Denmark - Part 3 - Spøttrup Borg

Having brought international visitors to your hometown, you always want to give them some of the best sightseeing the region can deliver, so we headed of to the local castle: Spøttrup Castle (Spøttrup Borg).

Spøttrup is Denmarks best preserved medieval castle. It has been standing tall for more than 500 years, some of them in honor and glory and quite a few where it was badly neglected. Middle of last century the Danish government took over the caretaker role i.e. they started paying the bills, and an extensive restoration was initiated to bring Spøttrup back to former glory.

Walking around inside the castle a Danish summer day you realize that the place was not built for comfort, you barely manage to feel the warmth of the sun and can just imagine how freezing cold it will be to visit outside of the summer months. The meter thick walls are built for war; they will stop a canon ball, but at the same time they will create a heat sink so efficient that it will take the wood from a small forest to keep the place heated during winter.

When built Spøttrup was a formidable stronghold. Before taking on the actual castle any attackers would have to negotiate two moats with an internal bank while coping with whatever the fortified soldiers could throw at them.
The little extension on the wall in the photo above is one of the so called "hemmeligheder" (secrets) that the castle sports .. absolute state of the art in toilet plumbing back in the day .. just boil the water from the inner moat before drinking :-D

The place is full of small details, one of the clever designed features of a castle like Spøttrup is that all winding staircases are spiraling clock wise up, so that a right handed swordsman defending the castle against intruders will have an advantage swinging his weapon - Good thinking! :-)


All good! It has been a few years, since last time I visited Spøttrup so very nice to see it all again. Having a visitor along is a great way to reacquaint yourself with all the good stuff you saw when you were a kid - bringing your camera along is a fantastic way to see it all from a new angle. ;-)

Denmark - Part 2 - Garden Macro Photography

What a difference 6 month makes :-) The picture above is from our usual walk around Balling - take a look here to see how all that greenness was white last winter when we did one of our danish winter bushwalks.

Nature truly puts on a show during the summer months back home in Denmark! Long sunny days and water galore keeps the plants happy and flowering, which attracts an incredible variety of insects, which again supply birds and other wildlife with a good protein source. The shortness of summer makes it feel like all that life is buzzing around at turbo speed - having to sort out all the tasks of an entire life in a matter of a few summer months.


Bird are wary back home, it is much harder getting good bird photos in DK than down here in Australia. Birds will take off early when you try to sneak in on them and deep dark thick foliage makes it nearly impossible to pick birds hiding in trees and bushes. However, lots of other stuff is happening just outside the door, so armed with my macro lens I used quite a few hours in the garden.


Bumblebees, hornets and insects with half body-length tails - Good stuff! :-) The long tailed insect is a female Pimplinae indet. and I can reveal that the "tail" is not used for stinging! Indeed it is an elongated ovipositor used by the female to lay its egg in hard to reach places. I must admit that I never really used the time to intensely study and learn to name all the small stuff that lived around me when I grew up in DK, but boy it is truly a magnificent world to look into - I finally see the idea in having a garden .. and a macro lens to look at it through ;-)


Apart from fulfilling your wildest dreams as a macro "studio" a Danish summer garden also doubles as an excellent location for your food consumption needs. Danes are very good at maximizing the time outside in the daylight during summer, it is like fueling the body with energy before the arrival of the darkness of winter. Only the transmission of (important?) sports events on the television can lure the Danish back into their dark burrows :-D

Denmark - Summer Holiday - Part 1 - Copenhagen

Back in Denmark for two weeks of summer goodness! :-) Finally, after 5 years I managed to squeeze in a midyear holiday back home. It has actually been slightly unfair for the reputation of Danish weather, that I, during the last 5 years, have exclusively been observing the shortest, darkest and coldest days DK can produce - Chrismas is super cozy, but summer is easy to like :-)

Arriving in Copenhagen (København) early Friday, we took advantage of not being needed anywhere before later that day and managed to use half a day in Copenhagen running around pretending(?) to be tourists and catch up with one of the (nearly) locals - aka Jens - who took us out for a bit of birding and a coffee.

The impact factor of Copenhagen tourism is pretty world class! An hour or two pottering around in the old part of town will give you most of the essential CPH ticks. Round Tower (Rundetårn) - top photo - was build for astronomical observatory back in the day when nights were dark, today it works as a tourist vantage point where from excursions can be planned or hard-to-find hotels can be rediscovered :-) The bloke riding his horse aka the equestrian statue above is Archbishop Absalon who has been credited as the founder of Copenhagen .. an honor that is probably associated with the fact that back in the day the history books were written by the church for the church - archeological diggings have proven that the township where Absalon build his castle was already pretty well developed before he came riding in :-)


Amalienborg is where the Queen lives and the best spot to get photos of a "garder" a soldier from Royal Life Guards, who possesses exceptional skills in the art of standing still with way to warm headgear on. Just behind Amalienborg is the Marble Church (Marmor Kirken) which is worth a closer look - someone with a fast wide-angle lens could get away with some fantastic shots from there ... and if you have a bit of cash or a not so risk-avert financial adviser you should consider the apartments in this pretty old-fashion but very nice neighborhood :-)
Before heading of to Jutland (Jylland), we finished of with the sweetest little castle imaginable! Located in the center of Copenhagen is Rosenborg Castle (Rosenborg Slot), another subject that makes me consider investing in something wider than a 50mm and with a great garden surrounding it and attracting summer hungry Danes out for a few rays of summer sun, we fitted in just fine.

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.

Barrington Tops National Park - Alpine Winter Camping in Australia

Barrington Tops National Park is in some ways quite similar to Lamington National Park, both sport high altitude rain forest with all the goodness that included .. such as Antarctic beach trees and Rufous Scrub-birds. Despite the calender revealing that Australia was just about hitting mid winter we decided to go high altitude winter camping for a bit of cold - but cozy - Queen's Birthday long weekend camping.

Lets be honest; the nights up in Barrington Tops were proper cold - we were solidly under 0°C during the nights - and the birding was pretty shabby, apart from a close encounter with 3 Wedge-tailed Eagles feeding on a dead kangaroo next to the road as we were driving in, we saw very few bird - and non of them were Rufous or Scrub.

Not having to focus our attention on the birds, we could concentrate on the landscapes, the walking and the task of trying to stay warm. It is not often that I have seen Australia this cold and quiet, it did indeed remind me of Christmas in Denmark.


But as always, when you get your lazy carcass of the sofa and get out there in the wild stuff happens - the big surprise of the weekend was an encounter with a herd of wild brumbies! I have seen wild horses up in Kakadu before, but that at a boringly safe distance of more than 100 meters across a broad river system. That encounter can in no way be compared to the joy of suddenly standing face to face with a small herd of properly wild ones :-) Fantastic to see how the leader of the pack - the large black stallion - took control as soon as they realized that they were not alone, it stood tall staring us down while allowing the rest of the herd to slowly wander off making sure that we did not follow. Great healthy strong animals - what a great sight!

Back at camp we got into survival mode - lots of cloths, hot food and hot beverages. As evident from the picture above, little G. was proud as a peacock after getting her new fuel stove firing, not even my poor choice of using kerosene - the most smelly sooty type of fuel possible (except maybe for diesel) - could remove the smile from her face :-)

The first night taught us that a bonfire was worth the effort, so out we went for firewood - needless to say that we did not exclusively go for the dry-dry selection - indeed I think the smoke from the start up of our little bonfire could be seen back home in Sydney :-D

Lamington National Park - The Final Days of A Great Holiday

I have raved about the benefits of having a terrace literally reaching into the rain forest, as you can see in the photo above I am not far from the truth, our O'Reilly's accommodation was indeed pretty well placed for someone that likes their trees.


We kept going to the early morning O'Reilly's Bird Tour and we kept being stunned by the trust those small feathered guys showed the bird guides. One of the days we had more of a walk around in the area and managed to spot another (slimmer) Thrush, another Green Catbird and 6 Topknot Pigeon in flight - the Topknots were new to me. :-)

We also kept pushing those tired legs ours, all in all we probably covered 50km over the long weekend, with the brunt of the distance covered over two good long full day hikes into the forest, 22 and 18km.

Those long walks are truly rewarding! If you are there purely for the birds you are probably better off staying close around O'Reilly's, where you can see nearly all the birds of Lamington except maybe for the Rufous Scrub-bird, but for everything else - including the exercise - you do really well by exploring further into the wild. The tiny Praying Mantis in the photo above was so well camouflaged that I nearly deleted the photo first time I went through the set.


Logrunners are great birds, they just scramble around in the very darkest part of the forest floor, often close to (but not on) the path. Therefore they become a quite easy tick, but it is very difficult getting good photos - some artificial lighting increases your success rate significantly though.

The final tick of the weekend was added after the sighting of a Noisy Pitta! I have been after that one for a while, up at Kingfisher Park in far north Queensland we used nearly 45 minutes stalking one calling from the bush, but we never got eyesight of the little colorful gem. This time in Lamington, the loud call once again alerted us and half of our little group managed to see the noise-maker before it took off. Seeing pictures of Pittas in a bird book gives you the impression that they are nearly unnaturally colorful and will be easy picking for any predators, but when they are hiding in the deep darkness of their rain forest habitat they still manages to blend in pretty well.


All good! - This will be the last Lamington post for this time :-) What a great spot - I will definitely try to go there again another time, and having proven (to myself) that it is in range of the Magna, one could even anticipate it happening more frequently in the future :-)