The Long And Winding Road To Bruny

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.

Now With Pictures!

As you may have noticed, I've added a Photos section to Leoville. I'm hoping I can get pictures uploaded while I'm in Egypt, and if I do this is where they'll appear. I'm using Smugmug to power the gallery. It's much more powerful than anything I could do myself with, say, Coppermine and I think Smugmug beats Flickr hands down for features. I guess I could put the Flickr gallery in a frame, but Smugmug integrates into the site better. I wish Smugmug were better known. I like the MacCaskill's, father and son, who founded it and I think they have loaded it with so many superior features. Alas, Flickr still has much the larger community. I've been through the features vs community wars before (remember Jaiku vs Twitter?) and I should know better, but I just can't help backing the underdog, especially when it works better. The fact that I can upload my videos there, as well, seals the deal. The big negative: it's not free. Smugmug is $40/year, $60 for gallery embedding, video and other features. Pro photographers can watermark and sell their photos and upload hi-def video for $150/year. Unlike Flickr there is no free basic account, but frankly I like the idea that Smugmug's got a long term business model. There are still a couple of little things I'd like to tweak. I can't seem to get my custom background to appear on the photo pages and the dropdown menus sometimes fall behind elements. But it's pretty close to seamless integration. I've uploaded pictures from Christmas just to test it out. We leave for Egypt tomorrow!

I'm Just Tucking In - Honest

Photo credit: Sean Carruthers

My First and Last lolcat

Thanks to Sandrino for the caption.

iPwned