Cape Banks with The Gang

Weather was not really good for snorkeling so the gang decided to use an early(?) Saturday morning down at Cape Banks for a healthy serve of coastal bushwalking spiced up with the chance of some pelagic action. To convince the boys to join I might have mentioned the possibility of bagging the resident Australian Hobby ... which obviously did not show!

Fantastic landscape down there and amazing that you can walk around for hours less than 3.5km from one of the busiest harbours in the southern end of the world and less than 6km from Sydney airport and have it all to yourself ... guess a bit of shabby weather increase your chances of solitude :-D


No Hobby and the shearwaters outside of binocular range meant that the Eastern Reef Egret above could proudly claim the "bird of the day"-title. But once again what really mattered was that we managed to drag our lazy bums of the couch (or out of bed) and put a bit of early Saturday excitement into a gray weekend :-)

Night Photography in Coogee

Once again I had signed up for a photowalk with Yiing, one of my Canon slinging friends. As usual there is always a surprise or two when Yiing is around :-) This time it was luckily great news .. and camera related, he had brought the Canon 50mm f/1.4! A super fast lens like that is tons of fun, the large aperture allows the photographer to take pictures that you simple cannot get with slower (cheaper) lenses.

All good! We started out by fooling around with shallow depth of field and available light shooting, but as it got really dark shutter speed slowed down and we decided to concentrate on long exposure night shooting. The secret is to have a good quality tripod, mirror lock-up option and a remote .. well, I do not have a tripod or a remote, my camera has mirror lock-up, but I cannot combine it with the timer function .. however there is quite a bit of good solid stonework around Coogee, which conveniently can be used as solid support, unfortunately, it also means that after a few nights out you end up having to take the same pictures over and over again unless the local council manages to put in some strategically well placed extra stones :-D One day I might buy a tripod .. maybe.

Good long exposure works really well with moving water, the averaging over 30 seconds (or longer) gives you this dreamy mercury look of the water, when conditions are right. This night in Coogee the waves were slightly on the large side and even cheating by retreating to the rock pool in our hunt for some steady waters was only partly successful - guess we will have to get out there another time! :-)

Cape Banks - Australian Hobby in Flight

Went for another little quick afternoon visit to Cape Banks, where we had first seen the Australian Hobby. This time we not only saw it again, but we managed to get a fairly good BIF :-)

After all the excitement with the Pacific Gull at Long Bay, Gemma had been all fired up about finishing of all the (usual) gulls - so mission accomplished and lots of cheering(?) when the Kelp Gull above cruised by.

All good! Great little trip and all this running around after work keeps you fit :-)

Royal Botanic Gardens - Macro Photography

I have hinted(!) in the last couple of blog posts that I am pretty happy about my macro lens, sorry if it is getting a bit much, but it is just soooooo fun shooting these close-ups! No matter where you go there is always stuff to take pictures of.

A rainy day down town Sydney with clouds all over the shop and still you can happily shoot away having near perfect light for all the small stuff.

The butterfly above was a good challenge, it simply would not sit still! Somehow it knew that it was being followed and in the end I had to give up on getting a "frozen" capture. The best I could get was the one above where a bit of wing blur actually works out alright.


Great flowers - very impressive shapes and colors! Since it is a botanic garden not all of the species are native, which makes the task of naming them significantly harder. Luckily I found a bit of help on the internet - the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens site actually have a "Blooming calendar" displaying pictures of what will be flowering every month during the year - great service!

With help from the blooming calender it looks like the white flower above is a Tabernaemontana cerifera native to New Caledonia ... that would have taken a long time to find out without a bit of help ;-)

Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens - Buff-banded Rail

Once again Sydney was capable of delivering a surprise bird in a very unlikely spot - meters away from some of the most busy streets of Sydney CBD we stumbled upon a Buff-banded Rail - never seen that one before :-)

The Royal botanic gardens in Sydney is a quite fantastic place, there is everything a tourist could possibly hope for; bats, birds, views of the Opera house and the Harbour bridge and weird and wonderful plants - so bring your camera!

We had actually not really planned anything specifically, but with subpar weather and some particularly dark clouds in the horizon we were thrilled to get ourselves a set of tickets for a guided tour of the Government House - how much more touristy can it be?..! :-)

The tour of Government house is free, but you are not allowed to take pictures inside. On a rainy day it can definitely be recommended! With everything wet from the rain and relative humidity hitting 100% we slowly pushed down towards the center of the park for a look at the bats and a few flower close-ups.

Long Bay - Pacific Gull

I could start this blog post exactly like the previous, where I rattled on about how a short 10 minuets drive down along the coast can give you more new ticks than 4 days of hard(?) birding far far away from Sydney. Less than a week after our La Perouse trip, we decided to give Long Bay a go - Long Bay being even closer to home than La Perouse, surely there would be no ticking action going on, but I have come to like the walking in the area down there and there was a breeze from south east - the right direction, but to be honest nowhere near strong enough for a real pelagic excursion.

Soon after we had parked the Magna and started walking the very large gull in the first picture past us flying along the rocky shore and it looked like it was looking for somewhere to land! The Australian selection of gulls is very limited (if you do not count the six or so rare vagrants) there are only three in the club: The Silver, Kelp and Pacific Gulls. Silver is hard to avoid, Kelp is around if you look for it, but Pacific is hard to find around Sydney - it is much more common down south, but we had not seen it at Ben Boyd and here we were back home in Sydney with an enormous gull very much looking like a juvenile Pacific Gull cruising around in our backyard!


The gull had landed down on a hard-to-get-to rock platform, but the need for a confirmation picture gave us wings .. or rather enhanced crawling capabilities :-) As soon as we got a closer look, there was absolutely no doubt that we had indeed bagged the Pacific Gull, not bad for a Wednesday afternoon.

After a bit of celebration(?) we continued our walk out towards the usual sea bird lookouts at the cliff top. As expected the weather was not rough enough to push the passing shearwaters in towards the coast and into range of the Bigma - if you wait long enough you will always get a few reasonable pictures, but nothing compare to the amount of close vicinity action that happens on a good stormy winter day along the coast .. a few months and there will hopefully again be a bit of albatross action on the blog.

Great afternoon trip to Long Bay, very exciting once again seeing a new bird! I had already planned another Victoria trip where I would be (nearly) certain to see the Pacific Gull, but there is something special about being surprised and seeing birds where you did not expect to see them.
We had been out a few days earlier trying to get pictures of the Sooty Shearwater slightly further down along the coast. In these economically unstable times I have decided to save the price of an entirely new blog post by including a few pictures from that trip here in the end of the Long Bay endeavor. These are handheld, but of fair quality - considering the distance. This winter I should probably give my monopod one more chance - I seriously did not like using it last winter, but I guess it is a question of giving it a fair go and if it can give me a stop or two it could dramatically reduce noise in these sea bird pictures where I usually have to crop quite hard to get something usable.