Jylanization

Well, 2 weeks ago on Friday the 25th April my dad and I, along with some boat-owning friends of ours, went out to Humpy Island for a weekend trip. I apologise for taking 2 weeks to write about, but I have been busy and I did have to go through 300 or so photos of the trip, which meant that I kept putting it off. You know what I mean ;-).

Humpy Island is a National Park about 65 hectares big, and is located just south of Great Keppel Island. More info is available from this link.

I’ve decided to call this a photo essay because of the large amount of photos that I’ve decided to include. Also, just note that I’m not documenting everything we did on Humpy Island, like snorkelling out on the reefs, with and without a boat. The reason being that I didn’t take many photos of that (for fear of damaging or wetting the camera). I did see a turtle underwater while I was snorkelling out in the boat, however. I actually tried to chase it as well :P.

Friday : Arrival Day

On to the story. We got up at about 5:00AM on Friday morning, leaving home an hour or so later. The meeting place was at Rosslyn Bay Harbour, which is the main boat harbour for the Capricorn Coast, so we drove there and started loading up the boat we were going out on.

Once that was all done, we left for Humpy Island at about 6:30AM! There were 2 large tinnies and 1 boat going (which had already left Thursday night). We went in one of the tinnies and the other tinny followed behind us.

A view back looking at the Rosslyn Bay Hill. The tinny in the picture was following us. I love the morning light, it makes everything look really pretty.

Appearances are deceptive on the ocean, and the distance to Humpy Island was no exception. I would have though that it was only 7 or 8 kilometres, but I bought my GPS along and the real distance was over 19km! It took us about 45 minutes to get to the Humpy Island, we got a bit wet but it was a perfect day so that didn’t matter too much.

On arrival we unpacked everything from the boats and chose a camping spot. A funny thing that happened was that everyone was down at the beach but someone had left biscuits on the table, and the crows were tearing into them.

The beach, soon after arrival. The boat we came over on is the closest in the water.

The people who had come to Humpy on Thursday night won’t around when we arrived, so we just set up camp in the main camping area just near the path to the beach.

Looking in the other direction from above. The camping area starts just where the trees are. We originally had our camping spot just a little way in.

Looking straight up to the main campground.

After we had set up our tents and stuff I decided to walk up the hill and take some photos.

Looking down onto the trees and camping area. We were camping in the far left of the main clump of trees, later on we moved a bit out of sight to the left.

A wildflower growing on top of the hill. It looks a bit like a dandelion in my opinion.

A type of long seedpod attached to a swirling base of long, thin, and serated pieces of grass or leaves. I think they are nicknamed black-boys (now politically incorrect) because they actually thrive on fire and can be seen all covered in blackness.

I think these are the same type of plant shown in the above photo, just with a full crop of matured flowers.

After a few hours or so the people who had come the previous night arrived back. Two of my friends and I decided to go on the whole island walk, which basically winds its way around the island “hill range.” I’ve just included just a few photos below because I’m going to put in more photos from when everyone did the walk.

This is looking from the far side of Humpy Island towards the camping area on the island, and Emu Park in the distance. The little hills you see on the left is where the above photos were taken.

The main cairn on Humpy Island. Cairns are basically just piles of rocks that are added to by people who have made it to the highest point on the mountain, or island.

After we had arrived back from the Humpy Island walk, the Thursday night people then went for a walk around the camping area. When they came back they said they’d found a much better camping spot (about 50m away) from which the boats could be easily seen. We walked over and had a look, and decided that it was better than our current spot. Moving was comparatively easy; All we had to for some tents was pick them up, carry them, then plonk them down again.

The new campsite that we moved too. It was much more open and there were no other people camping in that area. It was about 50m from the tap.

Well once everything had settled down we basically stayed settled down until the beautiful sunset.

The beautiful sunset. This would be looking towards the Capricorn Coast / Yeppoon area, but I can’t identify the coastline accurately enough to be sure of the exact locations.

After the sunset had finished, my friends and I decided to sneak around the camping area and flash lights at people once we got up close. That’s probably about all I should tell you ;-).

Saturday : Full Activity Day

Relatively early on Saturday morning just about everyone in our group decided to do the island walk, which we (meaning from now on two friends and I) had done the day before.

These pretty wildflowers were located about halfway. The ant inside was a stroke of luck.

Some more wildflowers. I reckon this one looks a bit like a dandelion.

Another blackboy plant, this time all nice and green and without a stalk in the middle. This meant I could get a nice symmetrical overhead shot.

Once we all arrived back we mainly stayed around camp (with the exception of snorkelling out with the boat, see the top of this post) until late afternoon, when we walked up the hill closest to us to get some photos with the afternoon light.

Looking towards our camp (just underneath the first clump of trees along the shore).

A zoomed in view of the main sandbank where we fished and snorkelled from.

My two friends. I’m on the left. This is looking east from Humpy Island out into the great Pacific Ocean.

Sunday : Day of Leaving

Sunday morning was fairly lazy, we just had breakfast, went for another snorkel, and then started packing up. Packup up took about half an hour, once that was done we just threw everything in the boats and said goodbye to Humpy Island.

My last few photos of Humpy Island were taken from the back of the tinny as we motored away.

I took a few photos at Rosslyn Bay Harbour. This is the biggest hill at the harbour, there is another one just on the other side that has a walking track on it.

This is a bit of a funny photo, I think it was on top of a Fisheries building and it was a pole with 4 security cameras pointing in all different directions.

That just about wraps up my trip to Humpy Island. I hope you enjoy the photos as much as I enjoyed taking them!

Well, on Sunday mum came home with a new Smithfield (or Stumpy Tail Cattledog) / Blue Heeler cross female puppy, who she had got from some people giving away a litter of puppies by the road. The Smithfield part of them means that they have no tail, which must give us the distinction of owning the strangest pets for kms around (We also have a hairless Devon Rex kitten). We named it Jazz.

Strangely enough though, when we went on our Wednesday library trip into town I was talking to one of the librarians who reads my blog and she said that she had bought a puppy from the same people, only it was a boy! Hopefully the puppies will be able to meet each other soon, I’m wondering if they will recognise each other.

I’ve put some photos of Jazz in below, but my favourite is the one which shows her tongue poking out. That was a real chance shot.

Here is Jazz and Sachi our cat sleeping together (well Jazz is sleeping anyway). Unfortunately this was a setup photo, they wouldn’t sleep together out of choice :-).

One of my attempts at an action photo.

My favourite photo out of all of these. I took it quite by chance.

This is Jazz trying to look mournful for the camera. She really like sleeping right in front of the door, which open inwards, not outwards.

Check out my photos from Humpy Island for some more samples.

This year as a very big (and late) birthday present I bought myself a Canon Powershot A720, which has 8MP of resolution, a 6X optical zoom, optical image stabilisation, up to 1cm macro, and the ability to control all the settings instrumental to creating a photograph, such as aperture size, shutter speed, ISO, and focus.

Olympus Mju 820 and Canon Powershot A720 comparison

When I was looking for a camera to buy I was originally planning to buy an Olympus, because that is what we’ve always had, and I’d also just purchased a XD type memory card which only works in Olympus and Fujifilm cameras. After looking around, I decided that the Olympus Mju 820 fitted my needs pretty well. It had 8MP of resolution, a 5X optical zoom (the Canon had 6X), a digital image stabiliser (compared to an optical stabiliser for the Canon) and could take photos up to ISO 3200 (higher ISOs are very good for lowlight shots, the Canon A720 only goes to 1600). It also had a 3cm macro (while the Canon A720 has 1cm macro).

More specs for the Olympus Mju 820 included the blazing fast 7 frames per second drive mode, and a maximum 4 second shutter speed for night shots. The Canon Powershot could only take about 1.5 frames per second but had a maximum of a 15 second shutter speed. The Olumpus Mju 820 also had a movie mode that could take 10 seconds of 30fps video at 640×480 resolution, but the Canon Powershot can take videos at that resolution to a maximum of 1 hour!

Why I bought the Canon Powershot A720

All of the above factors contributed to my decision to buy the Canon instead of the Olympus, but the deciding factor was a review of the Olympus Mju 820 by imaging-resource.com that said the Olympus had fairly bad colour fringing problems, which mean that the camera adds coloured edges to bright sections of a picture. In addition, the Olympus Mju 820 had a tendency to produce soft photos, which I certainly didn’t want. By contrast, the Canon Powershot A720 received a glowing review.

Where I bought the camera

After looking around, I decided that eBay was the cheapest place to buy the Powershot. I chose eBay user digital-rev-oz, because they had been using eBay for 7 or 8 years and their feedback rating was excellent. Once I bought the camera, it took about 13 days to get delivered to our house. Once the package arrived, I tried to rip it open straight away but was defeated by the layers of wrapping that they had used. I had to get the scissors to open it properly.

First Impressions of the Canon Powershot A720

When I first turned the camera on, it was a pleasant surprise not having to wait the 4 seconds that it took for my old Olympus to power up. The A720 only takes about 1.5 seconds. The focusing and photo taking speed is really fast too (in comparison to my old camera). If you go back to the Imaging Resource review of the A720, all the speeds for this camera can be found there.

The design of the camera can’t be complained about, although I wish that they had a button instead of a switch that could be used to switch between viewing and taking photos. The battery compartment is securely located at the bottom of the camera and can’t be accidently opened. The position of the flash at the front is a bit annoying, especially for me, because when I grip the camera with both hands I often cover the flash without knowing.

So all-in-all, I’m very pleased with my new Powershot A720, and you can expect to start seeing photos on Contrasting Sharply, my photoblog, this week. I’ve put some sample pictures in below.

A photo of our cockatoo called Daisy.

A nice macro of a little brush.

Another nice macro of a special type of building nail

A creative type shot of our big yellow table.

I just released my first public Wordpress theme a few hours ago, and I’ve called it Cascading Colours.

For more info, just go to the theme page. You can also preview it by using the links on that page. Please tell me what you think!