Yesterday Bruce Dale, Peter Krogh, Winston Hendrickson, and I took the morning ferry to Bruny Island, a secluded vacation retreat off the southern coast of Hobart - population 600.
Bruce drove, because he'd driven on the left before - in fact, he'd driven all the way from England to India following the gypsies for a book some years ago. After hearing some of his harrowing stories from that trip we feel pretty lucky to have returned in one piece. We stopped many times along the way and spent the entire day there.
Our goal was the Bruny Lighthouse, but our best pictures were from Cloudy Bay lagoon. That's my poor attempt to capture its beauty below, but Bruce took a panorama that should be amazing - we waited an hour for the light to be just so.
All of these pictures were taken with my Canon 5D. Most with the 24-105 zoom except for the Farmers' Market pictures which were taken with the 50mm f1.2. All of them were adjusted in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 and most of the Bruny Island pictures were re-touched in Photoshop to remove a dust blotch that was on my sensor.
I've uploaded around three dozen shots from our first three days in Hobart to my
SmugMug page (try the slideshow). Let me know what you think. I'm learning so much from these amazing photographers, and enjoying my first visit to Australia even more than I expected.
I'm taking today (Saturday in Australia) off to go through the thousands of pictures and hours of video I've shot. I also have to rest up because I'm doing the radio show tomorrow morning at 4 local time. After the show I hope we'll get a chance to go up to the
Tahune Forest AirWalk. After the radio show Monday morning we take off for Basecamp 2 at the
Diamond Island Resort in Bicheno on the east coast of Tasmania.
Sunday, April 6, 2008 at 5:46PM 
I'm leaving tonight for Australia on the Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop Adventure 2008: Tasmania!
My good friend Mikkel Aaland, author of O'Reilly's Lightroom Adventure is leading another photo expedition; this time it's to Tasmania with a bunch of the world's top photographers for the next edition of his book and he invited me to come. I couldn't resist even though I'm no photo pro. (They're billing me as a "special media guest.")
I do apologize to my friends on the mainland - the itinerary is limited to Tassie: A week in Hobart and a week in the wild. Our Qantas flight does stopover for seven hours in Sydney, so thanks to Aussie Mike, we'll do an impromptu meetup at the Starbucks at Terminal 3, Sydney Airport, 11a-1p on Tuesday. (It's a 12-hour flight and we cross the International Date Line so even though I'm leaving Sunday night I won't arrive in Sydney until Tuesday morning!) If there are any fans in Hobart who want to set up a meet up on Thursday or Friday let me know.
I'll be doing my radio show from Sea FM/Heart 107.3 Hobart Sunday and Monday morning 4-7a local time (Tasmania is UTC +11 but it'll be live in the States). The following week I won't have access to a studio so we'll air two shows I've recorded ahead of time with all new material.
I'm bringing enough gear to equip a multimedia army.
All this fits into my Lowepro CompuTrekker Plus AW backpack (it's huge) but I'm also bringing a Lowepro Slingshot 200 AW to carry into the field.
And a change of underwear.
Thank goodness I'm not going by ship. I think I'd sink it.
There's a reason for all this gear. I'll be blogging the whole time I'm Down Under, including photos (on Smugmug and Flickr), audio (here), and video (on Smugmug and Viddler) so watch this space. Many of the other photographers will be blogging as well on the O'Reilly blog site.