sunday selections: hunting the fagus

Today’s post is a Sunday Selections post for River, which I haven't participated in for ages.
 

One thing that wasn’t on my 100 things to do in 2013 list but should have been because it’s something I’d wanted to do for ages, and that is to go and see the fagus in autumn. 

 

Fagus, for the unaware, is also known as deciduous beech (or if you want to be scientific, Nothofagus gunnii) and is the only winter-deciduous tree in Australia. The only place it grows is Tasmania, mostly in remote highlands areas above 800 metres.

Every year around this time I see spectacular pictures that people have taken of the turning of the fagus, as the leaves go through the autumnal colour change. And every time I think I should go up and have a look, and it never seems to be the right time, and I miss out, thinking I’ll do it the next year. And by the time spring and summer have hit, I’ve forgotten all about it (which is why it wasn’t on the list).

This year it was different. I started seeing posts about people’s trips to Mt Field a couple of weeks ago, when the colours started changing and decided that this was the year I was going to go. 

So we blocked out the day and headed off to Mt Field. We had a vague idea of where to start looking and thought that bright yellow and orange leaves should stand out pretty well – which indeed they did.

Our first stop was at the boulder field, where there is a short walk amongst the rocks, and a few fagus trees growing nearby. These had only just started to turn yellow, so we hoped we hadn’t come too early. 

Oh yes, there was also snow. It’s pretty cold up there at the moment.

We drove a bit further up to Lake Fenton, which is in Hobart’s drinking water catchment. There’s some spectacular trees around the lake, including the beautiful snow gums that we saw last time we were there. 

There’s also fagus! The trees here were more advanced in colour than the ones lower down and we weren’t the only people taking photos. The main problem I had was trying to take photos of some delicate little leaves that were constantly moving in the wind. Not an easy task. But I got a couple of photos I was happy with, so it was worth the trip.

 Apparently there is another area in the park where the fagus grows; this is the Tarn Shelf, which is higher up in the park and involves a two-three hour walk. Not really an option with Juniordwarf in tow (based on previous experience of longer walks), but perhaps that can go on next year's 100 things list.

Week in review

So I’m not doing a photo and a post a day, but I still need to keep track of what’s been happening so that I can keep up to date with my 2012 Project Life album and don’t get five months behind like I did in 2011. The main point of me doing that project is so I can remember what all the photos I take are of, and why I took them.

Having said that, one thing I want to do this year is put the camera away sometimes. I think know there have been times when I’ve been so focused on taking the perfect photo of something that I’ve missed out on fully experiencing the moment at the time.

That seems a little ridiculous – if the moment is that fantastic it will live on in my memory without a photo (or at least without the perfect photo, and certainly without 10 or 20 photos), and what point is the photo if I didn’t really experience the event?*

So . . . I need to give myself permission to not capture everything and to not feel guilty about not doing it. I don’t need a picture of every little thing Juniordwarf does, I don’t need to record everything I do. I need to do it.

The photo a day concept is great, and it provides a time capsule of what my life was like over a relatively short time, which I think will be cool to look back on in years to come. But it is incredibly time consuming – even with the simple approach in Project Life – and I don’t want to spend my whole life catching up on recording things, rather than actually doing things.

One of my friends suggested a weekly approach, rather than a daily approach, might work well for this year.

I’m going to give that a go and just do one post with highlights of the week. That doesn’t mean I won’t post at other times during the week on other things, like Project Life or my struggle to beat my demons (because we all know that you love reading that stuff), but for the stuff that caught my eye during the week, I’m going to try and stick to one post.

So, here’s a selection of photos for the week:

(Monday) We went to Russell Falls.

This will make good topic for Sunday Selections on Sunday. (I think Kim is still running it. I haven't done one of those posts for a while.)

(Tuesday) Juniordwarf made a person out of his salad – cucumber slices for the body and head, carrot sticks for the arms, legs and ears, and lettuce for the hair. He then ate the person piece by piece, from the bottom up, and every time he picked up a piece, he said ‘looking at the person now!’

I lied. There isn’t a photo for this moment.

(Wednesday) I went back to work. I was dreading it because the previous two days had been really hot and I don’t own any hot weather work clothing. Fortunately a cool change came through and I didn’t need it. There was a stunning rainbow over the mountain on my first day back.

(Thursday) The bus got stuck in roadworks at Granton. This is the scene from the window.

(Thursday) Juniordwarf had been asking for a Harry Potter book for ages and he was really expecting to get one for Xmas. I suggested it might be better to get it from the library so he could see if he really wanted it before he went out and bought it. It arrived at the library and he was so excited about it he couldn't wait until Slabs came back to the car to start reading it. 

Slabs and I started reading it to him but he didn’t want to hear it. When I put him to bed he said he’d read the book to his teddy after I turned out the light. It seems like he tried to do exactly that.

(Thursday) Slabs and Juniordwarf picked me up from the bus stop and we went down to the Esplanade so they could go fishing and we could have dinner outside. It’s a shame the weather wasn’t particularly pleasant (what a change earlier in the week), but still it was a lovely thought from Slabs for us to do something a bit different, and it was a really nice way to spend the rest of the afternoon.

(Today) We went for a drive on a road we’ve never been on before.

* This the point where the camera addict acknowledges that her husband has said this to her on more than one occasion.

P365 - Day 332 - beans!

When I got home from work this afternoon, the first thing Juniordwarf wanted to show me was some beans that he and his friends had grown at their daycare centre. He was so excited about it, I just had to smile.

Slabs said that they were the first thing Juniordwarf showed him when he went to pick him up from daycare, and that he was really excited then too.

Juniordwarf said that he and I would share them tomorrow. Somehow they are going to be present at a puppet show that Juniordwarf will be doing tomorrow. He's doing this to make up for missing out on the puppet show at the Child and Family Centre site celebration on Saturday that was cancelled due to the rain. I'm not sure that he actually even has any puppets, so this might be interesting.

I love five year old logic.

I'm still not too sure what the connection between the beans and the puppet show is. I'm sure I'll find out though.

A good thing about all this was that he was so proud of his beans that he let me take a photo of him holding them. He does that now: stuff he's proud of can be photographed (sometimes), but he has to completely over-pose for it. Once I've taken the photo, he says: "that was a good one".

I'm just happy he lets me take a photo, because he's become very resistant to photos lately.

Now I just wish the stuff in our vege garden would grow so he can get excited about that too.

P365 - Day 288 - catching up (15/10/2011)

After Juniordwarf’s swimming lesson this morning, we travelled down to the Huon Valley to visit some friends who we hadn’t seen for ages.

We had a lovely afternoon catching up, celebrating them finishing their university course and watching Juniordwarf get acquainted with their cats.

The weather was exactly as you’d expect in Tasmania at this time of the year – four seasons in one day. It would have made for some beautiful photo opportunities as we were driving down, but we didn’t really have the time to turn the trip it into a photo excursion, so I had to make do with a couple of pictures from our friends’ place and out of the windscreen on the way home.

Ominous sky

Country lane

Huon River from the car

The plan next time is to spend the night and go ‘tenting’ in the yard so that we have more time and don’t have to rush back home in time for dinner. Juniordwarf is especially keen!

P365 - Day 244 - 1/2 way in, I mean 2/3!

I was going to do this post as my ‘half-way through the 365 photos’ post, but other things got in the way, and I never quite made it. So here we are, it’s my ‘2/3 way through the year’ post.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my blog lately. Why I’m doing it, whether I’m writing it for any particular audience and whether there’s any point to it.

When I started I had a vague idea about what I wanted to do, and that was for it to be a place where I could put my 365 ‘photo a day’ project. And if you’ve read my ‘to not blog . . . or to blog?’ page, you’ll know that I wanted it be a place to help me remember the past, live in the present and design my future.

Well that’s a lot to expect from a blog.

I think it does a pretty good job of serving as a reminder of what I’ve done every day this year - the present becomes the past. As well as that, I’ve done some trips down memory lane, and I’ve started to create a future for myself through my Happiness Project commitments – although over the last couple of months that’s fallen by the wayside for a variety of reasons.

But the main focus of my blog is the photos. On most days, the writing follows from them. Some days the writing is a description of something I’ve done that day, and other days it might just be a sentence or two explaining the photo. Some days the photos lend themselves to a more detailed examination about some part of me – perhaps being introverted and shy, or some of my long-lost dreams, or my struggles with decluttering my house or setting up my garden, or dealing with my demons . . .

All of that involves sharing myself and my family to some degree or another. Sometimes I simply want to show family members something that Juniordwarf has done, or keep them up to date with our life. Occasionally I have a particular person or people in mind when I’m writing about things we might have discussed previously, and some days I want to let off a bit of steam. It all depends, for the most part, on the photo - although there are times I've wanted to write about something in particular, so I've taken a photo to suit that topic.

Not everyone will ‘get’ every post, and that’s fine.

When I began blogging, I didn’t know much about blogs, so my understanding about what a blog *should* be came from reading other people’s blogs. I read some wonderful blogs, some by people I know fairly well, but mostly by people I’ve never – or only briefly – met but have gotten to know through the Internet.

There is such a huge range of blogs out there, and different people share different things. Some are totally up-front about who they and their families are, and others use noms-de-plume for themselves and aliases for their family members (speaking of which, I have the most wonderful pen-name under which my novels shall be published . . .).

Some people blog about particular aspects of their life – scrapbooking, gardening, iphoneography – and others are much more of a mixture. Some use their blogs as outlets to let off steam and to share the ups and down of their daily life and the particular challenges they face. Some people blog about ‘hot topics’ at the moment. Some just share photos. Some post whatever they want to post at the time. Most are a combination of many things.

Some of the topics I’ve written about I might not have if I hadn’t seen other people already writing about the same or similar issues. So reading other people’s blogs has helped me to feel more relaxed about sharing some things.

At the same time there’s a couple of my posts that I cringe thinking about how I commented on an issue because other people commented on it, but it really had little relevance to my photo of the day. It wasn’t really in keeping with what I saw my blog as being about, but I let myself be influenced by other people, who write different types of blogs.

But I don't care, because I like to think that this whole blogging year has been a learning experience for me. I started out being influenced by what I was reading – because I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing - but I think I’ve started to develop my own online personality now. I’m figuring out what works for me and what doesn’t; what I feel comfortable with and what I don’t.

It’s a lot of work – to take a photo every single day and write something about it – and is fairly time-consuming. It’s been a fun project and I’ve really enjoyed doing it. There have only been a couple of days where I’ve thought it was too hard and I didn’t want to do it. There have been a few days where I haven’t had a clue what to take a photo of, but for the most part, there’s been at least one thing that’s stood out for the day.

I’m leaning towards thinking I might not continue the Project 365 approach next year, but I’m not sure. I still have a third of a year to decide.

In the mean time, I’m pretty comfortable doing what I’m doing with this blog. I don’t like to categorise it as any particular type of blog. It’s just my blog and my Project 365.

Now I’ve written the post, what on earth am I going to take a photo of to illustrate it?

Well, that was pretty obvious, wasn't it!

P365 - Day 239 - fishing days

On Monday, Slabs took Juniordwarf fishing after daycare, and Juniordwarf caught his first fish! He was very excited to show me when I got home (although he didn’t want to touch it because his hands would get dirty).

We decided we’d go on a family outing to the same spot (on the Styx River, where we went earlier in the year) on the weekend, if the weather held up.

It did, so off we went.

Last time I was at that spot, it was all underwater. Today there was still some residual water lying around on the ground. The first thing I spotted as we drove in was a temporary 'pond' with some beautiful reflections of trees in it, and I knew that in the right light, I could get some nice photos.

While Juniordwarf and Slabs fished, I wandered around with my camera trying to get some decent shots of those beautiful reflections, of the river and of some rather cool looking funghi that I saw on a tree.

The boys fishing

Styx River

Tree funghi

Reflections in a 'pond'

I also played chase with Juniordwarf, helped him climb a tree and went for a walk with him. We all played hide and seek, which was fun, but didn’t last long due to there not being any actual hiding places that might be safe for a four year old.

On his little camp chair reading.
Not real glasses!
Don't ask about the head band.

Note the seat belt is almost on

Look Mum, I'm in a tree!

The only fish that anyone landed was too small and was put back into the river, so Juniordwarf didn’t get his wish to have fish for dinner fulfilled.

But it didn’t matter. We had a nice afternoon by the river, which is the most important thing.

P365 - Day 231 - at work (19/08/2011)

I couldn’t go through a whole year of ‘a photo a day’ without including a photo of me hard at work.

In the past when I’ve wanted a picture of myself doing something, I’ve just set the camera up somewhere close by, set the self-timer, then quickly tried to look like I was doing whatever I wanted the picture to be of.

Easy.

Except iPhone cameras don’t have self timer buttons do they?

Enter SoundSnap, a neat little app that takes a photo when you make a noise. It does have a self-timer, so all I needed to do was set a vey low trigger level, so that almost any noise would set it off, set the self-timer, arrange my phone on a fairly dodgy looking pile of folders, files and a business card holder, then make a noise distinct enough to set it off. That started the timer and gave me enough time to get back to work so that the photo would look sort of authentic.

It took a few attempts to figure out where to put the phone and what noise I needed to make to set it off. (I started by coughing, but then realised a fairly hard press of the ‘enter’ key on the keyboard would work just as well).

For 99 cents, it’s a handy app for situations like this.

P365 - Day 199 - a flower for mum

A couple of weeks ago I was having a moan on Twitter that I couldn’t think of anything to take photos of for this project and one of my Twitter friends suggested that I check out the Hipstamatic app. She’d been posting some really lovely photos, which were very inspiring, so I decided to devote this week to learning all about how it works.

Hipstamatic is different to the other apps that I’ve been using, as you select a film and a lens before you take the photo, then the app processes the picture with those settings, instead of you applying filters and effects after you’ve taken the normal photo.

It looks like a cool retro camera, with a little viewfinder. Cute hey!

Once you have the app, you can buy extra lenses, films and camera cases, and occasionally they release some promotional freebies.

For my first attempt at using this app I went for a walk down by the docks at lunchtime to see what I could come up with. I got some lovely photos and some really crappy ones too – mainly because it was quite glary and difficult to see what I was actually shooting on my phone. But the good ones were well worth the time I spent down there, even if I felt slightly ridiculous walking round taking photos. (Why is it that I feel so self conscious taking photos around my local haunts, but if I was a tourist I wouldn’t give it a second thought? It’s not like anyone cares!)

I was going to put some of the photos on here, but then when I got home, Juniordwarf presented me with a flower that he’d made at daycare today, and I knew that had to be the subject of today’s photo.

He chose pink because he knows it’s my favourite colour, and when I asked him where I should put it, he said it was for my study.

Slabs said Juniordwarf was so proud of his flower and it was the first thing he showed him when Slabs went to pick him up from daycare. It deserves pride of place in ‘my’ study.

Juniordwarf also drew me a picture. I asked him what it was a picture of, and he said ‘coloured squiggles’.

Of course it is. 

P365 - Day 198 - poser

Today's post was going to be a belated review of me reaching the half-way point of Project 365, but I'm struggling to find the words.

So instead, today's picture is my wonderful son, who I love absolutely, unconditionally, forever.

Even if he says he doesn't love me when I have my hair tied up, or am in my PJs or am wearing the wrong top.

The photo is blurry, out of focus, badly lit  . . . technically pretty bad overall, but I actually got him to (a) stand still and (b) not put on his cheesy grin. This is a victory, make no mistake about it.

P365 - Day 180 - closeup #3 - ice

Well if yesterday was cold, today was freezing.

I didn't check the temperature outside when we left home, but a reasonable guess, based on the weather report, was about -2 degrees.

This is the ice on the car windscreen.

I like this one. It reminds me of the moon.

P365 - Day 177 what catches my eye/sunday selections

Sometimes I like to take a lot of photos of little things around me that normally I wouldn’t pay much attention to. The idea for me is to take photos that capture these objects from a different perspective, from a different angle, than I would normally see them.

This usually means getting in a lot closer to the object than normal, which is where a macro lens would come in handy. But since my main camera at the moment is my phone, I don’t have that luxury most of the time.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been trying to test the phone’s camera to see how close I can get to objects, before it gives up in despair.

I tend not to use the zoom function on the camera, because it’s a digital zoom, so using it has the same effect as cropping the photo afterwards, and I find it easier to take the photo with more in the frame and crop out what I don’t want, rather than do it on the camera display.

I’ve been getting some pretty good results. Not macro by a long way, but still fun to play with once I start to edit the photos on the phone.

So for today’s post – and for Sunday Selections over at Frogpondsrock – here are some photos I took at the Gretna Green Hotel today.

We went there for lunch, and I’m sure the owner thought I was quite strange taking photos of random things around the dining room while we were waiting for our meals.

But there were some really interesting things that caught my eye. Because some of them are a bit abstract, I felt a bit more comfortable in using some of the more interesting filters on my phone to transform them.

Teapot on the mantelpiece

Beer!

Duck on the mantelpiece

Urn

Firewood

Spinning wheel

Artwork

Knot in a wooden bench

Intersection of wooden table & bench

Bells in the hallway

Now that I’ve done these, I’ve decided my theme for this week is to take a photo each day of something that I normally wouldn’t photograph or that I wouldn’t really notice, and try to make it look interesting.

Let the fun begin.

P365 - Day 161 a million little photos (10/06/2011)

On the weekend I finally finished taking photos for the Art House Cooperative's A Million Little Photos:  Photomobile project, which I signed up to in February.

I posted about this project when I received my camera in March, and then spent the best part of two months wondering what on earth I was going to take photos of.

I chose the theme ‘In Progress’, which seemed like it wouldn’t be too hard, but when it came down to actually taking the pictures, I had no idea what to do. The only thing that really came to mind was building sites, but I didn’t think taking 27 photos of buildings in progress would make for a very interesting project.

As a result the camera sat on my dining table for over two months, while I waited, with increasing desperation as the weeks went by, for inspiration to hit.

Eventually I realised I was just going to have to get out there and do something or I’d miss the 15 June deadline for the photos to be postmarked.

Until I actually started taking the pictures, I hadn’t fully appreciated the challenges involved with taking photos with a disposable camera, when I’m used to a variety of more sophisticated cameras, with zoom functions and the ability to focus and expose for the available light. Another thing you have to remember is when you look through the viewfinder, the image that the camera lens sees is slightly down and to the left of your view, which does make a difference when you're used to shooting exactly what you see with a digital camera.

I’m used to a little beep that tells me when something in the scene is in focus, so holding up a camera and basically going ‘click’ felt really really strange.

I put the camera in to be processed yesterday and got the photos back today. Overall I wasn’t exactly thrilled with them, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. 

You had to use the disposable camera, with all its limitations – which I guess was the whole idea of the project – so what I got was what I got. I could see a few where the flash would have come in handy, and a few where I tried to get too close. Since I couldn’t crop them, I tried to move in close to eliminate distracting backgrounds from the picture, only to end up with something that was out of focus.

Anyway it’s all done now. I dropped the photos in the post box on my way home and they are now winging their way to the Brooklyn Art Library to be a part of the project. I guess I’ll find out a bit later on which photo or photos they thought were worthy of inclusion. 

P365 - Day 135 i don't want to go outside

Here are my photos for this week's Sunday Selections over at Frogpondsrock.

This afternoon at about half past three, Juniordwarf suddenly decided he wanted to go outside.

We’d been inside all day, even though, as days nearing winter go, today wasn’t too bad. Still, I was quite cosy inside and didn’t really want to go out with him. (The way our house is set up, it’s impossible to keep an eye on him from inside.) I had stuff I wanted to be doing (or rather, needed to be doing – I didn’t feel particularly inclined to actually do it) and I groaned inwardly when he said he wanted to go outside.

But I don’t want to discourage him from being outside, and I know I should also be setting more of an example by spending time outside too, so I took a deep breath and followed him out.

We did some stuff together and then he did his own thing for a while. I decided if I had to be out there, I might as well make use of the time and find things in the almost dead garden to take photos of, as there might not be many more opportunities.

There was also a pretty moonrise just before sunset, so that was a good subject too – lots of interesting clouds in the sky. And then sunset itself (where I looked out the window, saw the light and raced outside to take some more photos).

All of these are taken on my phone, with the exception of the two sunset pictures, and all are edited with my go-to app, Camera+.

Moon rising in the clouds

Pansy from Juniordwarf's garden

One of our last roses

Juniordwarf's petunia that he potted up at
play group last year

Grape vine. I was hoping to find an angle that
made it look like I was in a vineyard, but who
am I kidding?!

Sunset 1 - my standard sunset view over the hill

Sunset 2 - behind the sunset