portolesi

Thredbo Blues Festival 2013.

Rick Estrin

Narooma Blues Festival 2014.

Glen Cardier

Thredbo Blues Festival 2016.

Simon Kinny-Lewis

Keller Jam, Thredbo Blues Festival 2013.

Tony Boyd (Kate Lush Band)

Thredbo Blues Festival 2017.

Kate Lush

Thredbo Blues Festival 2017.

Michelle Van der Meer

Sydney Blues Festival 2016.

Turner Brown Band

Blues on Broadbeach 2017.

Tomcat Playground

Sydney Blues Festival 2016.

Lloyd Spiegel

Sydney in Winter Blues Festival 2017.

Liza Ohlback

Thredbo Blues Festival 2016.

Rosscoe Clark

Sydney Blues and Roots Festival 2017.

Nick Charles and Fiona Boyes

Keller Bar, Harmonie German Club, Canberra 2012.

Foreday Riders

Sydney Blues Festival 2017.

George Washingmachine, Phil and Trudy Edgeley

Thredbo Blues Festival 2016.

Harry Brus

Thredbo Blues Festival 2019.

Dillion James (on keyboards) and 8 Ball Aitken

Thredbo Blues Festival 2020.

Leesa Gentz (and Julz Parker), Hussy Hicks

Thredbo Blues Festival 2019.

Sun Bears

Austrian Club, Canberra 2021.

John Gwilliam, 19 Twenty

Red White Amber and Blues Festival, Canberra 2019.

Kane Denelly, 19 Twenty in Schuss Bar

Thredbo Blues Festival 2020.

Michael David, Franchesca Appolis and Evelyn Duprai

Dancing in the Shadows

Thredbo Blues Festival 2019.

George Rigatos

Thredbo Blues Festival 2020.

Steve Edmonds

Red White Amber and Blues Festival, Canberra 2019.

Claude Hay

Thredbo Blues Festival 2016.

Ali Penney

Canberra Blues Society Christmas Party 2021.

Locked Down in Canberra (Floriade)

Oct14

28 September to 9 October 2021, Canberra, ACT.

Click on any image to see it larger (if you’re on a PC at least).

While in lockdown we are still allowed out to visit open places in our immediate area. Usually I’ve just been going for walks in the reserve out the back but I have also made some visits to Floriade. This is an annual flower festival in Canberra. Usually it is jam-packed with tourists and visitors from other Australian states but because of lockdown it was not publicised and no-one can come into Canberra from outside. Usually I don’t attend because of the crowds and because other than in small very occasional doses I find it all a bit twee, but it does have some interesting potential for photographs.

Australia, Canberra, Floriade, Flowers, Focus stacking, Landscape, Macro, Nature, Photography, Travel, Wildlife

I visited Floriade three times. The first time I was interested in trying focus stacking, taking lots of images and assembling them later to get arrays of all the flowers with all of them in focus.

I found it didn’t work as well as I was expecting. We don’t see detailed arrays in perfect focus like that and I found that the detail was overwhelming the composition. This first image is cropped in considerably for that reason.

I was using a Fujifilm X-E4 (for which you can specify start and end focus points for photo stacked images) and an 80mm f2.8 macro (and processing in Zerene Stacker) though as it turned out, most of the images didn’t really need a macro lens.

In the original version of this image, there were too many flowers in focus for the eye to know where to rest. I had to crop the image in considerably and also reprocess it so that fewer flowers were in focus.

This isn’t cropped in, it is as composed but the wind was blowing around so that the flowers were moving with respect to each other. The camera took around 150 images but there was no way I could use all those. So I selected 12 and combined those for essential detail, leaving the background out of focus.

This image didn’t require cropping and isn’t really part of Floriade. These are flowers on reeds growing on a small swampy island and I got down low to take them against the light.

This image is also not cropped, and works OK as a focus stack, with varying layers of white, green, red and purple.

Most of the images from this series I ended up discarding though.

The second time I visited I had a very different approach. I used a long telephoto with a very fast lens to get a flower or part of a flower in detail, with most everything else completely out of focus.

(A fast lens is one that opens very wide at maximum aperture and lets in lots of light with a small depth of field. To be precise, I used a Nikon D850 and 300mm f2.8 lens with a 1.4x teleconverter, all taking at maximum aperture of f4. The Fuji equivalent would be a 200mm f2 + 1.4x TC, but I do not have that lens.)

Using a long lens with a shallow depth of field like this brings out subject isolation and for the most part worked much better than trying to get everything in focus.

There were also some ducklings in the park.

The third time I visited I had in mind a variation of the approach. I still used the same long telephoto and this time I focus stacked, but only a small number of images. The images could be dramatic with a single shot but only part of a flower might be in focus. I wanted to see how it would work with a bit more depth of field to get the whole flower in focus. (Starting with the image above)

This worked well but there was too much wind on this day (it doesn’t take much when focus stacking) so I had to be patient and wait for lulls..

Locked Down in Canberra (Macro Landscapes in the Rain)

Oct7

4 September to 5 October 2021, Canberra, ACT

Small worlds in rain.

(Acacia in bloom).

I live backing onto a nature reserve. The first five images are on the path at the back of the houses, no more than fifty yards or so from the back gate.

I decided to get some practice going out and shooting in heavy rain. Some places you travel to you may well encounter it and not want to waste too much time sitting around. I found it has interesting potential.

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Almost all the rest are further out in the bush, no longer in heavy rain, and within about twenty minutes’ walk if I’m not stopping to take photographs.

There’s no real need to describe most of these images (though feel free to ask questions). I’ll add notes on how I took them at the end.

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As you may have noticed at the top, they were taken over a period of about a month.

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t. .

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s. .

These two were at a different location, at the Jerrabombera Wetlands.

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These are on a young eucalypt just outside the back gate. They look like caterpillars but they are actually spitfire bugs or sawfly larvae and are harmless to people and animals. Sawflies are a kind of stingless wasp. They are closest to the ancestral form of all hymenopterans (ants, wasps, bees and sawflies) and survive as fossils from the Jurassic.

On the back path by the fence again.

Back in the bush.

Though I didn’t encounter the heavy rain again, many of these images are taken during or after lighter rain, which brings out colours and changes the feeling.

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There are thirty-seven images here and only five were taken as a single image (marked with an “s” below them). The rest were focus stacked. Macro images have a very small depth of field, but to increase that you can take images at slightly different points of focus. Then you need to combine them later in post-production using Photoshop or a dedicated program such as Zerene Stacker or Helicon Focus. That’s focus stacking.

Focus stacking doesn’t require a macro lens or subject. With a wide angle lens in a landscape you may not need many exposures. At the extreme, using a 4mm circular fisheye lens, it required just two exposures to be in focus from around three inches to infinity (that’s the Pimilea Physodes image in this earlier post). Conversely, macro depth of field is very small and I took as many as 600 exposures for some images in this post.

Anyone can focus stack, provided you have appropriate software to combine the images. It’s good to stop down to f11 or so (to reduce the number of exposures) and useful to use manual focus, preferably with focus peak highlighting if you have it.

At the most basic level, you have the camera on a tripod, take separate exposures and carefully adjust the focus for each shot. Alternatively, you can set the shutter going on fast burst and slowly move the focus through your desired range. In both cases you need to be careful not to leave focus holes where you moved the focus too much between exposures.

It’s easier if your camera automates the process. I have Nikon D850, Fujifilm X-T2 and Fujifilm X-E4 cameras that do that. They all operate a bit differently. The D850 and the X-T2 fire away from a starting focus point for a set number of exposures. You also have to set the delay between exposures (usually 0) and the focus adjustment between exposures (usually a middling value in the range).

With the D850, when you finish a burst, the focus stays on the last exposure so if you haven’t specified enough frames, you just set it going again for the rest. With the X-T2, it goes back to initial focus so if you didn’t specify enough frames, you need to increase the number and start again. But it does make it easier to make a panorama in the same focus range. Three of the images above were also panoramas, combining two or three focus stacks.

The X-E4 can operate like the X-T2 but it also has an Auto option where you can specify the start and end points, so you don’t end up shooting lots of autofocus frames.

In all cases, it is better to start a little before what you see as the initial focus point because you can easily miss what that really is. When taking macro focus stacks, you need to carefully look through at different points of focus before taking the shot and even then it is easy to miss debris and extraneous elements that can disturb your composition.

It’s not necessary to use a tripod, though it definitely helps. The second acacia image, that I have marked with a “t” was hand held (with a long telephoto lens). There was some wind too and I was impressed how well Zerene Stacker dealt with that. It did have a clean background against the tree though. It would not have worked had there been other plants also blowing around further back. The previous three images (from the previous day) may also have been hand-held.

The six images at the back of the houses were all taken with the D850 and a Sigma 180mm macro lens. All the others were taken with Fuji, mainly the X-E4. Most of those were taken with the 80mm macro (sometimes with 1.4x teleconverter) and I also used 8-16mm, 14mm and 100-400mm lenses.

This post is the second of a short series of images from Lockdown in Canberra. The previous one is here, two posts back. The next one is (insert link when available). They are interspersed with Uzbek monochrome posts.

Locked Down in Canberra (Wildlife)

Sep30

24 August to 24 September 2021, Canberra, ACT

Currently we are in lockdown in Canberra with small levels of COVID at large while Victoria and NSW are also in lockdown with much larger COVID levels. Hospitals and ambulance services in NSW and Victoria are already over capacity. Current caseload indicates this will get worse and opening up prematurely for political reasons rather than health advice will not help. Levels are much higher in NSW and Victoria probably due to flouting of the restrictions there including demonstrations and football final celebrations. We are in this situation primarily due to the failure of the Federal Government to obtain timely vaccination supplies, set up quarantine centres and financially support the more vulnerable in the population (whereas large businesses are not required to repay hundreds of millions of dollars of excess payments). Also because the NSW failed to lock down at the first Deltas case and instead waited 10 days.

The one hopeful factor is that vaccination is rapidly increasing. Fully vaccinated people can still get COVID but they are less infectious, far less likely to have to go to hospital and then less likely to get long COVID. In the ACT as of yesterday, we have 89.2% receiving the first dose and 60.9% fully vaccinated.

So in the meanwhile, as I said, we are in lockdown. We mainly stay at home and currently we can leave to exercise for two hours a day in our local area. This is slowly easing starting from the end of the week. I am lucky to live at the edge of a nature reserve so I have been going out and photographing on many days. Here are a selection of wildlife images from that.

I will continue making such posts midweek during lockdown though it may not be every week.

Eastern grey kangaroos.

Grey fantail.

Eastern grey kangaroo.

Eastern grey kangaroos.

Australian Magpie.

Eastern grey kangaroo.

Sulphur-crested Cockatoos.

Little Corella (rare in Canberra).

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Common Bronzewing (though not common for me).

Female Blue Wren.

Pied Currawang.

Chough.

Australian Wood Ducks

An Australian Wood Duck performing for me.

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Kookaburras.

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Crimson Rosellas.

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Australian Wood Ducks.

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Cunningham’s Skinks.

Galah.

Peewee or Magpie-Lark.

Eastern Rosellas courting…

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Galahs pairing up…

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This post is the first of a short series of images from Lockdown in Canberra. The next one is here, two posts on. They are interspersed with Uzbek monochrome posts.

Lockdown is for the Birds

Aug29

Brisbane, Queensland, 1 to 6 August 2021.

(Click on any image to see it in a larger size.).
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Butcher Bird.

At the end of the last post, we had stopped off in Brisbane for a couple of days en route to a photographic tour in North Queensland, when our progress was arrested by a sudden seven-day lockdown. So we spent the next seven days with our friends Jim and Milena in their new home, and with the birds that either visited or lived there.

The same Butcher Bird from the verandah (also then next two images).

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Back inside, with Percy and Polly (Rainbow Lorikeets) and Milena. One of the lorikeets is interested in learning how to use the coffee machine.

The other, not so much.

On the verandah again, two Kookaburras.

Juvenile Magpie soaring up for food. this one has a damaged foot.

Juvenile Magpie on the rail (the adults are black rather than grey).

The Australian Magpie is not related to the Eurasian Magpie. It is related to the Butcherbird, though.

Kookaburra.

Though we were in a city, we were able to go for a brief walk in a forest nearby.

Inside with the lorikeets again.

They are very fast inside the house and challenging to photograph.

Ironically, I had brought a Nikon D850 and 300mm f2.8 lens (plus teleconverters), specifically for photographing birds in flight, mainly from various bird hides I expected to encounter. I did not anticipate the my BIF photography would be indoors.

These indoor images were all taken with a Fujifilm X-E4 and a 27mm f2.8 lens (40mm full frame equivalent), heavily croppped. I couldn’t predict when and where they were going to fly I needed loose compositions. They are all on 1/2,000 sec because the lorikeets are very quick and light levels were quite low so they are all on high ISOs, more that two thirds on 6400 or 12,800. As well as that, this was a new camera and when I had set up Custom Quick Menus, I hadn’t realised that as well as the values on the Quick Menus, there were also many other values I needed to set or they would revert to the original camera defaults. This meant I was shooting JPEG instead of RAW so many of the images are lacking highlight or shadow detail.

This might represent an interesting lorikeet decal on the splashback except that it was a bit too transient for full appreciation at the time.

Lorikeet and Jools.

Percy and Polly powering past.

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Also a Budgie, even more elusive on the wing.

… and here playing hide-and-seek.

Back on the balcony, an adult Magpie in midair leaping for food, plus a Butcher Bird.

… Coming in to land ….

Magpie pair.

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Again, a lorikeet as an interior decoration….

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Jim with Percy and Polly.

It was difficult to find lockdown information at this time as the Queensland Government told people not to ring them and if you did, you could wait for a long time and then drop out. Eventually, we worked out that we were free to fly back to the ACT, even while the lockdown continued in Brisbane. Jools did so first, I did so after receiving an email from the ACT Government advising against further travel.

Now Queensland is out of lockdown and we are in lockdown in Canberra. The main problem is New South Wales, which failed to lockdown for ten days after their first case and is now spiralling out of control with over a thousand cases per day. (That won’t sound high if you live in Montenegro, Malaysia or Miami but is the highest we have seen in Australasia). (The other problem is the low vaccination rate, due to the incompetence of the Federal Government). Fortunately it doesn’t seem too bad in the ACT and we may be out of lockdown in a couple of weeks, though the situation remains precarious.

At the water’s edge

Aug15

Brisbane, Queensland, 31 July 2021.

(Click on any image to see it in a larger size.).
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We are on our second day in Brisbane, staying with friends, en route to Northern Queensland, or so we thought.

Though inside Brisbane, we are on a scenic drive that goes in part through a national park, and we are looking down some distance at a house on farmland. It appears to be the mansion of a drug baron. Perhaps a nineteenth century drug baron. Probably opium, in that case.

Near the road, we noticed this compact granny flat. Specially adapted for natural air conditioning.

And in the distance there are these massive ancient megaliths. Some of them may be more than a hundred feet high. How they carried the stones there is a mystery.

It’s not fire season yet so this was presumably burning off. These days severe bush fires can occur even in winter though.

We proceeded on to Wynnum, where we visited a cafe and then wandered out onto the pier. Beside the pier, this I believe is a gazebo martin (though usually known as a tree martin). I tried to get them in flight as a test of camera settings for that purpose but they are very fast and I did not succeed.

Wynnum pier. The martins were building a nest in the roof of the right-hand gazebo.

Next we visited the nearby East Coast Marina and I photographed some of the yachts sailing around and in or out of the marina, from the end of a pier.

Also, a couple of dragon boats. Going out…

…then coming back in.

Small yacht returning to the marina.

Two launches and a yacht coming out.

The red sign at the left is not blank on purpose for the benefit of people who cannot read, rather it is a marker for the dredged channel. The water can be otherwise quite shallow around here.

A launch and a windsurfer exploring the possibility of flight.

I think the same windsurfer.

A small flotilla of launches coming in on the channel.

You can see the channel marker in the mid background (in itself an indication the water is not as deep as it may seem).

There was a parasurfer there as well.

We are now around behind the marina and a paddle-boarder is proceeding out. He may not require as large a mooring as those catamarans.

The boat at front in the middle is an old pearling lugger with a Maori name, which may indicate it was used by Maori divers.

We are now a bit further south at Cleveland Point. There are a number of cormorants on this tree.

With a slightly different angle, I am now shooting into the sun. It is still a colour image but the extreme contrast has wiped out the colour.

This is the old Cleveland Point Lighthouse, no longer in use. It has an unusual design and was built in 1865. It is a State lighthouse for local navigation so was not amongst the Commonwealth lighthouses I photographed in 1987 (Lighthouses tab, at top of page).

Half an hour after I took this photo, Brisbane went into a sudden COVID lockdown for at least seven days. We worked that out later when we drove past a pub that had no patrons. No flight for us to North Queensland early morning the day after next.

Fortunately, we were able to stay with our friends for the duration. The lockdown did end after seven days but then there was a North Queensland lockdown for another three days. That also ended after the three days and I would have waited and kept on going but I received a letter from the ACT (Australian Capital Territory) Government advising against further travel. The problem was New South Wales where COVID was out of control by Australian standards because the NSW Government waited for 10 days before locking down. Had I kept going I risked an ACT lockdown and either having difficulty returning or returning to 14-day hotel quarantine (as opposed to the much more benign home quarantine).

So after five days, I abandoned the North Queensland trip and returned to Canberra.

Meanwhile, we stopped for the sunset at a beach a bit further south near Victoria Point.

… as the light slowly receded.

MacLeay Island in the background and South Stradbroke Island beyond that.

. .

An obliging pelican swam up and posed for me.

The light was getting very low and although I was using a lens with good image stabilisation, that does not compensate for subject movement and I underestimated what shutter speed I needed so the pelican in this image is not actually in focus. (I decided to show it anyway because of the feel and the colour).

A last image in the gathering doom….

Then when we got back home, I went to change lenses on my cameras for more compact storage and discovered I was missing a lens – actually the new lens from my recent post on Setting Up the X-E4. It had fallen out of my bag.

Clearly it wouldn’t be there the next morning so notwithstanding the lockdown, I went back to try to find it. I thought it had probably fallen out of the bag when I bent down to take a photo using a small post as support.

When we got back to where we had been, I immediately saw it on the road where the car had been parked. It had fallen out when I got the bag out of the car, about eighteen inches to two feet. Fortunately I hadn’t run over it. It was unmarked, had no apparent ill effects and still worked fine including autofocus. (Phew!)

Murray Foote

Tag Archives: Australia

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