Olympus OMD f11 1/80s ISO320 Canon 50mm macro

This is a very common shrub in the Jarrah forest especially after a burn off it grows at an incredible rate compared to most plant which tend to be slow growers until significant rains arrive , but this one off like a rocket!

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Olympus OMD f5.6 1/640s ISO 320 Canon FD 50mm macroEnough of pears for now…

Its winter in my patch of forest we have had some rain and there is lots of new growth…

For any one who follows my posts regularly and I am very appreciative, it will be obvious by now that I love gardening and unlike Mike Johnson (who incidentally just about has the best photographic read site on the web) I also love photographing flowers gardens and things agricultural or natural. As a child I spent a lot of time and for a while even went to school in the English Lake District I still regard it as my spiritual home even though I haven’t lived there for a long while. Gardens are a place where loves passions hopes fears hard work and exasperations all come together and often all at the same time. So when I see something that adds a new dimension in this case literally to my gardening interest I take a serious look.

One such instance was a restaurant that opened on St Georges Terrace in Perth where strawberries were growing in racks up the walls. I later learned that this was the product of an Australian thinker / designer Joost Bekkers http://byjoost.com/vertical-gardens/ and today I learned of another vertical garden done by Yael Stav’s in Israel http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/greening-tel-aviv-with-vertical-gardening-1.430478.
Without making too rash a statement this is a glimpse into the future and the reason why I say this is that using such systems one is able to grow almost anything almost anywhere in any climate with very little effort once these gardens are established. Its a triple + bottom line, food, good utilization of space, saves water, energy, as insulation, cooling, reduction in food miles and more in other words common sense…

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Olympus OMD f5.6 1/4s ISO320 Canon FD 50mm macro

Another day and I’m going to have to eat these pears. This one would not sit where I wanted it so it took on a life of its own and I managed to capture the movement of a rocking pear!

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Olympus EM-5 OMD f5.6 1/125s ISO

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iPhone true HDR

I like pears my favourite is a Bartlett originaly bred as a canning pear but they are just as good fresh, they ripen well off the tree. Bartletts also dry well and if you have never sampled a slice of dry pear your taste buds have yet to come alive!, A Josephine pear is a wonderful eating pear but they really need to be tree ripened then its a gamble wether you eat them or our feathered friends the parrots get their sticky beaks into them. These two pears are both good varieties Bosc pears are of French origin while the green one at the rear is a Packham whose trees bare so heavily some times its hard to see the leaves for the pears!

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iPhone
Two pairs and a closely related cumquat view the moon …

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Olympus OMD f11 1/200s ISO320 Canon FD 50mm Macro

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iPhone Photo Toaster

iPhone Apps – I have tried quite a few photo processing apps including Photoshop which in all honesty is a bit weak, its a good job it was a freebie… However I have found two that work really quite well together true HDR and Photo Toaster Most of the functions to a large extent mimic what can be done in Adobe camera raw plus more filters than I will probably ever use. Sort of like what Photoshop was in version four – yes that’s 4 not CS4 over the years Adobe have seen fit for some reason known to themselves alone to have steadily reduced the number of filters many of which have been sorely missed by this long time Adobe user, at one point until I worked out specific actions to replace the filters I had four versions of PS on the same computer!   Photo Toaster allows one to crop I can’t find a resize function which would be useful for posting to the web especially if one happens to have an iPhone 4 which with a bit of careful capture and processing can be printed out an A3 page size and maybe more with a bit of effort. The file size from the iPhone 4 is too big for most web posts. I Really like Photo Toaster and feel that it represents phenomenal value for money.

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Olympus EM-5 OMD f11 1/320s ISO320 Canon FD 50MM macro

Towards the end of last November we had a burn off. It had been almost five years since the last time we set fire to our few hectares of forest. It sounds drastic to any one who is not familiar with the ways of this ancient land but setting fire to to the forest understory is an essential part of good land management Firstly having a controlled fire protects us from wild fires by burning off all the accumulated litter from the gum trees which on its own is extremely combustable. Secondly the chemistry of the soil is renewed allowing deposited seeds to germinate as soon as the conditions are right and that is how this little flower comes about these little sundews a Drosera erythrorhiza are insectivorous meaning that they absorb or eat insects as their method of feeding. This one also just happens to be the very first flower of the winter season.

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