I specifically wanted to do flower Macros.  I very quickly discovered that photographing flowers in even the faintest of breezes can be jolly hard work with a DSLR.  It picks up the faintest movement.  So I quickly moved on to birds as subjects.  I find them fascinating.  Never in a million years would I have thought I would become a Bird Watcher – but I have.  For that I needed an all round telephoto lens – the Canon EF-S  18-200/3.5-5.6 IS.  A long telephoto lens is too expensive and too heavy for me.

But a change is as good as a holiday and I think it’s about time I made more use of that Canon 100/2.8 USM Macro.  It was too expensive to sit gathering dust on my camera equipment shelf at home.

So I’m thinking of trying something a little different.  I’ll still take bird and animal images (with the occasional flower thrown in if I can find a windless day).

I shot the image below with the 18-200mm telephoto lens, but it could just as easily have been the macro lens I suppose.

I wonder what that bright green part is (in this piece of slate photographed from a waist-high wall around a rotunda in the Botanic Gardens) – looks interesting.  Both my Father and my older brother used to have lots of interesting rocks – I wonder what they did with them.  Some of the crystal pieces would have made interesting photos – perhaps with a strong light shining through them to reveal their inner colours.

Melbourne Zoo is not just about birds, animals, reptiles and cages – it’s a sharing of some of the locations and countries where the animals and birds originate from  too.  It’s an experience that many children will remember and want to re-visit.  It’s an experience for Tourists and Locals alike.

When I arrived at the zoo, I was rather dismayed to see several of my favourite walking paths and enclosures closed off for renovations.  One building site looked huge and I wondered what was going to be built there.  2012 is the 150th anniversary of Melbourne Zoo (which is the oldest zoo in Australia).  As I started walking around, there appeared to be minimal animals to be seen.  I guess they were resting indoors.

But once again I was given that rare privilege of sharing intimate moments in the primate area of the zoo.

The image below is one those special moments I captured yesterday.  I have several photos like this from yesterday.   Not necessarily great focus, spectacular light or great compositions, just the thrill of sharing an intimate encounter with wildlife. 

Not sure if it was a Parent showing a child a wood splinter in his hand or a Parent showing a child an insect to eat.  All I know is that to capture this image was very special for me.  Sometimes I think I must be one of the luckiest photographers to visit the zoo.

This butterfly (below) was really lovely.

Which photo do you prefer and would you have cropped any more of the building off the right hand side of the sign?  Please don’t say you like both.  You have to choose one or the other (I suppose you could say you didn’t like either image though).

I had severe headaches for every day for 5 weeks when I moved into a new office in my working life, culminating in the worst migraine of all time.  I am not normally a migraine sufferer, but do suffer in the company of perfume wearers, which makes me pretty anti-social (in general).  Luckily some of my best friends and a couple of family members sympathise and refrain from wearing perfume and/or use environmentally friendly products in their homes.

If I have to go into the city, I usually purchase what I need and then try to get away from the heavily congested areas as quickly as possible.

The second reason I rarely take photos in the city is that I never thought I was particularly good at capturing the atmosphere or sights.  I genuinely think I’m better at capturing the small details in my images. 

Today after purchasing what I wanted, I decided to have another try at photographing some of Chinatown in Little Burke Street in Melbourne.   Today, for the first time, I really liked the image below.  It accurately depicts the brightly coloured archway and the hustle & bustle of the street below.  The photo below says exactly what I wanted to convey.

I always loved the brilliantly painted archways.  The paintwork & decorative archways look so bright, that I wonder if they get re-painted every year.  Today, I felt as though I captured what the street actually looks like through the archway to the eastern end of the city. 

 And……..for the one of the few times in my life, I put the subject right in the centre of the frame (and actually liked it that way).  I know that there is that photographic rule of thirds. 

I sort of use it most of the time, but sometimes I just like a subject slightly off centre.  When it comes to birds and animals, sometimes there is no choice for me to follow the rule of thirds – I’m just too slow reacting to a moving living thing, so I snap away, here, there and everywhere just hoping one of the images turns out looking OK.

So forget the Rule of Thirds I say to myself today.

Shoot the coloured archway in the middle of all that lovely bright colour. (Except that I couldn’t stand in the middle of the road to photograph the arch exactly in the middle, at the risk of losing life and limb when the lights changed to green or the pedestrians threatened to knock me over).

Maybe it all did get a fresh coat of paint for Chinese New Year which was only a week or so ago.  Actually some of the laneway lamps looked freshly painted also.

But when I spotted this locked red doorway, it just cried out to be framed with the chain and door exactly in the middle.

The only image I had a real problem with was the one below – it sort of looked chopped off and out of balance (but it did show the brightly coloured signs in the street so I added it into this post anyway.

(I know it’s still summer in Melbourne, but you’ve got to run with me on this one.  Autumn is the time of beautiful sunsets in Melbourne.  Since my images have improved since I’ve been photographing animals at Melbourne Zoo in the last couple of months, I’m really looking forward to photographing sunsets this year).

Here’s a re-run of some of my favourite Autumn images.

I wonder if I can still lie on the leaf strewn grass in the Botanic Gardens to take some of those leaf close-ups.  I’m another year older and another year wiser, but that shouldn’t make any difference…………..should it?

Last year when lying on my stomach on a path taking a beetle photo, a couple  of English Tourists came up to see if I was ok (or had

 a fall) – LOL.