The School down the Street

This is the school at the bottom of the hill from where we live. I stopped and took the picture in early morning light with my little camera on the way to work. Unfortunately there are a lot of light poles and wires in the way of this church so I cheated and took them out with digital editing software. Click on the photo to blow it up and look at the pole - no wires.

I try to take pictures so I don't have to edit them. It takes time and I am lazy so mostly I just crop and align them and let it go at that. At times I will adjust perspective on pictures with straight lines at strange angles. I had to do this on the Crazy Clark photograph below.

Take a careful look at the picture with the lady and the dog below. Look at their shadows and then the people in the background. Did you notice the shadows were missing when I first posted the picture? I thought they were distracting on the original picture and took them out. It is fairly easy to do this on something like grass.

I always reduce the size of everything I post so they load faster on the blog. If you really like one of the pictures and want to print it just let me know and I'll send you the full size file...

Salt and Pepper

I noticed these salt and pepper shakers on the table when we were eating out the other day. They were sitting in front of a candle and my camera was pointed towards them. I pushed the button without even looking through the view finder and this is what came out...

Fossils

This fossil is embedded below the cliffs (they call them bluffs back in Arkansas) at Kangaroo Point. Click on the picture and you can see it isn't what it might first appear to be.

Brisbane is becoming more artsy than it was a few years back. Queensland was considered a backwater but now it is growing faster than any other place in Australia. I don't know if that is a good thing but it is a nice place and you can't hardly keep people away from nice places...

V = 8967

Australian Outback

This week I'm posting some photographs from the Australian Outback. Actually, it didn't seem that remote... It is more like a rural area, and is 240 km West and somewhat North of Brisbane. The location is Jimbour House where David had his Australian debut with the Brisbane Philharmonic Orchestra. Look behind Yebisu for a picture of Dave and opera singer Deborah Humble singing Carmen. The road heads out the back of Jimbour house. I was tempted to do a walkabout...

Outback Cactus Tree

You do see a lot of cactus out here. This one is very unusual. It is dry but there are more trees here in Southern Queensland than in West Texas. Australia is HUGE. In the Northern part of the state there is rain forest.

Outback Watering Hole

This is a man made stock pond just in back of the house. There is a small creek with a little standing water, but other than that, very dry...

Outback Tree

The trees, plants, and animals here have to be pretty resilient. I really liked the way the bark was scaling off this tree. It is winter and the leaves are scant, but I doubt this one is particularly leafy even in the best of times. The sky can have such beautiful deep colors at times and there always seems to be an intense sun.

Aussie Watering Hole

In Brisbane, there are lots of sidewalk cafe / bars - everybody likes to be outside. This one is in the middle of Queen Street (it is a pedestrian street now) and features television so that you can watch sports - another favorite Aussie activity.

They love coffee here but the closest thing to American coffee is espresso with heated milk - really a latte - but they call it a "flat white" since it doesn't have foam like a cappucino. There are lots of beers served - note that this one sports exotic Michelob as well as Cooper's Pale Ale.

There is something kind of neat about this picture that I didn't notice until I got home and downloaded it. Click on the picture and blow it up to full size then read the red poster at the bottom of the picture just to the right of the pastry counter. It is an advertisement for a soccer game to be played between Qatar and Japan that they will televise in this Australian bar. The world is a small place...

Crazy Clark's

This is Crazy Clark's Discount Variety Store in the basement of the Big W building on Queen's Street in Brisbane. Actually, I like Big W better. Big W is the discount section of Woolworths. It is a little higher quality than Crazy Clark's but doesn't suffer from the high prices you see at fancy name brand places like J C Penny or Sears. My kind of place...

Butterfly and Lantana

OK - I am back to taking some nature photographs again. This butterfly was checking out a lantana in bloom on Mt. Gravatt. Lt. George Gravatt was commandant of the penal colony here in 1839. Today there is a radio tower up on the summit and you have a view back towards Brisbane. There is also a nature park where I photographed this butterfly and the lorakeet below.

For those interested, the butterfly was about a meter away when I took the picture. Click on the picture so you can see it larger (but much lower resolution than the actual picture since I have reduced the size for faster internet transfer). I really like the texture in the leaves and note the way the veins in the butterfly wings match the color of the flower beneath. I took some other pictures of this same scene and each one shows a little different detail of the insect with it wings up or down, above or below the body. Neat...

Lorakeet

This lorakeet was in a tree about 30 meters away. I took the picture with my Nikon D200 with the tele zoomed out to 250 mm - equivalent to 400mm on a 35 mm camera. The picture has been cropped but that is all. I was pretty surprised it came out this sharp since the camera was hand held.

Lorakeets are parrot like birds that are sized in between parakeets and parrots. There were two of them in this tree sitting fairly close together but I couldn't get a good shot of both of them together.

Woman and Dog

This woman and her dog were enjoying the sunshine at the Scottish Festival on South Bank just down the river from the apartment. Scotties have a well deserved reputation for good temperament. I can't imagine too many other dogs happily wearing this outfit and a funny little furry hat. They weren't alone though...