Googs Trip 2016, Days 1 to 3.

Saturday morning was an early start as we were going to set off after taking a few photos of the sunrise from the border at Point Danger. I was up at 5 am, had a shower, put the last of the fridge stuff in the car and headed off at about 05:30 am. I found Shane's car and got the camera and tripod set up when he wandered back after having taken some photos, a little later Brett rolled in and started taking photos with his iPhone. Sunrise was delayed for a bit as there were clouds on the horizon but we eventually got a photo and set off a little after 7 am. A quick stop at the BP at Chinderah for iced coffee and then we were off. 

The new section of road at the back of Byron is great and the dual lanes go all the way to Balina now. Then the day was spent mostly doing 80 km/hr at the road works with occasional bursts up to 110 km/hr on the finished sections. I was leading and had the cruise control set as there are so many fixed and average speed cameras that it wasn't worth risking a speeding ticket. We also saw a few police cars with radars. We had a late lunch at Taree and then rocked into the fake Ayers Rock service station near Norms at around 3:30 pm to refuel. Then onto Norm's place where he had the camp fire roaring. 

We sat around chatting for awhile and then had a look at some video that Brett was putting together from one of Norm's trips to Cape York. Boy we have it easy now. Shane shared some cheese cake that Jo had made and it was pretty good. I set up the swag and stretcher in Norms car shed and we had a relatively early night as we were going to be leaving at around 7 am the next morning. 

Brett and Norm led the way as we headed south to Hexham and then turned west towards Dubbo. Most of the morning was spent driving through fog and mist with occasional patch of bright blue sky. Lunch was at Nyngan and then we refueled at Cobar. 

Although it was fine and dry now there had been a lot of rain recently and we were worried that the road into the Paroo national park would closed so we rang Phil and decided to camp somewhere in Wilcannia. We ended up at Warrawong just out of Wilcannia for the night and had a small camp fire before it started to rain. 

So we went to bed around 9'ish. There was a bit of rain overnight but it was fine and clear in the morning. After a little sleep in we packed up and headed off around 08:30 am. 

Then it was off to Broken Hill with me in the lead again. Pretty boring drive but easy. A quick refuel in Broken Hill and then it was off into a head wind. We kept the speed down to 100 km/hr to save fuel and pushed onto lunch at Yunta. Then further west through a couple of little town before we got into Port Augusta just after 3 pm. We did our fruit and vegetable shopping in Coles because we couldn't take any fresh stuff into SA. After refueling we checked into the Big4 caravan park, and had nice hot showers.

 No camp fire unfortunately. On the trip across from Broken Hill the Paj's fuel economy was nearly 15 litres/100 km when on the previous couple of days it was just over 12 litres/100 km. Bloody head wind. It's quite windy in Port Augusta so without the benefit of a camp fire we went to bed nice and early. 

Flowers and macro

While at mum and dad's on the weekend I tried out the new camera while walking around mum's garden. I had the 14-140 mm lens on and tried that out to see if it would let me take half decent macro photos. The following is at 140 mm with the distance to th flower at about the minimum focusing distance of 30 cm. 

I had a play around with another couple of flowers, experimenting with aperture, distance and whatever else I could come up with. The colours all seem to be nicely similar to what I saw and all are jpeg's straight from the camera. 

Then I started to play with the Post Focus mode on the camera. Essentially, the camera takes a short (~2 sec) 4K video where the focal plane is adjusted from the nearest to the most distant point in the field of view. Then while viewing the image on the camera touch screen you can choose which part of the image you want to be in focus simply by touching it and then save it as a 8MP jpeg image. Here is a link to Panasonic's explanation page including some video :- http://www.panasonic.com/global/consumer/lumix/feature/post_focus.html

For this I experimented on one of mum's orchids. Here is a link to the video file it produced :- http://youtu.be/-NKwkG3dFRk

And following are four photos extracted from the video on the camera. 

Since the 4K video is a standard .mp4 format you can also extract individual frames as 8 MP images on a computer using most video editing software (I.e. IMovie). If you want to get fancy you can combine several of these frames together using focus stacking software to produce an image with a much larger depth of field but still retain the blurred background. I haven't graduated to this yet but I'll have to give it a go sooner or later. I hand held the camera for the above shots but if you want to do this properly you would set the camera up on a tripod or you can align the images afterwards in software before stacking them. Overall I'm quite happy with the performance of the camera for this sort of thing as I don't often do proper macros and wild flowers would be the most likely time I would take these sort of shots. 

Note :- No flowers were harmed while taking these photos. Also, I only know one is an orchid as mum told me that, the rest I have no idea what they are. :)