The PITS again

 For the first time in many months I managed to join the Porsche 356 and other car desperates for the monthly gathering at the very scruffy Pie in the Sky biker's cafe at Cowan for a lunchtime pie today.

The Pie in the Sky is in a great location-it's good drive to get there- and it is a big site with plenty of bike and car parking and it overlooks national park but it is a dump. The pies are ok and the staff are friendly but that's it. It really could do with a big make over. Still it is an institution and it has a following so there we are.

A few regulars and a few newbies in the cars there today. No interesting vintage bikes but plenty of Ducatis and other late model crotch rockets. And it was a beautiful warm day. Roll on summer.

Photos taken on my newly acquired 'spare' Leica X1-its first outing in my hands.

A very large Siddeley Special

An aluminium bodied sports Bentley special. A staid, upright Bentley was probably sacrificied to make it

A

Vintage Hotchkiss .

It seems like only yesterday

 It's difficult for me to comprehend that a year ago Val and I were celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary in Port Macquarie with our family and afterwards we went on a road trip through New England, New South Wales.

Since then so much has happened and almost all of it bad. Covid-19 has arrived and wrought devastation on the planet. Fortunately through good luck-being an island does help-and very effective action by our federal and state governments Australia has managed the pandemic well. There was a setback in the state of Victoria with a second wave but  by imposing a very harsh lockdown it was effectively bought under control. Yesterday there were zero new locally communicated cases of covid-19 in Australia.

Covid-19 put an end to comprehensive travel plans for the year. I really was looking forward to our roadtrip through southern Spain and also our riverboat trip into darkest north Myanmar.

As well as the covid-19 lockdown Val and I have had the devastating diagnosis of her illness-a very severe shock which has upended our lives. This year we "celebrated" our 51st wedding anniversary last Sunday with her in an acute care ward of Gosford Hospital. What a difference.

At the time of of that road trip in 2020 eastern Australia was in the grip of a long and devastating drought. The tragic bushfires which ravaged vast areas of eastern Australia started in early November and lasted right through to early March. At home in Terrigal a blanket of choking smoke from the enormous Gosper Mountain fire became a daily occurence.  

So 2020 has been a terrible year for us and so many others. Yes, the drought has broken and indeed the rains have been so good that the farmers are looking at the best harvest for at least 15 years but other than this it is bleak, bleak, bleak.

Some photos from that now so distant Australian road trip in November 2019 when we had no idea what horrors lay ahead.

On my walk

For years I took my little Leica X1 on my early morning walk. But then I wanted to walk faster and I decided that I had exhausted the photo ops on my walk so I left the camera at home most of the time.

Recently I have been using my new series iPhone SE to take photos on the early morning walk. The image quality is really impressive but still I am not happy using the phone as a camera. It is a matter of haptics-touch and feel and handling generally. It just does not feel right. I find composing and framing the photo on the camera's screen difficult. Maybe it is a matter of what I am used to over many years. Maybe I am just stuck in a groove but I'll take a proper viewfinder any day over a LCD screen.

Having said that here's a photo I took with the iPhone earlier this week. The bird in the tree is a kookaburra-the Australian laughing bird. It's unusual to see a kookaburra in scrub on the cliff top walk. Usually they are in the gumtrees just a few hundred metres in land.There are dozens in the trees around my house and the kookaburras start their demented laughing in unison at around 4.30am at this time of the year. The reason they get away with it is that they look such a jolly, friendly bird. They are the quintessential Australian icon-along with the kangaroo, the koala and the emu.

They have quite extraordinary eyesight. I have watched a young kookaburra sit on the power lines outside my house and spot a tiny skink in the garden 10 metres away and swoop straight down on it and then devour it.

Velocette at the PITS

Classic Velocette, classic location, classic Bristol in reflection, modern photo.

The rider

The rider. A Harley-Davidson Owner's Group (HOG) rider setting out from Jerry's Biker's Cafe, Kulnura, NSW, Australia.

Leica X1 photo.

 

The little camera that could.

Recently I took my vintage Canon G9 out of the back of the cupboard and armed with a new battery purchased from a Chinese seller on eBay I gave it a little workout including this shot of a huge hibiscus flower in my garden.

 By today's standards the G9 is rather basic with its very small 12mp CCD sensor but it did, and still does, turn out great photos under the right conditions. Its achilles heel is that it does not handle low light well as you have to shoot at ISO 200 orbelow for reasonable quality.

In terms of handling it is compact and easy to operate.The controls and menus are very straightforward and the zoom lens is very sharp. The body is metal and the camera feels solid and very well made. It also has an integrated optical viewfinder. 

There would be no place even for an updated version of the G9 in today's market-smartphones have killed the segment-which is a pity because it really is a very competent little camera and I took some great photos with mine.

The photo was taken at 1/1000th at f4.0 at ISO 80 .

Australian dawn

 Beautiful sunrise on a crisp spring morning at The Haven, Terrigal, Central Coast, NSW, Australia.

 

The yawn

At 20 going on 21 Phoebe reckons she's entitled to sleep all day and most of the night. She wakes up at aound 5.00 pm and today after waking she gave a monster yawn before thinking about dinner.

The best of friends....

 The best of friends...snuggled together in the boot of a hatchback at Jerry's Cafe, Kulnura yesterday. Usually these two roam the forecourt of the cafe checking out all the bikers and other customers. At 8.30 am yesterday things were quiet, after a very hectic weekend, so they took the opportunity to get some rest.

Lorikeet madness

 

Lorikeets are very colourful, small parrots which just love eating grevillea flower pollen. They cannot get enough of it and as soon as spring arrives and the grevilleas flower the lorikeets arrive to feast on them. The lorikeets are around all year but spring has to be their favourite time of year.

They are most active and very noisy at first light and in the evening although some keep feeding all day. They climb in the trees and hang on as the branches swing in the wind. Some get so high on the sugar that they fly off straight into the glass around the pool. There is an ominous bang but miraculously in twelve years I have only found two dead lorikeets on the driveway and one dead lorikeet in the pool. Usually they just dust themselves down and start all over again.

Photo above taken today with a Fuji X-E2 -my special purpose camera-fitted with Fuji's bargain basement XC 50-230mm lens at 230mm. I did a fair bit of post processing on it. The photo was taken from my deck just a few metres away from the tree.

Forget Bali and Fiji.......

 

 

It's a long weekend in the school holidays. The weather is glorious. Clear blue skies and warm but not hot.

In normal times Terrigal would be very busy this weekend. But these are not normal times. Most interstate borders are closed and Australia's international borders are closed. So the hundreds of thousands of New South Wales citizens who usually fly to Bali, Fiji, Phuket or Hawaii for the school holidays are staying at home and the result is an absolute boom for NSW coastal towns such as Terrigal. 

I have never seen anything like the number of people on the beaches at Terrigal and Wamberal this weekend. The traffic in the town is awful and the cafes and shops are full to capacity- the main Terrigal beach looks like Rio. A vacant parking space is harder to find than rocking horse droppings. It is a visitor bonanza. The local traders will be lobbying the state and federal governments to keep the borders closed.

I went with one of my granddaughters to Wambersal Lagoon mid-morning so that she could go body boarding. Usually even at the height of summer there would be a dozen cars in the small car park there and a smattering of people-the sandbank in the photo would be empty. Today there were cars lining the road to the lagoon and the sandbank was packed with people. 

Photo taken with my iPhone. I would have preferred to have taken it with a camera but Leicas and beaches do not mix so it had to be the iPhone again. I have actually slightly dialled back the clarity on the photo in Lightroom as I thought it looked oversharp and harsh.