Barrington Tops National Park - HDR and Panoramas

With no birds around we had ample time for all kinds of other photography, including the challenge of trying to capture the beauty of the vistas that are associated with a mountainous environment. HDR does a good job at that! Some time back I used a bit of blog space to describing the process of using HDR and Tone Mapping to capture the details in the bright as well as in the dark parts of a photo, it all got a bit confusing. A few photos are worth many words: Above is a HDR + tone mapped photo combined from 5 raw images and below is a single jpg shot of the same view.

The jpg is doing a fair job at trying to preserve details in the dark front of the photo, but at the cost of badly overexposing the sky in the distance. In the HDR image details are contributed from all 5 photos allowing good resolutions in the dark as well as the bright parts. I might actually prefer the horizontal version of the view.

I also managed to shoot a few panoramas. Autostitch still works a treat and as long as the old CPU does not have too much to chew on and that I do not ask for too high a resolution it spits out panos as fast as I can generate blog posts to put them in. :-)

There is obviously the possibility of combining HDR and stitching - making tone mapped panoramas! - That will have to be another day, but there is absolutely nothing difficult about it, just a matter of shooting a hold flock of raw images and then remember what goes where. :-)

All good! Great escape to Barrington Tops National Park. We entered the park from the western side, but decided to leave going east. It is safe to say that we saw more birds during the ca. 40 min drive out of the park than we had seen during the 3 days up on the plateau. The eastern part also called Gloucester Tops National Park seemed very much alive and vibrant and I could be convinced to go there for a long weekend at some stage if someone is up for a bit of camping and an attempt at seeing a scrub-bird.

Mount Kosciuszko - Summit day!

Conquering Mount Kasciuszko, the highest pinnacle of mainland Australia, on Australia day! How much more Australian can it get? :-) As mentioned in the previous post we set out on our endeavor very early in the morning, to be able to make it back to Sydney before night fall. In reality we had heaps of time, since the climb is indeed quite gentle and can be done easily as a half day walk.


Crossing the Snowy river once again, we took the time to examine the crystal clear water and managed to spot a bit of underwater wildlife. The fishes of the alpine region of Kosciuszko have a very interesting story. Being a fish high up on a mountain does obviously have its difficulties, since water, as I am sure you readers are aware of, runs down when given a chance. So as a fish you either have to use enormous amounts of energy "staying high" or find steady water - like Blue Lake - and stay there at the cost of isolating yourself in a restricted area.

Indeed Blue Lake holds an endemic subspecies of the Galaxias family, obviously in close family to the small Galaxias sp. of the snowy river - like the one in the picture above - it has been isolated long enough to become a species of its own. In fact, if you "dive" into the literature you realize that the parting of water in the Kosciuszko National Park has lead to a number of fish subspecies each filling their own little niche of habitat. Exciting stuff!

With all that excitement going on around us it took a while to make it to the summit, but we finally found ourselves at the target of our walk, 2228m above sea level, Mount Kosciuszko! When coming from Charlotte Pass the "peak" looks quite flat and boring, but standing on the top you have some very impressive views.

Walking in the Kosciuszko National Park during Australian summer is absolutely fantastic, nowhere else in Australia (except maybe for Tasmania) can you do some serious hiking this time of year without having to bring your own body-weight in drinking water. The morning walk to the top had near perfect temperature and standing admiring the views was nearly a bit chill - very nice indeed!

Realizing that the ascent had taken slightly longer than expected we cranked up the speed a bit and pushed rapidly down the mountain. Guess we were all ready to get back to Sydney, there is something about coming home that is nearly as good as being on the move .. and I was super excited about getting the pictures onto the computer.

Again it was astonishing seeing the variation and quantity of the wildflowers along the path, during the ascent you noticed how a type of plants start being more common and then slowly disappears again as you go higher, each species having its own optimum micro habitat.


I really would have liked not having to name those grasshoppers, but since they are here on the blog I should at least give a qualified(?) guess. The one above gave me a hard time and only after realizing that the red dots are not a part of the grasshoppers natural coloration it started working out. After looking into a bit of grasshopper literature I found a Monistria sp. that looked quite similar and then it did not take long to find the Spotted Mountain Grasshopper Monistria concinna .. It should have been easy; it is spotted and we saw it while bushwalking in the mountains! :-) Best guess for the grasshopper in the picture below is probably an Yellow winged locust Gastrimargus musicus, you may argue that the wings are not yellow (I can reveal that I had the same thought), but apparently they are when unfolded! - see here :-) .. however, as always any suggestions are very welcome.

Blizzard Over Balling And Another Walk

We got a fantastic load of snow! Winters are so much better when white, it extends the day by many hours, brightening up those otherwise pitch black mornings and afternoons. Another benefit is that you have to drag your lazy Christmas-food-filled-carcass away from the top spot in front of the telly - probably loosing that very special extra comfy chair to an even lazier relative - to do your duty and clean the footpath.

The first couple of times every year it is actually quite fun and there is nothing wrong with the exercise. This year we had hired some exceptionally eager foreign labor aka little G. Who by pure spirit and determination easily compensated for her less than mediocre broom handling skills :-) She indeed enjoyed the task so much that it is still talked about how the snow, in a miraculous manner, disappered from around Casa Larsen that Christmas 2009.

Shoveling the footpath is one thing, cleaning the roads is another! As the layer of snow thickened we were actually getting slightly worried that we would have trouble making our way down to the "summerhouse" where we had our accommodation. However driving in snow is much better than driving on ice, so as long as you do not go at an excessive speed you have quite good grip in newly fallen snow.

We easily maneuvered the Volvo and ourselves through the most fantastically cozy winter landscape anybody can imagine :-)

Apart from battling snow in various ways, we managed to do good solid walk nearly every day. As stated in the earlier post there is wildlife around, however, it is not always straight forward to "capture" it. The dobbeltbekkasin (Common Snipe) was particularly difficult - during the two weeks I was home I saw maybe 20, but the best picture I got is the one below :-/ Those Danish birds are smart ones! :-)

A less secretive bird roaming the Danish landscape during winter is the Common Buzzard (Musvåge). Driving around you will see them sitting next to the roads at elevated posts scouting for anything mouse-sized and edible, they will sit there for hours .. or until you step out of the car and start fiddling with the camera gear and they are gone.

Lots of snow is, however, great news for mouse-sized edible creatures, since the buzzard along with most other predators have a hard time hunting creatures hidden by 25cm of snow - 2010 will be a big mouse year :-)

Capertee Valley - Glen Davis - Camping

The plan had been to visit Lamington National Park, in the south east corner of Queensland. Firstly because it is a fantastic spot and secondly because my dad has never been to Queensland. Unfortunately bad weather was forecast to hit the coast and instead we decided to take our party inland to good old Capertee Valley that once again delivered an excellent combo of camping and nature galore - so apart from missing his Queensland tick, dad was not cheated in any way.

We had left Sydney Friday afternoon, which made it possible to reach the campground in Glen Davis before sunset, indeed we were able to pitch both tents and cook a bit of gnocchi goodness before it got dark. After a big sleep and a solid serve of Gemma's signature breakfast dish we were ready for a big Saturday in the shoes.

We had opted for a walk deep into the valley, trying to push as far in as we could possibly do in a single day allowing time to get back out again. It proved to be an excellent idea! :-)

We managed to spend 8 hours walking that Saturday - 5 hours in and 3 hours getting back out of the valley again. The path is excellent - some would even argue that it is boringly good, guess it doubles as a maintenance track for the national park rangers supposedly being able to take a (good!) 4 wheel drive through. Nevertheless after a few hours of walking you feel the valley starting to narrow in on you and you get that fantastic feeling of being properly "into the wild" :-)

The secret to a good bit of bushwalking is to be well prepared! Always bring enough water and the usual survival gear. Knowing the mob I was traveling with this particular Saturday I also knew that as long as weather was good and there was plenty of food spirits would be high - As is quite evident from the picture above, both criteria were met! :-D

Great day in the shoes and as you can imagine there was heaps more to see than just the landscape stuff I have attached to this post, will put together a wildlife post shortly.

Gundabooka National Park - part 2 - Summit day :-)

Sunday morning after the usual very early little wander around with the binoculars and camera followed by another solid breakfast we were ready to take on the big one - Mount Gundabooka! The above pictures is a panorama stitched together from 7 pictures by use of autostich, press the picture to see a larger version.

Walking to Mount Gundabooka is hard work, walking back is hard work as well, but more importantly it is tricky business! The reason being that it is very easy to walk towards something you can see - like a mountain - but hard to pinpoint a clearing in some dense mulga forest ... even if you put the worlds biggest (value for money) dome tent in it. However if you have a compass - and someone that knows what direction to point it in - you can find everything ... or at least back to your tent again. Our companions were both greatly skilled in the art of following magnetic needles so we happily joined in on some exceptional rewarding off the track bushwalking to and fro the Gundabooka range.

Walking through the mulga scrub might not be the thing to do if you are exclusively into landscape photography (or a lot of other things), but wildlife was quite fantastic - I will add some pictures from the traverse of the scrub in the next post - Climbing the mountain though was an entirely different thing :-)

The range makes a great climb, it looks impressive on pictures but is still fairly easily negotiated and gives plenty of opportunities of enjoying the views across the mulga covered plains below.


Like all good mountain climbers we celebrated our conquest of the summit with a feast. Ours consisting of a delicious combo of chocolate, scones and water while enjoying the vistas and the acrobatic performance of the woodswallows flying around us, how good was that? ;-)

Half way home the sun broke through the clouds and we realized how lucky we had been by having a thin layer of clouds protecting us most of the day. Walking in the outback under a burning sun very fast becomes unpleasant. First of all because it is bloody hot and secondly because of the army of flies assaulting every exposed part of your body, trying to suck any moisture out of you - or of a sweaty backpack :-)

A Long Day in Botany Bay NP - Part 4 - Landscape

Apart from reptiles, birds, insects and wildflowers there is also the landscape worth having a look at down around Botany Bay. Brown cliffs in combo with some green bush, add some high blue sky and some dark blue ocean and it is hard not to get some pleasing pictures :-)

The only activity where Botany Bay has ever let us down was probably during the infamous fish-less snorkel trip. Every time I look at the waters around Boat Harbour I get in doubt, can it be true that such crystal clear inviting looking water does not hold any fish? The army of fishermen and spearfishers always present seems to suggest otherwise - or could it be ...?

Well, well - no more Botany Bay for a while, I (nearly) promise! :-) have probably pushed it a bit by making it into 4 parts, but hey, it has been a windy weekend and I had to do some computer stuff anyway. I have attached a link to the Picasa album below, there is a few extra pictures that did not make it to the blog.

Boat Harbour + Botany Bay NP

Another Long Bay Excursion

I have been busy doing non-blog'able things lately and have not been able to pack as much action into my weekends as I would have liked to. However, living at the coast gives the possibility of getting into something that feels like nature in very short time and I have tried taking advantage of that - unfortunately my underwater camera has become very unreliable and if my last tweaks do not help I am afraid it will have to spend the rest of its life on land.

Being restricted to land-based photography I took of to good old Long Bay. Despite having visited it over and over again there is always a surprise or two hiding along the cliffs down there ... and if not, you will have to make one yourself :-)


I nearly always find myself at Long Bay towards the end of the day, probably because it gives the most fantastic lighting conditions imaginable! The sun going down in the west and the cliffs facing east out towards the ocean gives an amazing play between light and shadow ... and a welcome excuse for testing out the HDR capability of camera and software.


HDR photography: Stacking five raw files taken with -2,-1,0,+1 and +2 stops of compensation means that you expand the dynamic range of the resulting photo i.e. you keep information in the shadows as well as in the highlights. Afterwards you can play around and try to compress all that info into a conventional jpg file by performing a tone mapping step ... Depending on how hard you push those sliders you can end up with something that categorize everywhere between normal and freaky :-D ... Unfortunately, stacking five pictures also mean that it becomes very clear just how dirty your lens or sensor is - looks like I need a go with a bit of soap and water to clean that old camera of mine ;-)

Sometimes though the light is just right and you do not need fancy software to manipulate anything. Tip of the day is to visit Long Bay just as the sun is disappearing and shoot those golden cliffs.

Botany Bay With An American Twist

Got up early Saturday morning, I had a little package flying in from America - not bad at all :-) After dragging the usual +70kg of luggage up into the apartment and a bit of whining about the level of jetlag. We soon realized that unless the rest of the Saturday was going to be conducted with closed eyes, we had to get out where there was sunlight, a gentle sea breeze and preferable a bit of excitement happening ... well, well off to the south end of Botany Bay National park, where recent rumors would know, that a bit of wildlife action was going on.

First surprise was the spotting of a bewildered cyclist obviously dropped by the peloton, but with the usual cyclist attitude, claiming that he would be able to catch up with the break-away after a little rest. Unfortunately he had managed to scare away any sign of wildlife around him - probably due to the heavy breathing - and after a few polite greetings we continued south and saw him head back towards the vibrant suburb of Marrickville.

We had a great walk along the coast, the pure beauty of the place made it difficult to fall asleep and when the vistas were not enough, a bit of balancing along the cliffs edge made sure we were all alert :-)

The Grass Owl was hiding, which gives me a one up on the American ticking machine, but boy does she attract wildlife!! :-) It was all happening at sea, on land and in the air.

We managed to get sufficient views (but less than impressive pictures) of a Tawny-crowned Honeyeater taking a bath. Saw a few albatrosses and a Southern Giant-Petrel, which was very nice after having used quite a few month at the cliffs around Long Bay only being able to spot the northern cousin. But the highlight of the day was no doubt having eye-to-eye contact with a Black-shouldered Kite.

Great day down south, impressive effort to get off the plane and hit the bush straight away ... have a sneaking suspicion though that those binoculars were held high once and a while to sneakily hide a closing eye or two ;-)