Archive for the 'General' Category

As seen from Kirribilli

This was posted directly from my Nokia N900 using the Pixelpipe photo sharing service. This note added later using WordPress for N900.

Just bought myself a Nokia N900 mobile computer.

This blog post was written using the MaStory application on the N900.

Works well!

Another walk through Munro Park – this time it was a particularly pretty dragonfly I came across on the walk. He sat still long enough for me to get a couple of good photos of him.

Dragonfly

I had to fly over to Adelaide to take care of some business, so I thought I’d take an early flight to give me a few hours at Adelaide Zoo to get some photos.

Unfortunately it started raining just as I arrived, and got steadily heavier until it was bucketing down at one point – I had to find shelter in the large Rotunda with all the bored school kids and bedraggled teachers.

Adelaide Zoo - avenue of bamboo

My main goal was to get some general photos of the zoo itself and of the various enclosures for discussion on ZooChat – so the fact that it was not ideal conditions for photographing animals wasn’t actually that much of an issue. I was able to get some fairly decent photos of the zoo, even if they are a bit dull and lifeless – at least there wasn’t many people around to get in the way! It was a little awkward taking photos with the DSLR in one hand and an umbrella in the other – but I managed.

Adelaide Zoo - food preparation area

Ever since they built them a few years ago I’ve liked the toilet block / bird aviary – although it is a little disconcerting to have a large Cockatoo staring at you while you are trying to do your business.

Adelaide Zoo - Toilet Block or Bird Aviary ?

With the zoo being fairly quiet (weekday and raining), I was able to take the opportunity to spend some time in the nocturnal house taking photos with long exposure times. I set the camera up on the flat area of the fence around the Bilby enclosure, and then with the wide-angle lens looking across the room I tried a number of different settings (without using the flash) to see what I could capture. The Bilby’s were mostly cooperative – they were too busy eating to hop around – but I didn’t even bother with most of the other animals who were all too active to show up in a long exposure photo. The photo below is one I thought worked quite well from only a half-second exposure at 10mm focal length.

Adelaide Zoo Nocturnal House - 0.5 second exposure

I will be uploading more photos to the Adelaide Zoo Photo Gallery on ZooChat.

Tweets from today

In Murray Bridge visiting my parents

22nd September, 2008 6:59 PM from web

heading up the freeway to Murray Bridge

22nd September, 2008 4:30 PM from web

in Adelaide briefly taking care of some business. Miserable weather :(

22nd September, 2008 1:48 PM from web

Went for a walk yesterday in Lane Cove National Park – a few kilometres west of our place. One of the great things about Sydney is that we have national parks right in the middle of the city. If you can get through the traffic that is – official reports show that traffic congestion on the North Shore is now officially worse on weekends than it is during the week!!

Anyway – we sat and had some lunch before heading off along a track which is part of the Great North Walk (which actually goes as far as Newcastle!). The path winds its way along the river, sometimes heading up along the ridgelines too. We walked for just under two hours in total – we would have walked further, but the sun was getting low and the parks closes at 6pm, so I didn’t want to be rushing back in the dark.

I took the GPS data logger – here is where we went: