Happy 70th birthday!

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black and white Sunday, Cruz, Loki

Cruz has just turned 70. Therefore he feels entitled to take up residence on top of the dirty pink sheets in my washing basket at the top of the stairs. We brought him home from Queensland as a too-young puppy, whom my son rescued from extermination. He was one of a litter of ten, and my daughter has his brother, Loki. Cruz travelled for two days in the car from Queensland to Potato Point up J’s jumper, and he’s still ecstatic whenever J visits.

He’s a great addition to our household. Everything is impregnated and interwoven with his white hairs: there are never any foodscraps to dispose of; he barks madly whenever anyone stops in the drive; and he lays claim to every patch of sun – which is why he’s in the clothes basket.

Cruz and Loki were once very tiny snub-nosed puppies. 

Here’s my daughter’s account of their birth, snaffled from her Facebook birthday post:

Ten years ago a ten-pup litter was born during a huge thunderstorm at the Happy Apple (a Stanthorpe caravan park). I had to drive a tractor over from work because the road was too muddy to get my old Pulsar out, and these are two of the little faces that greeted me. Happy birthday to the two funniest, weirdest dogs in a long life of peculiar canines.

They are still cosy companions on occasional visits.

For a collection of wonderful black and white headshots – but none as handsome as Cruz! – have a look at Paula’s black and white Sunday.

Thursday’s special: pick a word

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branching, Thursday's special, vigilant

Paula offers this generous pick a word challenge once a month. She bestows five words on us; her superlative photographic interpretation; and an invitation to join in. This month Melbourne has provided me with images for two of the words. 

This tree in the Botanical Gardens, whose identity I recently deleted, provides me with the perfect image for branching.

The drinking fountain near my apartment and the Queen Victoria Markets represents the vigilance of the women of the temperance union and reminds me of the temperance pledge I signed at primary school, long since breached. That admonitory hand amongst skyscrapers and autumn leaves rebukes me.

RegularRandom: Five minutes with a sand bank

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from the same position, on the beach, RegularRandom

I should never embark on anything in my current mood. It’s too easy for an idea to become an obsession. That’s what’s happened with RegularRandom, the challenge on DesleyJane’s blog to spend five minutes photographing an object. For my second attempt, a sand bank chose me.

Here, I’m not really experimenting with light, because outside the light is what it is, and mostly doesn’t change much in five minutes. I certainly can’t manipulate the sun. What I’ve done is photograph what I see, with one foot staying in the same position in front of a sand bank crisscrossed by roots and vines as I look up, down, out and straight ahead. The other foot I permit to lunge at full reach. It is mainly an exercise in examining a site in close up.

Five minutes with a clothes horse

Tags

clothes horse, raindrops, regular random

When I was in Warsaw, I determined to join DesleyJane at musingsofafrequentflyingscientist in an intriguing challenge called RegularRandom, once I returned to my leisurely life at Potato Point. To meet that challenge you need to spend five minutes with one object and photograph it in a variety of ways.

My back deck offers many possible subjects. A tumble of shells on the glass table, emptied out of a dish to remove mosquito-breeding water. A python skin shed by my resident python and not yet dried out enough to lift and drape around the neck of the china goat on my chiffonier. The ragged covers of the deck chairs. The spectacularly rusty stand for the deck umbrella. A clothes drying rack with an apron in recovery from the outfall of a rotten potato in my vegetable rack.

It’s the clothes rack I decide to focus on, with its lines of raindrops, colourful pegs and the black and white check of an apron that belonged to one of my beloved aunts.

This post celebrates two things. Drying washing outside, after a year of indoor drying – always supposing the rain stops.  And the power of photography to capture a moment that won’t return. By the afternoon, the rain drops have disappeared and the clothes horse becomes merely mundane and functional.
 

 

 

 

Black and white gardens

Tags

b&w, spotted gums

Garden tragic Jude is asking this month for a b&w or monochrome garden-related photo. My garden is the bush, and one of my favourite plants is the spotted gum, which I've photographed untold times – smooth and stately, peeling in great slabs, gleaming with rich colours after rain. I've adjusted to its name change – once Eucalyptus maculata it has become Corymbia maculata – but a name change doesn't change beauty. The forests near home are filled with spotted gums and their companion burrawangs and, in summer, hyacinth orchids. In one patch on the headland the trunks are twisted and the trees stunted. Elsewhere they stand alone and can reach giant status. The Big Tree in state forest near J's has been a place of family pilgrimage for many years: if you haven't visited it you feel deprived of a mysterious pleasure. Other giants lurk on the outskirts of rainforest.

The one in the photo is the view from the front door of the house where my children grew up. I have seen it peering through mist; vivid in crimsons, creams and greens after rain; dangling shreds of bark at raking up time as the fire season revs up; serene and smoothly grey in afternoon light.

 

 

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Drinking the rainbow

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Durras, mosaics, toilet block art, vibrant

For this week's wordpress challenge “vibrant” is the theme and its epigraph is a quote from Khalil Gibran:

Let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow

Three king parrots offered their vibrant green and red briefly outside my living room window, but I wasn't fast enough to capture them.

Mosaics on toilet blocks are much easier to sieze photographically. This collage consists of fragments of Durras rising, 2014, a pair of mosaics designed by Moira Christie depicting Durras Beach by day and night.

 

 

 

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Black and white Sunday

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black and white Sunday

I don't usually do black and white or take up challenges, but I'm so pleased that Paula's back in the blogosphere I'll give it a go this week. Two gos in fact: roadside mallee flower that is bright yellow in reality, and an attempt to capture morning light on the silvery bark of a eucalypt overarching our campsite beside the Murray River.

 

 

 

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