What’s going on

Last weekend was a busy one. Saturday saw me out all day at the Australian Botanical Gardens shooting Rocky Trail’s Shimano Mountain Bike Race and Sunday I was closer to home shooting the Pub2Pub here on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

The Shimano MTB race was a great event. I teamed up with talented photographer Gilbert Romane of GiroPhotos so we could capture as much of the action as possible. The race was based on a circuit with each lap taking about 30 mins and was a choice of either a 4 hour race or a 7 hour race. The winner was the one who completed the most circuits in that period of time. Gilbert covered the start while I moved off up the track and set up for the first group of competitors to come through. After that we moved between different spots where we thought would capture the action best. I think between us we took around 2500 shots. We decided to pool the photos together to make it simpler for all the competitors to find all there photos all in one place rather than having to search between two different websites. If you were a competitor be sure to go over there and search for your number and check out the shots we got of you. If you weren’t a competitor your very welcome to go over and check out some of the action from the day.

Sunday’s race was local and I was shooting on behalf of Marathon Photos. Marathon photos cover numerous events and races all around the world. The photos from the day can be found over on their website though there is no way for me to isolate my shots to show you.

Yesterday I went on my first ever photowalk. A photowalk is basically a bunch of photographers (in this case about 130) who stroll around the city and take photos. It should perhaps be called a photostroll as that to me sounds a lot more casual and my photowalk was certainly a casual affair. For me spending time with other like-minded people and just making new friends. That’s not to say that I didn’t take any photos I just didn’t take that many.

The walk started off at Hyde Park in Sydney and meandered it’s way through the streets to Observatory Hill near the Harbour Bridge. So we didn’t come across like a protest march and get ourselves thrown in jail the group was split into smaller ones. The groups kept meeting up with each other and converging at key points through the city. I am sure that as we split again I found myself following a different group each time, not that this was an issue as the whole thing was very casual.

The photowalk was organised by three photographers from Google+, Giuseppe Basile, Michael Sutton and Gretchen Chappelle.  Lockey McGrath from Google got wind of the event as it was being organised  and Google themselves kindly threw their weight behind it giving all participants a t-shirt, new camera strap and to top it all off put on drinks and a BBQ at the end of the day for anyone. I was very impressed by this from Google. They seem to be determined to take Google+ further than just another social media site and turn it into something more like a small online community. It has certainly become an amazing place to talk to fellow photographers, follow their work and get inspired by all the wonderful images on there. So in closing I just want to say a big thanks to all the organisers and to Google for making it such a fun day out.

I have never been overly thrilled with the way my website displays my panoramas to you. They always seem to be lacking a lot of detail, skinny little pictures that don’t really do justice to the original shot. Today I came across a viewer that should be able to change all that. Above is my first test of the Seadragon Viewer from Microsoft.  I would appreciate it if you could let  me know if you have any problems using it. At the moment it is running through zoom.it a website that allows anyone to set it up.

Barrington Tops National Park lies about three hours to the north of Sydney in the Hunter Valley, a region more famed for its wine growing.  The park is on the World Heritage List as part of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia. What makes the Gondwana Rainforests so special is that, according to fossil records, many of the species in the rainforests today existed on the Gondwana continent over 200 million years ago. The park has also been declared a Wilderness area and some of the rivers have been classed as Wild Rivers, meaning they are exceptionally pure and free of contaminants.

I spent a couple of days there in the south eastern section. Due to wet weather driving it wasn’t really possible for me to get too far into the park in my little city car. I stayed down near the Blue Gum Circuit and explored from there. The rainforest there is beautiful. There was a constant drizzle of rain and at times torrential rain but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Grey skies reduce the contrast and make for great photo opportunities inside a forest. One thing the rain did bring out though was an incredible amount of leeches. I have never seen so many before and it was near impossible to keep them off me. Whenever I stopped to take a picture they just seemed to launch themselves upon me. Somehow they even managed to get upon my face a couple of times.

Different sections of the park are supposedly completely different. The flora in the park varies from the rainforests through to alpine. In winter the high reaches of the park often get covered in snow. I certainly hope to get back there sometime soon, perhaps next time either better prepared for a longer walk or with a 4wd so I can get further into the park and experience some of the different sections.

I am very happy to announce that this week I won 2 Bronze awards in the Epson Panoramic Awards contest. One award was for Sunset on Long Reef Beach in the landscape category and the other of Northern Beaches in the urban category.

The contest is a worldwide contest with entries from over 60 countries. There is some beautiful entries and it is well worth a look through one of the galleries.