Come for a wander up a winding path and find delights around every bend.

Heronswood - Photographing in the middle of a sunny day

November 3, 2021

Oh, dear Diggers Gardens, how I love thee. This love may possibly be enhanced by the first visit after being Locked Down. But really, I loved you before lock down.

There are three Diggers Gardens in Victoria and one in South Australia. Heronswood is situated at Dromana on the Mornington Peninsula. In between lock downs I managed to get to Olinda to see the Cloudehill Garden in Autumn (which I’ve just realised I’m a bad blogger because I haven’t shared the photos!) . My favourite is Garden of St Erth and that will be next on my list to revisit on my way to Ballarat for the Ballarat International Foto Biennale which has thankfully been extended until Jan 2022 due to the Lockdowns. Speaking of photos and gardens, the middle of a bright sunny day is the worst time for photos, but getting out in the real world after lock down takes a bit of getting used to so it was midday before we got there. I decided to go for the harsh light challenge and see what I could come up with. I used the standard kit lens on the Fuji XT-2 and tried to show a bit more of the gardens and surroundings as opposed to my usual macro shots. A few shots needed a little bit of a lift of shadows in Lightoom but that’s the benefit of shooting RAW files.

I hadn’t seen a body of water other than the murky brown Yarra for ages, so the startling blue of the bay as a backdrop to the gardens was nourishing for the soul.

Apart from the gorgeous gardens there’s a cafe and a plant nursery. And the beautiful Historic Heronswood House is the anchor for the expansive gardens

You can learn a bit more and see a video from Gardening Australia

I have grand dreams of running a photography workshop in the great teaching spaces they have, either here or at St Erths.

I’m working on a book at the moment so once it’s finished, and good ol’ covid stops locking us down, I’ll be able to share the love of photographing flora.

Just a quick window selfie after checking out the conference room.

I spotted this little blue beauty just swaying in the breeze. I’ve never seen a colour like it. It looks like a white flower that’s been placed in a cup of water with blue dye. I have no idea what the flower is either so if you know, please leave me a comment below and let me know.

Gotta love it when the ladies co-ordinate their outfits to match the gardens.

There’s no right time to go check out the gardens. Go anytime. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Cheers and thanks for stopping by.
Deb

Save paradise from becoming a parking lot (if you live in Queensland)

September 2, 2020

Save Isobel Jordan Reserve. Or, save a piece of paradise from becoming a parking lot for the Air Museum. It takes 2 minutes to lend your support to protect this little pocket of amazing habitat (Queenslanders only) down near the Caloundra Airport. Please click the link and sign the petition. It ends on the 5 Sept so hop to it. They really need your help. Here's a few flora photos I snapped yesterday morning at this little treasure trove of natural goodness. https://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/work-of-assembly/petitions/petition-details?id=3374

Gardens and Their People - Heide Museum of Modern Art

July 12, 2020

I was just starting to venture out and explore places again and then we were locked down in Melbourne for the second time. Oh the freedoms we take for granted!

I recently headed off on the deadly treddley to meet an Instagram friend. It felt a bit like a blind date or an internet date. We’d only chatted over Instagram, we liked similar things, lived on the same side of town and decided to meet, with cameras, at Heide. It was so nice to sit and have a coffee, with the now social distancing and sanitising lotion for the hands a familiar ritual. In Day 3 now of the second Covid-19 Stage 3 lockdown, sitting at a coffee shop is one of the simple pleasures I’m missing greatly.

The 16 acre Heide grounds In Bulleen, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, contain an art museum, a cafe, heritage-listed gardens and a sculpture park. It includes the original home of John and Sunday Reed and a rich history of Australian Art and Culture. On this day I visited the cafe and strolled through the Kitchen Garden and the Wild Garden around the original homestead. There’s much more to see and it’s well worth a visit when Melbourne opens up to outings again. https://www.heide.com.au/

The walled garden which is delightful in other seasons, didn’t have a lot happening in winter, so we headed up to the house and the kitchen garden. It was a hum of activity with staff and volunteers catching up on a back log of weeding and mulching after being isolated and the kitchen closed. Part of the garden is undergoing a reconstruction so it will be interesting to see the changes we can get back out again.

We chatted to Alice, pictured below, who works in the Kitchen Garden and had lots of interesting bits of information to share. I mentioned that my brother was into Veggie Gardening in Toowoomba, Qld, and has his own YouTube channel and my Mum was an avid ornamental gardener and as I currently don’t have access to a garden I live vicariously by photographing other peoples gardens.

My partner Steve mentioned trying to get a community led conservation type program happening in our neighbourhood but the local council doesn’t provide any support to set it up or coordinate it, so Alice mentioned guerrilla gardening, where locals band together and just do what needs to be done. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes!

The Kitchen Garden supplies fresh produce to the Cafe so eventually we wandered back down and enjoyed a delicious Calamari lunch with a glass of wine. Everything is closed again now for at least 6 weeks of Covid-19 Stage 3 Lockdown. But oh, how nice will it be when we can get out and about again!

While I was walking...

August 9, 2019

Late one afternoon on a cold and gloomy day, I was at home feeling tired and snappy. I donned a coat and grabbed the camera and walked around the block. I moved to Fairfield earlier in the year and walk these streets often, but always on my way to a destination. This time, I had no goal other than to clear my thoughts. The first thing I noticed was the house number on the dilapidated fence a couple of doors down. 41. I don’t know if I’d call it a lucky number but it’s a significant number for me, and whilst I’d always been aware of the fence (in an otherwise orderly street its precarious state and the ramshackle yard it fronts is intriguing), I’d never noticed the number before. It was somehow reassuring.
I kept walking and looking around. Front yards, letter boxes, rusty gates, fences, trees, flowers, leaves, bark, porticos, arbours and architectural features.

The light was fading. I made it home just before the rain came down.
I can’t do mindfulness, but I can do this. I think it works just as good.

Have you been for a walk around your neighbourhood with a camera lately?

-

How to Photograph Flowers

July 31, 2019

How to photograph flowers in a small kitchen without any fancy equipment.

Fingers included to show scale

Ingredients:

One stolen flower from the tree you walked past on the way home

A few pieces of baking paper from the third drawer.

One white chopping board

One camera with macro lens

One tripod

One kitchen window

Daylight

Optional: Spray bottle for water droplets. Timber chopping board for a dark background.

Method:

Tape one or two pieces of baking paper to the kitchen window. (Any window will do)

Place flower with baking paper behind it (backlit). I tried several options, including sitting the flower on a glass jar covered with baking paper, which worked quite well. I also used a complicated combination of a peg and some rubber bands and a spoon in the jar so the flower was ‘floating’. It worked, but was a bit precarious. I have since bought a gadget from an electronics shop that is perfect for holding flowers. I’ll share a photo in a future blog post.

Use the white board to reflect light back in to the shadow side of the flower.

Place the camera on the tripod as you’ll need a smallish aperture to get enough depth of field and you’ll end up with a slow shutter speed and you want to avoid useing a higher ISO to avoid noise in the image.

Camera used: Fujifilm XT-2. 60mm Macro lens.

Settings: A range of apertures between f/2.4 through to f/16. Shutter speeds from 1/125sec to 1/4sec. ISO 400.

Below: Behind the scenes iphone photos. Can you spot the Zebra in the background in the kitchen? (He was just a silent observer and had nothing to do with the photoshoot).

If you like this post or would like to see more photography recipes, leave a comment or at least hit the ‘like’ button so I know you’ve stopped by.
Thanks :-)

The tree with the tiny pink flowers

Time is a slippery devil. Tesselaars

April 28, 2019

I was just commenting on Facebook this morning (or was it yesterday?) about how much a broken wrist slows you down. I’m a few weeks out of plaster and hand therapy is going well but I’m amazed at how the year is disappearing. I picked up a brochure last week for a Flower Festival coming up at Tesselaars. This morning I was running through a list of possible things to do with the day when I pick up the brochure to check the dates. I was sure it was for the next month. Turns out today was the last day of an almost month long festival. Somehow, I was a month out.

I’ve been in Melbourne for nearly 9 years now (feels like about 2) and I’ve never been to Tesselaars. So I jumped in the car and off I went and spent a delightful afternoon amongst the flowers and gardens at Tesselaars. Here are a few of my favourites in no particular order.