Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Having worked for 72 hours last week and most of the weekend so far, it was good to take a couple of breaks. Saturday I went for a bike ride with the youth through the bush near here. After losing the slow riders early on the fast bunch went hard for an hour or so. I followed that up with hanging with our kids for a bit. We had some great laughs just hanging out. Today I went to church briefly (after a few hours sleep – didn’t stop to talk sorry) and came back home to work. At 4 PM I had finished a major piece of work and decided to take the kids to the park. We went to the lake and I have that story below. I actually ended up being there for 2.5 hours and took over 400 photos while I was there. All the good ones have been uploaded into Flickr in a couple of different sets. All the photos I uploaded are in the 20081130 lakewalk set. I also uploaded large versions of the close ups, mostly of birds, but also of the girls, into the Close Ups set. There are some really nice black and white shots of the girls there.

After playing in the playground for starters, we went exploring – Mercedes was the leader today. First we went out onto the bridge over the lake and looked at ducks, turtles, fish, dragonflies and lilies. I have been teaching them the value of sitting still and looking at what you can see sometimes. It is amazing what is right under your feet!

Then we wandered through the untamed side of the lake (no smooth lawns or concrete paths) and ended up crossing a bit of a swampy area where we got muddy. That meant when we hit a long puddle it was time for splashing. I got the girls to line up and run toward me and got some awesome shots.

From there it was heading into that magic hour for photography and I was having a ball playing with the aperture settings. I got some great shots of a paper bark tree as well as some other trees.

Next thing a couple of ducks came right up to us. These things are real friendly and hung around us. I was able to get a bunch of really cool photos – I now have a extremely large ducks head staring at me from my 6 monitors!

I also took the chance to get some very tightly focussed closeup shots of the girls. I have uploaded these to flickr in colour, black and white and a blue black colour.

Heading away from the ducks as the sun was just setting we had the tops of the trees with sun light and lots of parrots flying around and eating seeds etc. I managed to get some shots, but they were much harder to get close to.

I also got some shots of white herons I was particularly happy with. The first pic was just after caching and eating a fish. No black swans today though.

Heading back to the car I was stopped by a chap who wanted to ask about us repairing his PC. The advertising works!

We picked up pizza and came home for dinner, then caught the escaped skinks before I got stuck back into work. Right now I am waiting for files to synchronise before doing the next job.