Water Dragon in Profile

I never tire of photographing the water dragons. This was a pretty big one that was on the sidewalk at Roma Street Parklands. He was close to 3 feet long and let me sit down beside him and take his picture with the lens only a couple of feet away. Click on him to enlarge so that you can see the detail better. I am not sure why he is looking at my hand like that but you can see him salivating. This is a low resolution picture made for web viewing. The high resolution one

is even better.

V = 10,753

Great Egret with Fish

There were lots of birds in Tasmania and I took quite a few pictures of this egret. In this shot he has just caught his dinner. He flew about 10 feet, hardly landed, and then quickly caught the fish with his wings still open.

I think I have labeled most of the pictures correctly but may have missed a few. If you ever find one not identified correctly, be sure and let me know...

Tasmanian Coastline

Tasmania is quite wild in places. We didn't get into the wild places really - pretty much stuck to the trails. There is a very nice local scene, although maybe not quite as nice as New Zealand. Definititely worth a trip though...

There are more scenic pictures and bird pictures in the albums I have posted.

Beware of Falling Rocks

Tasmania is very scenic, but beware of falling rocks.

Less than Truthful

Everbody knows that photographs can be altered such that they don't reflect reality. Actually, no photograph really reflects reality. Think about it - it is a technically limited two dimensional recording of a 3 dimensional reality. I would digress into Heisenberg's Uncertainy Theorem and how nothing can really be recorded accurately but that probably would be over the top. Well, if you insist, you can read about it here.

But back to today's topic. The second photograph is derived from the first - double click each picture and look them over carefully. The original isn't a particularly good rendition of the scene as I saw it to begin with. What interested me at the time were the beautiful clouds and the panorama. I didn't have a conventional lens that would take in all of what I was seeing so I used the fisheye. This fisheye records 180 degrees corner to corner and distorts the heck out of everything by definition so we know right off it isn't going to be an accurate rendition.

The original is pretty poor. In addition to the fact that I had the camera at a tilt, the photo is boring, has no focus point, and the water is ugly. So, to make it more like what I wanted, I ran it through a rectilinear filter to get rid of the fisheye, straightened it, and then played with the colors until I liked the clouds and shoreline. Then I made a copy of the upper half and flipped it to make the mirrored scene on the river. I filtered it some more to make it look more like a reflection and then cropped it to make a panorama.

Actually, my "improvement" looks a bit fake and post card like but it is more interesting than the original. I don't do this sort of thing often but it is kind of fun every once in a while...

Story Bridge from New Farm

There are lots of pretty views along the river. Believe it or not, this is a fairly "straight" shot from the camera in that I haven't altered it much. It was taken just after sunset, with the sun setting about in the middle of the photograph.

St Patrick's Day Parade

This steam engine was at the end of the parade on Saturday.

Maritime Museum

There is a maritime museum just down at the bottom of the hill where the footbridge goes across the river built around an old dry dock. This Lighthouse Ship is stored there and you can see it from the bridge. Like I said, it is just down the hill. One of these days I need to go through it. Can't believe I haven't done it yet...

Batty Boat Tour

Last weekend we took the "Batty Boat Tour" up the Brisbane River to Indooripilly. There is a mud island there where the bats congregate and sleep in the mangrove trees close to the river. They number in the thousands and I took quite a few pictures but most didn't turn out so great because it was near dusk.