Portugal bound

 

Only a month to go before we head off to Portugal and Spain. We are looking forward to it but I do have some reservations. On my previous visits in 2016, 2018 and 2019 we had a rental car and were free agents. This time sadly there is no rental car and the travel will be more structured. I just hope that I find as many photo opportunities as I did previously.

Photo taken early morning in Marvao, Portugal in 2016 on an early morning walk using my Leica X Vario.

Terrigal Ocean Classic Swims

Due to the big seas on Saturday the 1km and 2km Terrigal Classic Ocean Swims scheduled for Saturday morning were moved to Easter Monday morning.

I went down to watch the start of the 1 km swim and hopefully take a few photos showing the atmosphere of the event. It's not an easy event to photograph nowadays as most of the spectators, with their smartphones, are now budding photographers jostling for the best photo positions.

Also previously there were massed starts to both events. Now they have more sophisticated timing gear and start groups of 3 in rapid succession which makes for much less of a spectacle but fairer races.

I used the Q2 43 and came away with the photos below. I tried to get some photos of finishers crossing the finishing line but I'm not happy with them due again to those pesky smartphone snappers crowding me out.

 

More big seas

To our surprise we awoke to huge seas here at Terrigal and all along the local coast. The surfers must have thought it was Xmas, not Easter, and they were out in force from early morning.

For scale see the two people at the lookout on the cliff top on the RH side of the photo.

Photo taken from the top deck of the house at 1.30pm so the waves were still big into the afternoon. I used the Leica SL2, with the Lumix 70-200mm f2.8 lens and the 2x converter, mounted on a monopod.

It's the big competitive Ocean Swim here at Terrigal Beach tomorrow, Saturday, morning. There will need to be a much calmer sea for it to go ahead.

A walk on a beach

 Cloudless, sunny, hot days are not a photographer's friend and this summer we've had a lot of them . Not that I'm really complaining but a change is always welcome so when last Tuesday turned out to be a partly overcast day I picked up my camera and two lenses and drove to nearby Bateau Bay to try my lucky.

I always approach these locations, even if I've been there many times before, full of hope but inevitably come home disappointed without a photo worth keeping.

The renowned American landscape photographer, Ansel Adams is reputed to have said that if you take ten good photos in a year then it's a good year! So maybe my expectations are too high.

This trip I surprised myself by coming home with two keepers.

The first was sheer luck- a shot of a very tame magpie which carried on searching for stuff amongst the grass and seaweed on the fringe of the beach even when I got down on my knees to photograph it.

The photo was taken with my Leica SL2 using the superb APO 50mm Summicron ASPH lens. 

The second photo was a seascape from the edge of the mangroves at one end of the bay. I shot it using the same camera and lens combination as the magpie shot. It was taken with the lens wide open at F2 to keep only the centre clump of mangroves in focus.  

 

Full moon over Adelaide

 

Full moon rising over Adelaide, South Australia, in the evening of 12th March 2025- a very hot day.

Photo taken with Leica Q3 43.

The Big Picture

 

Big sea day last week. Rough seas combined with a king tide led to coastal erosion at many points along the east coast of NSW.

 Photo taken at The Haven, Terrigal, looking south towards Avoca Beach.

Taken with the Leica SL2 and 16-35mm Lumix S Pro lens at 16mm.

Postcards from Kangaroo Island

 The final batch of photos from our recent stay on Kangaroo Island. 

Wineries, beaches, lighthouses, sea caves, remarkable rock formations-there's more to Kangaroo Island than just kangaroos and seals.

 

Photos taken with Leica Q3 43

Big sea day

 Really wild weather over the past few days has generated huge seas along the coast of NSW. Photos taken this morning at Avoca Beach on the Central Coast. Taken with the Leica SL2 using the Lumix S 70-200mm f2.8 lens fitted with a 2x converter.

There were terns flying just above the waves which dived in and caught fish as they were tossed up by the force of the breaking waves. 

A tern can be seen following the wave in the bottom photo and another tern is just visible beside the plume as the wave breaks in the top photo. 

I shot these in colour but the storm gave them a green tinge so I have resorted to converting them to black and white.

Wildlife on Kangaroo Island

 Here is a selection of some of the wildlife photos I took on Kangaroo Island. 

Firstly kangaroos. With an estimated million on the island it’s not difficult to find a roo to photograph. We stayed in a lodge close to the Cape Willoughby Lighthouse on the eastern end of the island. Roos were around the lodge all day and as the island is currently desperately dry they come to drink out of the bowls of water put out for them. Late afternoon roos came to the bushes outside our room to feed and we could watch roos feeding as we ate dinner.



 

 

Also one afternoon a Rosenberg goanna with its distinctive very long tail came out. A nearby roo kept a watchful eye on it but as roos are herbivores the gonna was safe.

Despite the fact that there so many koalas on the island-although thousands sadly died in the 2019 bushfires which swept the island-spotting them is not easy. Koalas don’t move fast! In fact they often don’t move for hours. They eat gumtree leaves- but only leaves from particular species of gumtrees-and the KI koalas are eating those leaves faster than the trees can grow them.

Now gumtree leaves are not very nutritious -or some I am told-so each koala has to consume a lot of leaves every day and then not rush around because they don’t have reserves of energy. All of which explains why koalas do f… all all day!



Because they are usually static and well camouflaged in the bush it’s not so easy to spot them but we did well here.

The appropriately named Seal Bay on the south coast of the island is the home to a very large seal colony. The seals live in the sea, on the beach and in the surrounding dunes. Visitors used to freely wander the beach and surrounding dunes but that was not good for the wellbeing of the seals and particularly the pups which have to wait for 3 days every 6 days for their mothers to return with food after 3 straight days at sea.

Now visitors have to be with a National Park Ranger/Guide, stay in a tight group and can only access a small part of the beach by the boardwalk. Life has definitely improved for the seals and their pups but photographers now need long lenses.
 

Click go the shears

 

I'm back from Adelaide in South Australia and  Kangaroo Island which is off the coast of the South Australian mainland, 75kms south of Adelaide

I'll put up most of the photos from Kangaroo Island over the next two weeks but I'll start with photos of sheep shearing which I shot there.

The photos were taken with my Leica Q3 43 and although they were shot in colour I feel that monochrome better suits the subject although I'm not 100% convinced this was the right call.

Along with an estimated one million kangaroos, eighty thousand koalas and thousands of seals, sealions and birds, Kangaroo Island is home to hundreds of thousands of sheep. Sheep farming, is the major industry on the island followed by tourism.

The sheep are predominantly Merinos bred for their highly prized wool. Eighty percent of the Australian wool clip is exported to China.

The photos show the farmer with one of his working dogs, an Australian Kelpie, mustering sheep and shearing.

 "Click go the shears" is the title of a traditional Australian bush ballad which describes a shearer's work using hand shearing scissors in the days before shearing cutters were electrically driven.

In the photos the shearer is putting on his shearing mocassins which protect the sheep's legs when the shearer stands on them to keep them down during the shearing.

Back problems were, and still can be, the bane of a shear's life but the development of the Back Aid, seen in the photos, significantly reduces but does not totally eliminate, the strain on backs.

The shearer removes the fleece in one piece and an expert or "gun" shearer can shear a sheep in under three minutes. 

The shorn sheep look naked but it is said they are relieved to lose their thick coats as they can hear better, feel lighter and are generally more comfortable.

After the fleeces are shorn they are individually assessed for wool quality and then pressed into a bale in a mechanical press. Details of the contents of the bale are stencilled onto it and then it is ready to be shipped most probably to China.

 

Light and shade

 We are experiencing the far edges of Cyclone Alfred today-very strong winds, driving rains and heavy seas. Not a good day to be out photographing and anyway I'm packing ready to head off to South Australia on Sunday. So this one is from the archives. An overlooked shot from a wonderful trip to Oman in 2018.

Taken in Nizwar, Oman. It was a very hot day and I spotted this man hurryng across the courtyard to get out of the burning sun. I particularly like the shadow of the palm tree on the wall.

The early surfer

 

A lone surfer heading out for the first surf of the day on Terrigal Beach although the surf was almost non existent. I guess he decided that he'd got out of bed really early so he'd give it a try anyway. Nothing ventured nothing gained.

Morning has broken-28th February.

 I woke up very early this morning to a magnificent sunrise. Unfortunately the two cats demanded breakfast before I was able to leave the house so I had missed the best of it by the time I reached the Haven however I did manage this shot looking down onto the rock shelf below the Skillion.    

Although I have owned the Q3 43 for nearly 3 weeks I have only managed to take just a few photos with it as it has been either too hot or raining.

What I have discovered is that the new APO f2 43mm Summicron ASPH lens on the camera is extraordinary. In the photo above on my computer monitor I can clearly see the details of the rock fisherman fishing off the rocks. The same is true of the man walking towards the sea with the green bag.The wristwatch on his left arm is clearly visible. The photo was taken with the lens wide open at f2 and right on the top edge of the photo the padlocks on the fence wire- attached by couples- are visible.

Dawn fisherman

Dawn fisherman, Terrigal Beach

India revisited

 As a follow on from the earlier post of photos from Kerala, India, here are more finds from the photo library from that 2015 trip.

Diving into my extensive photolibrary on Lightroom Classic I am finding many photos which I ignored at the time they were downloaded but which I now feel are worth looking at. Also there are photos which are better the second time around with different cropping or processing treatments.

Part of my problem is that from the time of my retirement in 2008 to Covid, in 2020,  my wife and I travelled so extensively and so frequently that I barely had time to look through the photos taken on a trip before I was off to the next destination.

Photos taken with the Leica X1 and Leica X Vario in Ooty, Tamil Nadu, and Kochi Spice Market, Kerala. 

 

Morning has broken

Sunrise over Terrigal Lagoon