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. :)

New camera

The poor old Sony SLT A-33 was getting a bit long in the tooth (nearly 6 years old). It has performed well but I have  had a couple of times where I couldn't set the aperture, however a reboot fixed the problem. This was my first interchangeable lens camera and I knew that you generally get locked into a camera brand by the lenses you buy. The Sony seemed like a good camera at the time and the lens mounting system had been around for quite awhile (A-mount which was compatible with the old Minolta AF mount), so I assumed that all sony's new cameras would use it. Unfortunately, Sony changed to a new system, the E-mount a couple of years ago for all their new cameras, so whatever new camera I bought I would need to get some new lenses as well. 

After doing quite a bit of research I ended up getting a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX85, which had only just been released. This has a 16 MP micro-four-thirds (MFT) sensor with all sorts of fancy in camera stabilisation. The advantage of the MFT system is that both Panasonic and Olympus make both cameras and lenses which are interchangeable so hopefully I won't get stuck in a few years when I want a new camera. I got a Panasonic 14-140 mm lens (28-280 mm 35 mm equivalent) with the camera and also got a Panansonic 100-300 mm lens (200-600 mm equivalent) for long distance photos. A comprehensive review of the camera can be found here - http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/panasonic-lumix-dmc-gx85-gx80-review

It has lots of fancy modes and also 4K video shooting, so I spent a bit of time going through the manual so see how it all worked. It is fairly compact but feels quite solid in its build quality and both the screen for the EVF and the rear display screen are OLED screens and they make the old LCD screens on the Sony seem fairly primitive. Just like the Retina screens that Apple produced make the old screens seem prehistoric. I took the camera and the 14-140 lens for a walk around Currumbin Creek one Saturday arvo and had a play with some of the fancy modes. One thing I should say is that the autofocus is also amazing compared to the old Sony. The colours and close up shooting were great for flowers. 

One of the modes that is quite interesting is a monochrome mode called L.Monochrome which produces nice moody images. 

I was also able to geotag all the images from the walk by using the Panasonic iPhone app which records a gps log while you are shooting and then when you are back home connects to the camera by WiFi to download the track to the camera and tag each of the images. Unfortunately, this is all done without being able to get at the gps points, which means I can't use them to make a map of the walk. At present I'm shooting in Raw and jpeg mode but really only using the jpeg's as I'm not particularly good at processing the RAWs to produce anything even close to what comes out of the camera. 

The following weekend I went for a wander down to the beach with the big lens on and quickly realized that it is not real good as a general walk around lens. But I was able to get some reasonable photos and even some 4K video. 

This was looking north to Surfers Paradise at the lowest zoom (100 mm). 

From the same spot at the highest zoom (300 mm).

The 4K video I shot was of some jet skis out in the ocean at the maximum and I was a bit hard to keep the subjects in the middle of the shot but the stabilization helped to miniseries the shakes. It's on YouTube but you can't see it in full 4K just HD - https://youtu.be/7_0Nx8_NNfU

On the way home I tried out the selective colour mode on the Honey Bee Koala in the park, it lets you specify just one colour to show through with the rest of the image being converted to monochrome. Probably not the best example as there isn't that mush contrast difference with the yellow. 

All up I'm quite impressed so far and while I have a handle on the basics of the camera, I have a lot more to learn, to make use of the full features available. 

Antarctica trip Jan 2016 Day 19

The day started early as we had to be packed and gone from the ship by
about 8:30 am. SO after breakfast we said a quick goodbye to the rest
of the group and others we had met on the ship and headed off to the
buses. They dropped us and our luggage at a place where we could store
our bags for the day and then Gary and I headed off for a walk up and
down the main street looking for coffee. Unfortunately most places
didin't open until 10 am so we had a bit of a wait. We then had a
relaxing coffee and a bite to eat and connected up to the wifi to
check messages and say hello to the folks back home.
We then checked in on our respective hotels to make sure we were
booked and that was all good, so it was a walk back to the luggage
store with a detour around the port to have a look at the docked
cruise ships. There were six all up including ours, which would be
restocked and ready to leave on another trip by 6 pm this arvo. The
weather was once again superb with blue skies and a temperature of
around 15 deg C. I went back to the hotel and checked in properly and
then got myself organised and had a bit of an afternoon snooze.
Unfortunately the room was very hot with no way to control the
temperature so I ended up openning a window to make it less stuffy.
Around 3'ish I went for a wander up the main street for a look in the
gift shops but most of it was so tacky, I didn't end up buying
anything, so it was back to the hotel to read a book. I was getting
hungry around 7'ish, so it was back up to the main street where I
found an all you can eat Argentinian BBQ place (300 pesos, roughly
US$15), unfortunately it wasn't open until 8 pm, so I went for a walk
down to the harbour. Four of the cruise ships had already left and one
big, very fancy one was in the process of leaving, so I sat and
watched that for awhile. The BBQ place was very good and I made sure I
obeyed my general rule of having so much main course that you don't
have room for dessert. Back at the hotel I repacked my bags and got
ready for the plane trips home.
The next day I would be checking out at 10 am, catching a taxi to the
airport, then hopping on a plane after lunch for a three and a half
hour flight back to Buenos Aires, then about six hours in the air port
lounge before heading off on a 13.5 hour flight to Auckland. Then
another four hours in the Auckland airport lounge before the final
three and a half hour flight to Brisbane. So with the time difference
I'll leave Friday lunch time and get into Brisbane roughly Sunday
lunch time. Not looking forward to this.

Argentina_Antarctica_Day17 and 18

The first night sailing home went quite calmly and at the moment the Drake Passage seems to about the same, maybe a bit calmer than our trip to the south over a week ago. Now we have to fill in the days on the ship, so we'll have a few photography sessions and I'll see if I can finish off a couple books, as well as to continue to sort out my photos of which I have taken over 5,000 so far. I've thrown out quite a few as some of the ones taken from the zodiacs end up having focus problems or someone stands up in front of you while trying to take a photo. I've generally left on Continuous shooting mode for when there is wildlife around, so I generally end with at least two photos of everything.
After lunch we have a mini-Australia Day celebration in the Observation Deck, with some munchies, an Australian flag "Borrowed" from the captain and some Australian Crawl playing in the background. Then its a relatively lazy afternoon reading and organising photos before the dail y recap and Briefing which is followed by dinner. The chef had organised Pavlova for dessert and we had a chorus of Waltzing Matilda and rousing cheer of Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Ooi, Ooi, Ooi. Dinner lasted a while as we sat around chatting, before finally heading off to bed.
The seas were still fairly gentle overnight and seemed even calmer the next day. I'm not even feeling the need for Kwells. Today is our last day at sea, so its time to start packing our bags and making sure everything is organised for disembarkation tomorrow morning about 8am. We are having a final photography get together this morning to handle any last minute questions as well to look at a slide show that Michael has prepared showing all the high points of the trip so far. After lunch we had a lazy afternoon reading, snoozing, and starting to pack our bags. At the final briefing session they had a great presentation of some of the photos taken over the duration of trip as well as hints on how to fold the big yellow jackets, so that they fit into out luggage. Then there was a final cocktail party, followed by dinner and a chat in the bar with our fellow travellers, before a reasonably early night in bed. At this stage we were well in the lee of South America so the seas were very calm and no one seemed to be suffering from sea sickness. Tomorrow would be an early rise as we leave the boat in Ushuaia and start out journey home.

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Antarctica trip Jan 2016 Day 16

Today is the last day where we get to go out on the zodiacs, so it was a relatively early start for breakfast. It was a bit windy but as the ship entered the Graham Passage the wind dropped off as we were protected. Then it was into the zodiacs and out for a couple of hours of cruising. The scenery was spectacular with the harbour surrounded by glaciers and mountains. Our first sight was a leopard seal making a meal of a poor ex-penguin while swimming along. Then there was seals and penguins on the ice floes and the beautiful scenery. The sky was blue and it was quite warm.
Back at the ship we had some lunch and got things organised for an afternoon excursion while the ship sailed to Mikkelsen Harbour. This included the ship sailing through the Graham Passage for some more spectacular views. Once there we had another cruise around before landing on D'Hainaut Island to look at the penguin colonies and tons of whale bones on the beach. There was also an old shed that w as part of an Argentine base. The wind had picked up a lot and it was getting quite chilly, so we headed back to the ship a little early. We got out of the wet weather gear for the last time and headed off to the evening briefing followed by dinner. I had an early night in bed as we were heading north to Ushuaia via the Drake Passage. It was time to start taking the Kwells again in case things got rough.

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Antarctica trip Jan 2016 Day 15

The weather was looking quite reasonable as we all headed off to breakfast at 07:30. Today we were headed to Danco Island where we would land and view some penguin colonies, both Gentoo and Chinstrap. We landed on a pleasant rocky beach and then went on a walk up to a high spot across some snow to see the penguins. It was a relatively easy walk up the hill but by the time we were walking down it had gotten pretty slippery so a slow and careful descent was needed. Then it was back onto the zodiac and a cruise around the surrounding islands. Some great icebergs and some very lazy seals reclining on them in the sun.
After lunch the ship had moved to Foyn Harbour and the views were spectacular. The remaining clouds had gone away and we had beautiful blue skies for an afternoon of zodiac cruising. This afternoon we got to see lots of Humpback whales as they were cruising around and feeding on the krill. There was also seals and penguins on the sea ice and some very inter esting looking icebergs. We found out that the small off cast icebergs are called Bergy Bits.
Back at the ship it time for the brave souls to undertake the polar plunge. They put the gangway down beside the ship and 50 or so of the 180 passengers jumped into the cold, cold water. I had fun just watching the reactions, there was quite a few swear words involved when people first hit the water. After the days briefing and dinner, I spent some time up on the Observation deck just watching the whales swimming and feeding around the ship. It was a very serene experience, except of course for the engine noise from the ship.

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