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Nothing like a road trip to end the year. My girlfriend and I had been planning to visit Bridestowe Lavender Farm earlier in December but as time slipped away from us as Christmas approached, we decided to visit during our holidays. This turned out to be a good move as we arrived at the farm when the lavender was in full bloom and near harvest. As you can see above, the fields were a sea of mauve.

What perhaps surprised me most was that the lavender plants have a short lifecycle. I’ve had lavender plants at home for years, but many of the plants at the farm are probably less than 5 years old. Below is the “Tourist Photo”.

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If you get the opportunity to visit the Bridport area of Tasmania, I strongly recommend visiting the Lavender farm, particularly around December when the lavender blooms.

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I’ve always maintained that trying to capture the colour and how immense the mountains are in Tasmania’s south west is ridiculously challenging. No photo could possibly do duty to the unique colours and textures and size of the peaks. This photo taken on a recent trip to Lake Pedder however is my new favourite of the Sentinel Range, taken near the old Lake Pedder track.

Captured in the mid afternoon, the weather ensured the sun was not bright enough to cause the deep contrasts I have normally experienced at this location, and at the same time the weather was good enough for the peaks not to be covered in rain clouds.

For me, it was not a very successful night taking photos, and it reminded me that some basic preparation goes a long way.

1. Focus

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At night, planes are hard to miss when landing, they have a whopping big headlights on the front that can provide light up a field hundreds metres away. So it was rather annoying that even seeing the plane some 10 mins before it landed that this photo was taken out of focus.

This night I was using 2 lenses, this one was an Canon EF-S 18-135 f4-5.6, and like most “lower end” lenses, it was lacking a focus distance meter. AF does not work at night, there is not enough light for the camera to pick up an edge to focus on. Prior to the plane starting it’s final approach as it was so dark and I was lacking a torch, I could not see to focus manually so took a guess at where infinity was on the MF and shot. I was wrong.

Tip 1: Take a torch, even better a spotlight, that you can use to illuminate what you want to focus on in the photo. Ideally have a friend act as assistant in light coloured clothing, and get them to walk to the area you want to focus on and shine the light on themselves.

Tip 2: Torches are also very handy to find your way on uneven ground at night. I really missed having a torch.

2. Aperture and Stability

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Having changed location, we were definitely in position that offered a much more interesting photo, but being up on a hill was windier. For this photo I swapped to a Sigma 10-20mm f4-5.6 DX which did have a focus distance meter. The photo to the right was the result of a 5 minute exposure @ f18.

Three things are wrong with this photo. First and obvious one is that it is too dark, and much of low-light airport detail is lost. Second is at some point during the exposure the photo the tripod was bumped, which has resulted in the lit objects being double exposed. Finally in the lower right, you see the viewfinder of a friend’s camera. Oops.

Tip 3: Long exposures at night do not necessarily require stopping down the lens to oblivion, the smaller the aperture the more significant the fall-off between light and dark will be.

Tip 4: Stand clear of the tripod when taking long exposures. Make sure friends stand clear of the tripod when taking long exposures. In windy conditions your tripod will be more stable the lower the camera is to the ground, so adjust tripod legs accordingly.

Tip 5: Once you start exposing, make sure nobody with any torches, phones etc walks into your field of view.

3. Crop

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Semi-convinced that the IS functionality of the 18-135mm lens would still provide a sharper image in the windy conditions, I swapped back to this lens, adjusted the aperture and with the final landing of the night shot the photo to the left, around 2m30s at f 6.3.

From an exposure perspective and sharpness perspective, this was a definite improvement on previous photos with crisp clear lights, and more of the airfield detail on display with the low light.

But no matter how careful I was trying to get everything into view, the two most critical parts of the image when the plane turns, have been cropped.  The second fault with this image is that the lit areas were overexposed. I did attempt to recover those areas in post-processing but it still is not ideal

Tip 6: It doesn’t matter how good the lens’ sharpness and exposure is if the focal length is not short enough to capture the entire scene.

In all it was an interesting night, and as the airport is far from busy (usually only 2-3 inbound flights after 8pm) you have to try and make every photo count. I am hoping to visit again in the very near future and having learnt my lessons will get the photo I am after.

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Despite living in Tasmania all my life, Sunday was the first ever time I visited Bruny Island. It has been something that has been working it’s way up my to-do list, but an opportunity arose for a day trip and so it happened.

Unfortunately the situation I was in did not give me very much time for photography, however I made very sure that I travelled the length of the island to visit the Cape Bruny Lighthouse. Built in 1838 and decommissioned in 1996, it was the oldest continually manned lighthouse in Australia.

Parks and Wildlife Service have some more information about the lighthouse here.

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This photo was taken on my first trip out with my DSLR. In my first trip to the Tasmanian West Coast in over 15 years, the main purpose of the journey was to experience the wonderful Wilderness Railway, better known as the Abt. Built in the 1890s by the Mt Lyell Mining Company, the railway connected Strahan and Queenstown for a number of years, before being closed in the mid 1960s and rails ripped up. In the late 1990s money was granted to re-establish the railway as a tourist venture.

In the photo here we see Abt Locomotive #1 taking on water at Rinadeena – the highest point of the journey and the lunchtime stopover. This is a tremendous journey and I would recommend it to anyone who happens to have a spare day when visiting the Tasmanian West Coast.

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The Airstrip and Melaleuca was quite busy. I expected one, perhaps two planes. In the time we were at the airstrip around half a dozen planes landed and took off. They were lining up

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Lunch was had in the dense temperate forest surrounds of Mt Stokes & Bramble Cove

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If was a great day out, and it’s somewhere I definitely want to visit again, although camping really is the only option for the photographer in this area – the day trips are simply not enough.

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I really like this photo. It feels like the branch in the foreground is reaching out to the craggy, skeletal branch of the other tree, as if to save it from the abyss that is veiled in the mist.

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The Alpine region of Mt Field National Park is a harsh environment of many extremes. Not only is the land baked by the sweltering summer sun, but it is also lashed by vicious blizzards and submerged in deep drifts of snow during winter.

It is therefore natural that some plants do not make it. In the case of trees, they die and their skeleton is left to be bleached by the weather before eventually succumbing to rot and falling to the ground.

Over my Christmas break, I visited the Lake Dobson area of Mt Field with friends, and this was the image that I ended up picking from the set of images taken

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Whilst the cloud did make the desired photos I wanted to take that much harder to obtain, the above photo shows that you need to look around when taking photos to make sure that you miss nothing

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It’s funny how things work out. Yesterday’s trip to Mt Field National Park was to take pictures of Russel, Horseshoe & Sharpe Falls to include in a 2010 Calendar. As it turns out, the photos were terrible. However the road to Lake Dobson revealed the spectacular site of Mt Field well capped in snow. So of all the photos taken yesterday, this is my pick of the bunch.

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