You could go to Australia for the warmth or the wine, or for the light or for love; and all of these would be good reasons. But the real reason is to sit near the ocean and feel its tropic wind warm on your cheeks, which is entirely beyond price. Herewith some news and colour.

News · I shaved my beard for the first time in thirty years, but didn’t like it, so you get only the rear view in this picture of me working on Genx.

Open Source development in Queensland
Open Source Development is Hell

But the real close shave is pictured below:

Smashed Astra
The Victim
The truck that hit us
The Villain

Lesson: when a cheap & cheerful holiday rental is rear-ended by a truck with a full load of soil, the rental loses. Bad news: I was in the right rear. Good news: no harm done, except to the poor little car, which I think is a write-off.

Enough with the news: I can’t take a picture of that warm wind, but I can capture a little bit of...

Colour · On the beach, the sand is white and the rocks are black, black, black, the picture doesn’t come close to the impact on the eye.

Black stones on white Queensland beach

When you get out of the city the plants are the story; this one has flowers trying to be leaves and leaves trying to be flowers.

Leaves verge into flowers into leaves

But the real treat is genuine tropical rainforest; below a shot of one we spent some time in, on the way in.

Tropical rainforest in the sun

Photography on the forest’s inside is tough because the contrasts are too severe for the camera software’s best guess, the only answer is to put more work into understanding the trade-offs and going all-manual. It’s pretty dark in there, but the tropical sun does come through here and there, and when it does...

Backlit orange leaves
· · ·
Backlit palm leaf in tropical rainforest

At which point, something with lots of legs stung me viciously on the toe—tropical rainforest, remember—and I didn’t shoot any more until hours later when the truck rear-ended us.


author · Dad
colophon · rights

February 15, 2004
· The World (151 fragments)
· · Places
· · · Australia (29 more)

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