Articles in “Random Photographs”

‘Nough said, really.

That’s really the whole story, but let’s see if I can expand it a little.

Today is Brisbane’s worst possible weather: the threat or promise of a storm later and a southerly change for tomorrow, but in the interim such a high degree of humidity that you perspire just sitting still.

I’d been doing some washing up with both the front and back doors open, and when I walked out into the living room, I startled a small, skittery water dragon who’d obviously wandered in through the front door—at least, I’d like to think I’d have spotted him if he’d come in the back door and had to run past me.

This initiated a most entertaining forty minutes, in which he persistently ran past the invitingly open front door.

The real fun was when he ran into the main bedroom.

Twice.

Here, for example, is a composition I call “Terrified Water Dragon In My Dirty Linen Basket”:

(In my own defense, I’d been trying to get him out for twenty minutes by this point, and thought, “Sod it: I may as well get a blog post out of it.” He’s much smaller than the dragon who normally stars on this blog, so it was harder to get a clear photo on zoom, unfortunately.)

But the most entertaining part of the afternoon is expressed in this photograph, which I call “Terrified Water Dragon Who Stupidly Ran Into My Wardrobe”:

To cut a long story slightly shorter, we managed (after chasing him out of the bedroom the second time—he’d managed to squeeze under the shut door—and moving half the furniture in the living room) to induce him to hare out the front door.

Unfortunately, now we’re compelled to keep the front and back doors tightly closed in the hottest part of the day.

Stupid dragon.

The kookaburra was back this afternoon, and was clearly torn between the relative risks of having his photograph taken and forgoing lunch by flying away.

End result, he let me get much closer than he usually does:

I really must write about books again, soon.

Seriously, I haven’t the faintest idea what it is, but it’s beautiful and keeps coming to feed off the palm trees.

From the looks of its bill and from its behaviour, it’s an insectivore, at least partly.

Can anyone identify it for me? Even my father, the former twitcher, is stymied.

I have my parents staying with me briefly (they only ever stay briefly: they’re peripatetic creatures by nature) for my graduation ceremony tomorrow, so I’ve been neglecting the blog a little.

And this on top of the neglect from last week caused by my determination to get a journal article out to a journal before my birthday. (Success! Yay me! Now, the waiting.)

On the other hand, my parents are now incapable of staying awake after 8.30 p.m., so that does give me a chance to update with what is more of an excuse for not updating than it is a proper update.

Well, an excuse and a picture of the moon rising with Jupiter and Venus, the three brightest objects in the night sky:

It’s not the clearest photo but what’s more unfortunate is the fact that it’s a frowny face, when it was a smiley face yesterday. I should have taken my photographs then.

Still, the crescent moon itself is worth a look, even without the two planets:

My parents don’t entirely grasp the need for me to update the blog (do I sound sixteen instead of thirty-two?) and are clamouring for their dinner.

So, in lieu of a proper update, here are some photographs of my lovely kookaburra, shot this evening.

When I have a chance, I’ll add some photographs of the moon, taken tonight.

I decided to put our Christmas tree up tonight, partly because I like to have it up early, or else we don’t have the advantage of it for a full month, and partly because I got a little squiffy and it seemed like a good idea at the time:

We’d never put up a tree before last year, but last Christmas I rebelled and decided I had to have a tree.

It’s a tiny little tree: according to the box, it’s something called a “Canadian Black Pine,” but I find that unlikely, since the tree also has sparkly silver and purple highlights—I’m quite certain there’s no tree in the wild, Canada or elsewhere, with that type of colouring.

But we are limited to a small tree by available space and it was this or a fluorescent pink one.

Frankly, though, the main reason I determined to put the tree up so early was because I adore my lights:

Falling in love with these lights at Tandy was a determining factor in deciding to buy a tree to display them on.

I don’t want to spoil their novelty as Christmas lights by displaying them on non-Christmas occasions, so putting them up a month before Christmas seems a fair compromise.

Yeah, there was really no chance I was going to avoid making that pun.

Once the storm moved away from us, we could see an amazing lightshow from the back verandah: these don’t do it justice, but they’re fairly funky, anyway.

This next one is a cropped version of the above photograph, showing the lightning in more detail:

The storm is still going on as I write, but I thought there was no point living in Brisbane during the worst storms in twenty-five years if I don’t take some photographs of it and post them on my blog.

Solipsistic? Me?

There are also some photographs of the back end of the storm after it moved over us in this post.

The grevillea:

The palm tree, without lightning:

And the palm tree at the moment of a lightning strike:

After being completely invisible during the rain of the last few days, the bigger water dragon appeared first thing this morning to try and absorb as much heat as possible from the soaking-wet barbeque:

He couldn’t have flattened himself out any further, however hard he tried.

He was also either unusually pleased with himself or absolutely desperate for warmth, because he let me get closer than he usually does:

He’s a lovely boy, despite that vague look of contempt in his eyes.

To counterbalance that, here’s a photograph of the world’s most lugubrious noisy mynahs (if anyone reading this doesn’t have a garden full of these birds, that name is not a misnomer. Damn birds won’t shut up at the moment.)

They’re huddling together in yesterday’s rain. It would be hilarious if they didn’t look so miserable:

Well, no—it’s actually pretty hilarious, anyway.

Not everything about the rain is bad—in this suburb, at least.

Because I can, really. And because they’re pretty. And because I haven’t quite shaken off my marking exhaustion, and am feeling lazy.

But I do think that this is a nice counterpart to the twilight moon photograph from two days ago.

Still, it makes a change from endless photographs of the frangipani, doesn’t it?

It turns out my camera can take reasonably decent photographs just of the moon, without any intervening foliage, if I concentrate.

Who would have thought it?

Not that this should form a distraction from the fascinating discussion about The West Wing going on two posts below this.

Since I took the last moon photo, I’ve become obsessed with the likelihood of taking moon photographs later at night.

The problem with that idea is two-fold.

To take decent photographs of the moon, I need to either adjust the ISO setting and exposure time myself (which I’m not a sufficiently accomplished photographer to do on the run) or have the camera on a setting where it adjusts them itself (rather than on a fully automatic setting). If I just try to use a fully automatic setting, the camera will insist on using the flash, to compensate for the poor lighting. And using the flash ruins the ambient lighting.

But allowing the camera to adjust its own ISO settings and exposure to compensate for low-light shooting also means that the shutter has to be open for longer. Plus, the moon itself is too far away for my camera to focus comfortably on it. So I need to have the moon near something else, so that the camera can focus on what’s in the foreground while still taking a relatively crisp photograph of the moon.

That’s where I was lucky last time, since the grevillea was nearby and the moon had risen early: it wasn’t full dark when I took the last moon photos.

And that’s why I couldn’t resist trying to take these photographs when the moon moved over the palm tree in our back garden late tonight (about three hours later than the last photos were taken):

The clouds create an interesting effect, too: