The view from my hotel room

Spent a couple of lovely nights up in Bunya Mountains National Park.
These little wallabies were just sitting a few meters away while we had breakfast on the verandah.

Graphics not that great.

Xander

Not wanting it to end......

Packing up after Christmas....
at least one of our family did not want it to end!

Twas the night before Christmas

And a lovely night it is too....
The Christmas tree has everything it needs....
everyone is tucked up in bed (except me obviously).

It is a beautiful night outside...  A gentle summer storm, a bit of lightning and thunder, but nothing scary.  Just enough to keep it cool.

To everyone who I care about - have a great Christmas!

The view from our hotel room

On vacation at Caloundra.... Awesome stuff!

Been a good school year.

Last night we had Zak's graduation from Primary School.

He managed to get the Arts award (tied with a very worthy "opponent"), and the Dux for the year.

That combined with his sports award for.... wait for it..... Chess(!), and his winning of his year in the Drama competition, all adds up to being a good result for the efforts he put in this year.

Between that and Xan getting an academic award along with his swimming age champion...  I think we can chalk up the 2014 school year as a good one!

Well done boys.  We are proud of you.

Izak looking iridescent.

Celebration???

Work Christmas party this weekend.  All went well.

Not 100% sure about the celebration aspect of it....  (this of course was my reaction to having my camera stolen off me!)

But I am sure that somewhere in the world there are people who have done things worthy of celebration over the last few days...  And I definitely hope they did indeed celebrate!!

Oh... and as a complete side issue... I was photographer for the night and the D750 behaved extremely well in the challenging light conditions.

Flashback

A few older photos.
Ruth on the New Zealand Trip at Lake Tekapo, and the Church of the Good Shepard there.  Both playing with a flash.

And a photo of Zak from earlier this year.  He has grown up so much since then!

All the photos were grabbed from older shots because the topic of the month for Toowoomba Photographic Society is "Use of flash".

Random Animal posts...

Dimmy (the cat),
and Shena (the dog)....

Wow...I really need to deliberately set out to make some photos....

Swimming Presentation

Xan received an award for being age champion in the swimming at Downlands this year.
Here is before (and then after) the presentation, looking, to my eyes, extremely adult.

First photo taken with my OMD with the Lumix 20mm 1.7 in the light of the outside passage.

Second one taken using the LED torch from Ruth's Iphone as lighting....

New Camera!! - Nikon D750

So, used it to take a photo of the nearest available subject....
One of our cats, doing something she should not have been doing!

It is the full frame Nikon D750.  (the camera - not the cat).
So far feels great.  Some little things that I will need to get used to... and I am back down to just 3, prime lenses after the change to full frame, a 20, 50 and 85mm.
Looking forward to understanding it, and getting some shots with it!

Carnival of flowers

Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers this weekend.
Toowoomba really is a beautiful place to live and the Carnival is a bit of a celebration of that.

Not that the photos here have too many flowers in them... mostly just stuff....

The Compere

Izak was the main role in his school musical last night.
He played a compere in a singing game show....
I might be a little biased, but I think he did an awesome job!

Hiding from myself

One I have been meaning to do for a while...
The topic for the photography competition this month at TPS is "Selfie"... so I thought, why not?!


Photogeeking:  This photo took several years of planning... 4 or 5 years ago, I started developing a clone of myself (he is the one in the red shirt)...  he is not much good for most things, but was useful for this.  He sees things fairly simply and spends a lot of time cranky, so convincing him to do this was not hard.  A flash through an umbrella was used for the blue me... a direct flash for the red me, with another one filling in some of the detail.