Behavioral Survey
- Thread starter ddrueding
- Start date
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
I think we need a little context here: it's not just wonderful places, it's the whole experience. When it's all said and done, life is a journey,
and if you are wondering when you are going to get to where your goal is, then you've missed the point.
and if you are wondering when you are going to get to where your goal is, then you've missed the point.
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
The JoJo
Wannabe Storage Freak
Absolutely FANTASTIC pictures Tony, I'll drink to that!
Uhh, the drinking yes, drinking makes me sleepy. I do usually drink may once a week, mostly during the weekends. A sixpack of good beer or some rum while watching a good movie at home, that's what I like.
Uhh, the drinking yes, drinking makes me sleepy. I do usually drink may once a week, mostly during the weekends. A sixpack of good beer or some rum while watching a good movie at home, that's what I like.
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
ddrueding
Fixture
Those pictures are really amazing Tony. If I lived in a place as beautiful and open as that, I would also be tempted to spend significant amounts of time without people (a great source of anxiety for me). And with a pleasant travel companion such as Tea, it only makes it more appealing.
time
Storage? I am Storage!
Sheer poetry. Quite magnificent. Bloody tremendous.
Why on earth are you wasting time pretending to run a successful computer store when you could be a great professional photographer?
Why on earth are you wasting time pretending to run a successful computer store when you could be a great professional photographer?
Buck
Storage? I am Storage!
What time said. You should be selling prints on ebay.
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Kind words, gentlemen. But I'm not professional standard yet, and even if I was, I doubt that I'd want to ruin a perfectly good consuming passion by turning it into a meal ticket. I travel and take photographs because I want to. This way, there is no confusion. Hell, two weekends ago, I actually decided, of my own free will, not to go out and photograph anything, but to sit around the house and mow the grass and stuff like that.
(There is something he's not telling you here. He didn't go out on the weekend because he only got home from an eight day trip to northern NSW after midnight on the Friday night. He goes every other weekend.)
(Who asked you to butt in, Tea? And anyway, you're banned. Go and play in the traffic.)
(It's midnight. There isn't any traffic.)
(GO AWAY!)
(OK, OK. I was juzt leaving....)
Ahem ... As I was saying, sometimes I start to feel like I'm pretty good at this photography thing. Then I look at the work of one or another of the really outstanding nature photographers — Michael Morecombe, or David Hollands, for example — and am reminded just how much better those guys are. It's like hitting three home runs in your school baseball side: it seems pretty good till you go and watch the real pros in the big league. Then you get a sense of perspective.
But my original point was that, follwing on from Gilbo's point, there are things you can do to restore your ... er ... for want of a better word I'll call it your soul. Actually, I shouldn't say "restore", rather it's more like "grow" or "nourish" or "exercise" it.
Alcohol, oddly enough, can play a part in that necessary and pleasant part of life. But only when you take it in suitably sized doses (small: a glass of red with a meal; a cold beer after some hard physical work on a hot day; or large: getting outside a couple more than you really ought to with a close friend or two). The key issue, though, is that alcohol is a limited-use tool. You can only benefit from drinking when you don't do it very often. This applies especially to drinking relatively large amounts (more than two or three). Even in small amounts, it's best and most effective when you don't do it every day.
Nature, on the other hand, has no limits. You can never have too much of it. Real love, I suspect, is much the same, though love is something I tend to think of as a slightly second-rate substitute for nature. Ambition for material success, on the other hand, is a consuming drug. Like cocaine, it works wonders in the short-term but leaves you burned-out and hollow in the long run.
(Stop being so cynical, Tannin.)
(Sorry: you are quite right, little one. I was right about ambition though.)
The thing with nature is its endless variety and enoros subtlety: much more subtle than the delights of physical love or even the finest creations of chefs and poets and musicians.
Consider this picture.
Did anyone stop to wonder why I chose to include it? It's pleasant enough, if a tad over-exposed, but what's it's point against the wonder of a Green Tree-snake or a pair of Brolgas?
This is, in fact, an extraordinary part of arid sub-coastal northern Australia. It is a dry rainforest.
Huh? Doesn't make sense? How can you have a dry rainforest? It's a contradiction in terms.
Like this.
Once upon a time, perhaps 100,000 years ago, the whole of northern Australia was tropical rainforest. Different species, but habitat broadly similar to what you see today in what remains of coastal northern Queensland, or Florida, or the Amazon Basin. It rained practically every day, and was hot and steamy.
Then two things happened: the climate started to dry out through natural causes, and humans arrived. Humans killed off the large browsing animals (diprotodons and such), and lit lots of fires, both by accident and deliberately — to encourage fresh green grass which, in turn, acts as a magnet for the surving types of large, good-to-eat animals: i.e., kangaroos and wallabies, which were harder to catch.
Now the large browsing animals served a function: they recycled nutrients rapidly through their dung (which is vital in an ancient, nutrient poor land such as Australia), and they trampled down or ate large tracts of undergrowth in the rainforests. With the large browsers hunted into extinction, the forest grew thicker and, during the dry season, burned much more readily (because of the extra fuel).
Rainforest species can't cope with fire. It kills them. And once the forest is gone, the rain goes away too, because the microclimate is changed, and the rainforest doesn't come back. Instead, you get hard-leaved, fire-tolerant species: in particular, eucalypts and acacias. Gum trees and wattles took over the vast bulk of Australia, and the rainforests retreated into the sheltered valleys and taller mountains. Rainforest is now one of the rarest vegetation classes on the continent.
But what about the dry rainforest?
Well, it so happens that there were a few areas that are naturally protected from fire. In the main, these are on the top of rocky outcrops (limestone, mostly: this part of the world is age-old sea bottom, with vertically tilted blocks of former coral reef (you can see some in the background) sticking op above the plains. Fire tends to be reflected by the sone, and, amazingly enough, the plants growing on top of the outcrop are protected from it.
But although the fires didn't get them, the climate change rolled on regardless: over thousands of years, less and less rain fell, and what rain does fall is compressed into a very short part of the year: typically from December to March. For the rest of the year, it almost never rains.
But these plants held out, learned how to make do with less and less water — and you can trust me on this, it gets bloody hot and bloody dry. The day I took this picture was an ordinary October day, no different from any other. It was 42 degrees (that's about 110 on the old stone thermometer) and it hadn't rained for six months. I'm standing near the top of a limestone outcrop maybe 50 or 100 metres above the plains — i.e., on the hottest and driest part of this very hot, dry place.
And yet, incredibly, the plants you can see are not the hot and dry adapted eucalypts or acacias you see covering most of the continent, they are all rainforest species, species very similar to the ones you can see by the Daintree River (up above between the Blue-winged Kookaburra and the dragonfly).
Over time — and over very little time as these things go, a mere few tens of thousands of years — they have adapted to cope with eight months of extreme heat and no water, then four months of heat and torrential rain. Where northern hemisphere plants deciduate in winter, drop their leaves and go into torpor, these broadleaf rainforest plants deciduate for the dry season. When the monsoon rains come, they will burst into a riot of fresh green leaf and become an impenetrable thicket of vines, growing, flowering, and producing seed in a matter of weeks before they drop their leaves and close ther pores, hanging grimly onto the last vestige of life through the long, hot dry season once again.
My point, now that I finally get to make it, is that it isn't always the spectacular or the pretty thaty makes studying this planet so worthwhile: it's the way that everything fits together.
(There is something he's not telling you here. He didn't go out on the weekend because he only got home from an eight day trip to northern NSW after midnight on the Friday night. He goes every other weekend.)
(Who asked you to butt in, Tea? And anyway, you're banned. Go and play in the traffic.)
(It's midnight. There isn't any traffic.)
(GO AWAY!)
(OK, OK. I was juzt leaving....)
Ahem ... As I was saying, sometimes I start to feel like I'm pretty good at this photography thing. Then I look at the work of one or another of the really outstanding nature photographers — Michael Morecombe, or David Hollands, for example — and am reminded just how much better those guys are. It's like hitting three home runs in your school baseball side: it seems pretty good till you go and watch the real pros in the big league. Then you get a sense of perspective.
But my original point was that, follwing on from Gilbo's point, there are things you can do to restore your ... er ... for want of a better word I'll call it your soul. Actually, I shouldn't say "restore", rather it's more like "grow" or "nourish" or "exercise" it.
Alcohol, oddly enough, can play a part in that necessary and pleasant part of life. But only when you take it in suitably sized doses (small: a glass of red with a meal; a cold beer after some hard physical work on a hot day; or large: getting outside a couple more than you really ought to with a close friend or two). The key issue, though, is that alcohol is a limited-use tool. You can only benefit from drinking when you don't do it very often. This applies especially to drinking relatively large amounts (more than two or three). Even in small amounts, it's best and most effective when you don't do it every day.
Nature, on the other hand, has no limits. You can never have too much of it. Real love, I suspect, is much the same, though love is something I tend to think of as a slightly second-rate substitute for nature. Ambition for material success, on the other hand, is a consuming drug. Like cocaine, it works wonders in the short-term but leaves you burned-out and hollow in the long run.
(Stop being so cynical, Tannin.)
(Sorry: you are quite right, little one. I was right about ambition though.)
The thing with nature is its endless variety and enoros subtlety: much more subtle than the delights of physical love or even the finest creations of chefs and poets and musicians.
Consider this picture.
Did anyone stop to wonder why I chose to include it? It's pleasant enough, if a tad over-exposed, but what's it's point against the wonder of a Green Tree-snake or a pair of Brolgas?
This is, in fact, an extraordinary part of arid sub-coastal northern Australia. It is a dry rainforest.
Huh? Doesn't make sense? How can you have a dry rainforest? It's a contradiction in terms.
Like this.
Once upon a time, perhaps 100,000 years ago, the whole of northern Australia was tropical rainforest. Different species, but habitat broadly similar to what you see today in what remains of coastal northern Queensland, or Florida, or the Amazon Basin. It rained practically every day, and was hot and steamy.
Then two things happened: the climate started to dry out through natural causes, and humans arrived. Humans killed off the large browsing animals (diprotodons and such), and lit lots of fires, both by accident and deliberately — to encourage fresh green grass which, in turn, acts as a magnet for the surving types of large, good-to-eat animals: i.e., kangaroos and wallabies, which were harder to catch.
Now the large browsing animals served a function: they recycled nutrients rapidly through their dung (which is vital in an ancient, nutrient poor land such as Australia), and they trampled down or ate large tracts of undergrowth in the rainforests. With the large browsers hunted into extinction, the forest grew thicker and, during the dry season, burned much more readily (because of the extra fuel).
Rainforest species can't cope with fire. It kills them. And once the forest is gone, the rain goes away too, because the microclimate is changed, and the rainforest doesn't come back. Instead, you get hard-leaved, fire-tolerant species: in particular, eucalypts and acacias. Gum trees and wattles took over the vast bulk of Australia, and the rainforests retreated into the sheltered valleys and taller mountains. Rainforest is now one of the rarest vegetation classes on the continent.
But what about the dry rainforest?
Well, it so happens that there were a few areas that are naturally protected from fire. In the main, these are on the top of rocky outcrops (limestone, mostly: this part of the world is age-old sea bottom, with vertically tilted blocks of former coral reef (you can see some in the background) sticking op above the plains. Fire tends to be reflected by the sone, and, amazingly enough, the plants growing on top of the outcrop are protected from it.
But although the fires didn't get them, the climate change rolled on regardless: over thousands of years, less and less rain fell, and what rain does fall is compressed into a very short part of the year: typically from December to March. For the rest of the year, it almost never rains.
But these plants held out, learned how to make do with less and less water — and you can trust me on this, it gets bloody hot and bloody dry. The day I took this picture was an ordinary October day, no different from any other. It was 42 degrees (that's about 110 on the old stone thermometer) and it hadn't rained for six months. I'm standing near the top of a limestone outcrop maybe 50 or 100 metres above the plains — i.e., on the hottest and driest part of this very hot, dry place.
And yet, incredibly, the plants you can see are not the hot and dry adapted eucalypts or acacias you see covering most of the continent, they are all rainforest species, species very similar to the ones you can see by the Daintree River (up above between the Blue-winged Kookaburra and the dragonfly).
Over time — and over very little time as these things go, a mere few tens of thousands of years — they have adapted to cope with eight months of extreme heat and no water, then four months of heat and torrential rain. Where northern hemisphere plants deciduate in winter, drop their leaves and go into torpor, these broadleaf rainforest plants deciduate for the dry season. When the monsoon rains come, they will burst into a riot of fresh green leaf and become an impenetrable thicket of vines, growing, flowering, and producing seed in a matter of weeks before they drop their leaves and close ther pores, hanging grimly onto the last vestige of life through the long, hot dry season once again.
My point, now that I finally get to make it, is that it isn't always the spectacular or the pretty thaty makes studying this planet so worthwhile: it's the way that everything fits together.
Buck
Storage? I am Storage!
What sort of animal species live in these dry rainforests?
Buck
Storage? I am Storage!
Here is a bit from the Queensland Government on Dry Rainforests: http://www.forests.qld.gov.au/educat/btl/dryrainf.htm
Buck
Storage? I am Storage!
I like s1.jpg and s2.jpg the most. I can definitely see myself enjoying the solitude and peacefulness of s1.jpg.
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Buck, funny you should like those two: they are, aside from the colourful New Holland Honeyeater, the only two taken in Victoria. (The others are nearly all from Queensland this time last year.) S1 is sunrise in the Mallee (western Victoria), and S2 is the South Australian bushfires in the Adelaide Hills ... well, the sunset that resulted over here the day after the fires. It was taken about 20 minutes drive from home.
The other sunset is in far north South Australia - about as arid and remote as you can get. - somewhere north of Coober Pedy.
The other sunset is in far north South Australia - about as arid and remote as you can get. - somewhere north of Coober Pedy.
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Buck said:
I don't know, Buck. Not many, I shouldn't think, as they are very small: often only a few acres. There is one rather big one (which I unfortunately didn't go to), but I should imagine tht you get, in general, much the same creatures that you get in the surrounding territory.
I haven't read the article you linked to in detail yet (way past my bedtime) but it seems to be talking about "dry rainforest" in a much broader sense than I was. I'll read it properly in the morning.
mubs
Storage? I am Storage!
Stunningly beautiful pictures, Tony. And very articulate about the restorative powers of nature, too. Thank you for sharing!
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
Jake the Dog
Storage is cool
the Tree Snake photo is my favourite as well though I love the image of the Brolgas almost as much.
thanks for sharing such spectacular images Tannin. besides your obvious talent and presumably top notch photo equipment, what makes them so good, at least for me, is that I think I can 'feel' the moment in which they were taken. to have captured that is amazing and congrats to you for your fine efforts :thumbleft:
thanks for sharing such spectacular images Tannin. besides your obvious talent and presumably top notch photo equipment, what makes them so good, at least for me, is that I think I can 'feel' the moment in which they were taken. to have captured that is amazing and congrats to you for your fine efforts :thumbleft:
GIANT
Learning Storage Performance
P5-133XL said:
I have a really large "extreme telephoto" lens -- as in Nikon F-mount. I use it with my Nikon F, F3, D100. I only use it for nature photography.
This lens is far too large and heavy, so the lens mounts directly to the tripod, which for me is normally a large Bogen 3036 tripod with 3047 pan head or super duty Bogen ball head. The camera hangs off the lens by itself. Maybe I'll post a photo of this lens, which is a 300 ~ 600 mm / 600 ~ 1200 mm F3.5 ~ 5.6 zoom lens. It's stored in its own trunk case.
Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
GIANT said:
Please do!
Explorer
Learning Storage Performance
Tannin said:
Well, I didn't have the time to do a decent job. I got tied up far too long tonight on something else. Anyway, without further ado...
PS: That's one of Tannin's masterpieces in the background.
Landscape Orientation
Portrait Orientation
This is a Vivitar Sports telephoto zoom. It's the only zoom I own, with the exception of a couple of Nikon "CPU" lenses that I occasionally use with my D100. It can focus fairly close -- about 1.5 meters. But better than that, I can quickly install my Panagor macro converter on this lens, which installs between the lens and the camera body like a doubler and keeps all metering and F-stop functions intact, and look small details like worms and ants at rather great distances, or look deep into the face of animals and birds (if they would stay still long enough!) at 10 meters. Using its matched doubler, it's basically like using a telescope, but with an aperture and a Nikon F bayonet mount. For shooting landscape or portrait, the lens rotates in its ball bearing ring mount. In fact, it rotates freely 360 degrees in any direction, meaning you can shoot an upside down image.
The camera hanging off the back is a Nikon F3 meant for serious business, complete with motor drive and sports finder. Tripod head in use on that particular set of legs is a heavy-duty Bogen geared head for doing precision X-Y-Z panning work.
Dïscfärm
Learning Storage Performance
LunarMist said:
YES. It's been so long since I messed with it, I forgot what it was. Yes, I just double-checked it and it 'tis indeed a Vivitar 120mm ~ 600mm / F5.6~8.0. When I made that first post (calling it a 300 ~ 600) I was not at home. I even thought for a little while earlier today that it was a Tamron!
Onomatopoeic
Learning Storage Performance
LunarMist said:Now who was it that had Alzheimer's disease?
(Not a drink since Week 38 and none until Week 50...)
Less a thing about memory problems, more like a "doesn't care much about zoom lenses enough to remember their specifications" problem.
Ironically, I recall not recalling very well what that zoom lens' specifications were a year after I bought it (1984-ish). By the way, I stated earlier something about a dedicated 2x for that lens. Well, it doesn't exist. I was using a Nikon 2X with it (with no vignetting problems at all).
I recently realised that I have a significant amount of camera support stuff. It's easy to forget about accessories. After I somewhat-recently bought a carbon fibre Bogen/Manfroto tripod at a local camera outlet (whih was having a good clearance sale one weekend) and some more Bogen heads and accessories. Once I got back home, I brought together all my camera support stuff to check compatibility and adaptability. Unfortunately, I'm now having to stock multiples of 3 different quick-release adapters because of the different head formats.