Whoops......

Went and took a look at the aground ship Pasha Bulka at Nobby's Beach yesterday. Took a few snapshots of it too.

Restoring le jardin.

A lamish excuse for not blogging....I've been doing a spot of gardening.

I was trying to find a "before" shot of this rather awful patch of mountain jungle which I am trying to transform into its glory days. Some of the folks who have been around here for a few decades said the original owner had a wonderful garden. There seems to be a lot of gardeners around here so I'd thought i'd better do the community thing.

So anyway, here's the best photo I could find of the garden before..... it was so bad that I never took a full photo of it. It was basically a heap of rather invasive Kikyu grass, some equally as invasive Fishbone fern and some other sort of horrible tuber on some pretty poor soil. We had some rain around here, so it was the perfect opportunity to dig a lot of this crap out whilst the soil was moist and loose. I've been rather used to digging in rock hard soil the past few months.


So, when I was digging around trying to get out a largish Cypress Pine (you can see the rootball in front of the car) and replacing it with the smaller weeping Japanese Maple pictured above, I discovered an old brick path underneath about a foot of soil. Digging it out was particularly difficult, nevertheless there seemed to be a pattern there. With the rain, scooping off that top 12 inches was considerably easier although one of the previous owners (a builder) decided to bury bricks in the bloody garden. In total I've found about twenty, laid flat neatly in the soil. Anyway after digging out bricks and other assorted building site refuse, here's what I found.

So, I've thrown in some roses and bulbs and some smaller shrubs around the maple, I've also made a small rock border around the maple which looks kind of hokey at this stage. Topped the whole lot with some sugar cane mulch which smells good enough to eat. And here it is so far.

Apologies for the winter light. You can just make out the maple tree bereft of leaves near the hose. The sugar can mulch is extremely thirsty, so a good three days rain has fixed that. Notice I've also hacked back a big bunch of fishbone fern in the background. the stuff is horrible with a two inch thich mat of roots underlying the whole deal, will take a lot of digging out to bring it back to some sense of order.

I should have some more photos of le jardin come spring!

The roses list: Just Joey, Fleuro, Bettina, Blue Moon, Olympic Torch, Canary, Chrysler Imperial, Sylvia, Fragrant Plum, Chicago Peace and Pristine.

HDR Pepsi

Not my photos......

.....but cool anyway. Click them for a larger view, theres a demotivation poster opportunity there somewhere.

Nobbys Beach: We operate from Nobbys Beach as it is the safest beach in Newcastle. This location offers a perfect beach break for learn to surf, we nestle in to the corner that faces north east which provides consistent waves protected by a southern headland, sheltered from prevailing winds and larger swells.

Ummmmmm..... Now they have a bloody big ship in their way.

Small Waterfall

Australian Magpie

I was putting in some roses after the recent rains when this fellow (an Australian Magpie Gymnorhina tibicen) decided to dig around for worms and grubs in the newly turned soil.

Banksy

Cool! Still trying to find the original photo of this one, unsure if rioter was tossing a rock, a bottle or a Motolov Cocktail.

Palestinean side of the Israel/Palestine separation wall.


Subverting flea market prints.


Classic Banksy, much in the tradition of Keith Haring (one of my favourites) and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Banksy started off doing grafitti. Working mainly around Bristol and London. He's had his first exhibition in Los Angeles.

And from Wikipedia.

In addition to his artwork, Banksy has claimed responsibility for a number of high profile stunts, including the following:

• At London Zoo, he climbed into the penguin enclosure and painted 'We're bored of fish' in seven foot high letters.
• 
  
• At Bristol Zoo, he left the message 'I want out. This place is too cold. Keeper smells. Boring, boring, boring.' in the elephant enclosure.
• 
  
• In January 2001, he travelled to the areas controlled by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas, Mexico, and in sign of solidarity with their movement, painted murals with scenes depicting the struggle and also made stencils on the walls of San Cristóbal de las Casas.^{[citation needed]}
• 
  
• In March 2005, he placed subverted artworks in the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York.^[18]
• 
  
• He put up a subverted painting in London's Tate Britain gallery.
• 
  
• In May 2005 Banksy's version of a primitive cave painting depicting a human figure hunting wildlife whilst pushing a shopping trolley was found hanging in the British Museum, London. Upon discovery, the museum added it to their permanent collection.^[19]
• 
  
• Banksy has sprayed 'This is not a photo opportunity' on certain photograph spots.
• 
  
• In August 2005, Banksy painted nine images on the Israeli West Bank barrier, including an image of a ladder going up and over the wall and an image of children digging a hole through the wall.^[20][21]
• 
  
• In April 2006, Banksy created a sculpture based on a crumpled red phone box with a pickaxe in its side, apparently bleeding, and placed it in a street in Soho, London. It was later removed by Westminster Council. BT released a press release, which said: "This is a stunning visual comment on BT's transformation from an old-fashioned telecommunications company into a modern communications services provider."^[22]
• 
  
• In June 2006, Banksy created an image of a naked man hanging out of a bedroom window on a wall in central Bristol. The image sparked some controversy, with the Bristol City Council leaving it up to the public to decide whether it should stay or go.^[23] After an internet discussion in which 97% (all but 6 people) supported the stencil, the city council decided it would be left on the building.^[23]
• 
  
• In August/September 2006, Banksy replaced up to 500 copies of Paris Hilton's debut CD, Paris, in 48 different UK record stores with his own cover art and remixes by Danger Mouse. Music tracks were given titles such as "Why am I Famous?", "What Have I Done?" and "What Am I For?". Several copies of the CD were purchased by the public before stores were able to remove them, some going on to be sold for as much as £750 on online auction websites such as eBay. The cover art depicted Paris Hilton digitally altered to appear topless. Other pictures feature her with a dog's head replacing her own, and one of her stepping out of a luxury car, edited to include a group of homeless people, which included the caption 90% of success is just showing up.^[24][25][26]
• 
  
• In September 2006, Banksy dressed an inflatable doll in the manner of a Guantanamo Bay detainment camp prisoner (orange jumpsuit, black hood, and handcuffs) and then placed the figure within the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride at the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California.^[27][28]. More recently his work has appeared on Melrose^[c

Great stuff! Take a look at flickr or Google images to see some more of his work.

Chrome

Monty Python - French Sketch

The Pythons take a sideways stab at the Concorde under development between the British and French in the early 70's.

Morning at Rhodes Sydney

Took a few pics this morning, this one seems to be the best after HDR.


This one combined with Photomatix and tonemapped using QTPFSGUI

This one done solely with Photomatix.

Go stick that in your pipe Golby................. Friggin' ingrate :)

New bit of kit.

Not blogging much, photographing instead :-)

Bought myself a newish Olympus e-500 digital SLR which I have been trying to get the hang of. Well it's sort of new....Olympus are upgrading this to the E-510 so this is the last of the series and Olympus are doing end of product runouts (just like the car companies). I was looking at the very popular Canon EOS but they were about $1400, so instead of the Beemer I went for the SAAB of cameras after reading a LOT of good reviews on it. Picked up a refurbished one from E-Bay and it seems to be like new.

Not only do I have to get my mind around the controls and menu but I've two lenses..... which means focal lengths, white balances and other such things to now deal with. So far it's been pretty good..... I just leave it on auto or pick a couple of the "scene " modes. I took it to the Olympic Stadium on Wednesday night and took it down to Parramatta River this morning to get some shots for more HDR.

It's better for HDR as the files are bigger, the sensor is better and thus images come out crisper with less noise. The downsize is my poor old computer is really groaning at Photomatix, Photoshop and Windows XP all crunching away at pixelorial data at the same time. Think circa early 90's internet speed rates!

So far the results seem a lot better than my old Fujifilm 5500s.

Nightshot using the "fireworks" scene.....either that or a 13 second exposure on a tripod. No adjustments made to pic.

Shot done this morning I "auto adjusted"' on Photoshop and that was it.

Another nightshot using the "fireworks" setting. Needs tilting back to normal, don't ask me how I managed to get a tilt on a tripod!