Going bush

Continuing on from last time, these pictures are from the main track of a bush conservation area about 1.5 kilometres (a mile) from my house.

This is what it basically looks like. I especially like coming here on a hot day because the path is shady and cool. It smells nice, like gumtree and onions (I think the onion smell comes from some kind of wild onion grass). However, right next to this scrap of nature is a golf course.


The air here is full of bird sounds. I brought my camera, hoping to photograph a flock of cockatoos that I’d seen here a few times. Unfortunately, there were no cockatoos when I went walking that day (there were two when I went out today, though!).

I did photograph this little bird. The following two photos come from the same snap. I don’t know which crop I prefer. I like the branches but compositionally, I’m told it’s often good to leave space in the direction that the subject is looking. I explained this to dad and he suggested using the computer to flip the bird around so that it was looking at the branches! Dilemma solved, eh.


Also, the photo isn’t very sharp. I don’t have steady camera hands. My photos often come out a bit fuzzy 🙁


Here’s a tree that caught my eye. You can’t see how big it is. I’d say it were four storeys high, so maybe 25 metres.

This is my favourite part of the walk. I am standing on a bridge over the creek I wrote about three years ago. It has been very dry for years. It used to be that I didn’t see those rocks on the riverbed at all.

Over the weekend, we’ve had thunderstorms and flooding rains. When I visited the creek this morning, it was serenely full. It was a happy sight.

Being full means that this sign by the creek is finally of use. On other days, the sight of the riverbed rocks themselves should be enough to warn even idiots off.

When I snapped that sign, I heard a voice behind me, which said, ‘Do you want me to smile?’

This couple was happy for me to take their photo. The gentleman told me that he had spent hundreds of dollars on a camera some years ago and now it was worthless. While we were talking about photography, a woman walked by with her dogs and the couple said hello and introduced me. It turns out the couple enjoy meeting new dogs.

The next lot of photos will be from the path going from the bush to the park. There are paddocks along the path so I promise there will be horses.

2 comments

  1. mo says:

    Birdie: I prefer the second crop. In the first crop, the bird is almost falling out of the frame. Too bad the foreground is both overexposed and unsharp (but no wonder since your exposure time was 1/25s@150mm).

  2. joanium says:

    1/25s? That’s strange. What was I doing at that shutter speed?

    Ooh… I was on +1.0 exposure bias, aperture priority. I had just taken the photo of the tree (pictures below the birdie). I think I was so keen to catch the birdie that I didn’t have time to change the settings.

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