On a beautiful winter morning

 A beautiful winter morning today. By our standards it was cold but there was no wind chill. I was up very early and went over to nearby North Avoca to capture the orange/pink light of the sunrise on the rocks.

Now is the time to say goodbye.

Now is the time to say goodbye to my beautiful 1971 Porsche 911. Yes, after 15 fun years of ownership  I have decided it is time to sell it. From being the enthusiastic owner of two classic Porsches within the space of 18 months soon, hopefully, I won't own any. The 4 car garage is empty apart from the Mini.

The reasons I have decided to sell are straightforward. Firstly from some time I have been suffering from a bad back. Often it is a really bad back and early 911s with sports seats are incompatible with bad backs. Getting in and out of the car is painful.The laid back seating position is painful. The offset pedals do not help and neither does the lack of power steering and the cable operated clutch. Put simply an early 911 is no place for an old man.

Secondly, I tended to drive my Porsches quickly -where conditions permitted, of course. But even the most experienced drivers can have an 'off' and in an early 911 even a small damp patch in the shadows can catch you out. Or more likely on a narrow rural road you could meet head on an enormous suv or ute travelling at high speed and taking up all the road. In a modern car, such as my Mini, even a major accident can be survivable but hitting an object at high speed in an early 911 could well be a very different story. No deformable body structure. No airbags. No ABS. No dynamic stablity control. It could very easily be no driver or at best a badly injured driver. 

Thirdly, owning the 2021 Mini Cooper S has really spoilt me. I love the handling, the better than the Porsche performance, the electronic driver aids. The 7 speed dual clutch automatic gearbox is a joy compared to the very challenging 5 speed manual gearbox in the 911.

Yes, it really is time to say goodbye. It's been a load of fun over many kilometres, so thanks 56600H.

Marvel update

 It's almost a year since I adopted Marvel, my beautiful rescue cat, from the RSPCA. She is now 4 years old and she has been a wonderful companion over the past year. She is delightful, affectionate, well behaved and very pretty. Everyone who meets her loves her.

PoppyX2

 

 

At last a new photo. Whilst visiting family last weekend I hurriedly took this photo of granddaughter, Poppy, with her "natural" hair using my Q2.

I did some post processing on it with Lightroom and I was pleased with the result. It then occured to me that a monochrome version would make a good entry into the 'People' class of the Australian/NZ Monochrome awards-see earlier story.

A quick check confirmed that the entries for the competition closed at midnight on the day I took the photo so I quickly exported the file to my Silver Efex Pro2 software and spent some considerable time finessing it to the result below which I then entered in the competition.

I find that it is best to optimise the colour version of the photo before converting it to monochrome but that may just be an invalid assumption on my part.

Which version do you prefer-colour or monochrome? My personal preference is for the original colour version although I do also like the monochrome version.

 

Oman revisited

 

It's been just four months short of three years since I last stepped onto an aircraft and flew anywhere.  My last flight was from Qatar to Sydney in September 2019 after three glorious weeks driving in Portugal and northern Spain. It is just a distant memory now. So much has happened since and much of it bad and sad-the covid lockdowns,Val's illness and then her death in April of last year.

It has not all been bad and sad news. New friends have entered my life as well as beautiful Marvel, my one of a kind, marmalade rescue cat and I did a restorative road trip soon after Val's death which unexpectedly threw up some good photos.

I have no plans to jump on an aircraft and travel the world anytime soon. Reports of congested airports with chronic delays, sky high fares and hours of mask wearing have extinguished my enthusiasm for venturing outside Australia in the short term. So there will be no new photos of mine from foreign parts for some time yet so I have looked into my archives in search of photos for the blog

Looking back at all the travel Val and I did particularly in recent years one trip to fascinating and friendly Oman in December 2018 stands out as one of the best, if not the best. So I pulled out some of the photos taken on that trip and looked at them with fresh eyes. I have reprocessed four of them using the latest version of Lightroom Classic and they are above. 

All were taken with my Leica Q.

Monochrome awards

 Last year, much to my surprise, a photo of mine of an opal miner taken near Lightning Ridge in NSW was Highly Commended in the annual Australia/New Zealand Mono Awards photography competition for monochrome photos. 

Sadly although the competition has a very generous prize pool the prizes don't stretch down to Highly Commended so all I won was a virtual certificate.

The organisers of the competition have prompted me to enter the awards again this year. One of the conditions of the competition is that the entries have to be taken on or after !st January 2021. In my case that is a major limitation as due to the covid lockdowns and the illness and death of Val I did very little photography last year. However the same road trip in May of last year which produced the Opal Miner shot has yielded three more photos for entry into this year's Awards -two for the people category and one for the places category.

Here they are below.The two people shots were taken with my Leica Q and the beach scene was taken with my iPhone SE 2 and all were converted to monochrome using Silver Efex Pro2.