Standing Out
australia
The Edifice
Pause for Thought
Apple Concentrate
The Apple store on George street is always interesting from a people-watching point-of-view.
The glass walls and free wifi means there are always groups of people concentrating on their devices to photograph.
It makes me think of the store as a combination of temple and social meeting place.
Time Passes
An early meeting took me into the city, with my new Fujinon XF14mm 2.8 R lens on my X-E1.
First impressions are really good. Actually, great. It feels precise and well made, and the manual mode is fantastic. You slip the focus ring back to go from auto focus to manual, which reveals distance markings allowing you to set the depth of focus. Although it is electronic focus, it feels mechanical, with end stops. If Fuji can produce their 35mm equivalent lens with this manual method, then zone focussing will be a doodle,and they will have a wonderful street photography option.
Distortion is incredibly well controlled (this is 21mm equivalent), and it produces really sharp results with good colour saturation.
This is up to my old Canon L glass standards.
I can’t wait to use this for some long exposure seascapes.
Still
My wife and son are away visiting Mémé during the school holiday, and I have a weekend to myself. Autumn is here, and I wander out into the garden, with the intention of tidying up and catching up with odd jobs.
It is so still, so quiet. Normally, the garden is full of noise and movement. Nola tending to her plants, Cameron chasing his friends around or jumping on the trampoline, the air full of shrieks and laughter.
Today is so still.
Autumn
Autumn has slowly pushed aside summer. The temperatures are dropping, along with the leaves.
We took a trip up to the Blue Mountains National Gardens at Mount Tomah, which along with the native trees, hosts pockets of European and North American flora. There is something reassuringly familiar about seeing conkers on the ground, and I have flashbacks to my childhood.
When I was a little older than my son, my brother and I would collect conkers, pierce them with a skewer, and thread a length of string through their core, creating an instrument of playground competition. These were great battles when you were seven years of age, which would be settled with one competitor’s dreams ending shattered on the floor, along with his weapon. Your status was entwined with the fate of your conker. Did you have a lowly ‘oner’, or had you vanquished your classmates and reached the heady heights of a ‘fiver’, or more?
These delights await my son, but for now he is content to climb trees.
After the fire
The smell of smoke had long subsided, and we took a trip into the forest to see what effect the back-burning of ground litter had had.
There’s something beautiful about the red dust that our vehicle kicks up, as we go deeper and deeper into the forest. Nowhere in the UK has earth this vibrant colour.
We pass fire trails as we reach forks in the track. “Left or right?” I ask our son. “Left, we’ve never been there”, he says. And so, we end up at Mount Portal, looking out over the Nepean river, Sydney in the distance.
We are heading into autumn, and the light is low, casting long shadows through the forest. The ground is burnt, covered in a layer of ash, and the smell of smoke is still noticeable. Here and there, green shoots are rising out of the ground. The forest is renewed, and life is taking hold again.
Mike Baker | Photography 