To the garden again!

Back to the Royal Botanic garden. Autumn's footsteps are closing in and most of the flowers have disappeared.

I was hoping to get a few photos of Autumn leaves but there weren't much of those around either. Instead I took a few shots at different angles to see if I could get variations of images. Hopefully the garden will be replenished with new flowers or plants for us to photograph.

Visit to St Mary's Cathedral

Shots taken of the St Mary's Cathedral and Hyde Park fountain using my original 28-200mm lens...I'm quite happy with the results. The weather wasn't the greatest that day and as per the first photo I had a few raindrops which fell on my lens so the image is slightly flawed.

Unfortunately the cathedral no longer permits photography inside so I didn't manage to take any photos of the interior which was also beautiful.

Surprise guests

I've been hearing some birds bicker outside the balcony for a few weeks but never bothered to check as I didn't really want to encourage the curiosity of the cats...

On Saturday I was out watering the cat grass when I spotted Shadow crouched really low and looking intensely at something...I glance across and there they were, a pair of beautiful rainbow lorikeets feasting on the nameless fruiting plant right outside my balcony! They were vibrantly coloured and the fruits they were feasting on were bright red which complemented their blue/green feathers beautifully.

I rushed inside to get my camera and moved quietly to the edge of the balcony trying not to scare the birds while I took the photos (although they looked very comfortable even in the presence of 2 cats staring at them). Below are some of the shots I took while there were still enough light.

These creatures sure know how to pose~ Although I hope they wipe their beaks after eating a bit more often :D

Hopefully I'll get to see them again this weekend ^_^

Daliah Centre Crop

Out of all my photos I've taken during this month, the one I'm most pleased with is the daliah...

It is extremely difficult to keep the photos focused while using a macro lens without tripod...no matter how still you think you are, you will still see blurring in parts of the photo when you view it at 100% size on a big monitor.

The reason I love this photo is that it was really quite sharp even at 100% which is rare (most probably due to sheer luck)

Below is a centre crop of the same photo at 100%

Photos again

Although I've been inactive on the blog, I was still shooting photos as much as I could. We've had a few rainy and windy days in Sydney right after Easter holiday and photo shooting was made quite difficult.

Even though I had a few lucky days where I managed to capture a small dragonfly and a few nice shots of the daliahs, most of the photos from my visits didn't turn out too great to make the blog cut...

I finally managed to pull out 5 photos that I'm reasonably happy with for a few reasons and here they are ^_^

Sniff sniff, it's Echo!

I tried to take some cat photos last week. All of Shadow's were ruined as he couldn't keep still...I think he doesn't like being photographed much so it's his way of avoiding it...

Echo on the other hand was such a charm to photograph, she usually stays put in a posture for a few minutes allowing me to adjust settings etc.

I'm happy I was able to get a clear shot of her nose~ =^.^=

After a long pause

I've been ooa from the blog for a few weeks now. I haven't been able to take great photos the last few sessions, the photos ended up either too dark or too grainy. One thing I blame on was the weather, we had a few cloudy days here which didn't help with nature photos. It also took me some time getting use to the new 60mm lens which I'm still really glad that I got.

The session we did last week was quite good, I ended up with some shots that I'm happy about so I'm finally back again blogging ^_^

Hopefully the weather will hold this week at least during my photo sessions so I can continue to update the blog on a weekly basis...