Tasman Peninsula camera test

The two Saturdays prior to this one had been taken up with marking duty, with a couple of stacks of assignments to return to students. This meant that I was feeling a bit antsy for a trip outdoors, not least because I’d recently purchased my long-promised half-century birthday present and hadn’t really had a chance to give it a work out. I had decided to buy a new digital SLR since my old one was starting to show signs of age and limitation (which is true of its owner!). As I was thinking about upgrading, I nearly decided that the performance of my little digital camera would be sufficient for my needs, but it won’t do time exposures of any length, and I do want to keep doing waterfall photos and night photography, where exposure times of more than 1 second are useful. So, I am now the owner of a Canon 70D with an 18mm-200mm lens (which means that I will only need to carry one lens on bushwalks, instead of the two that I carried in the past (and, even so, they only got me from 18mm to 135mm because these lenses are from my original film SLR and lens technology has also improved over time)).

So, with Saturday looking free and climatically pleasant, I took my parents down to the Tasman Peninsula. The light at the beginning of the day was rather flat, which made photography a little disappointing, but by afternoon it was a little better. At the end of the day, as I looked at the shots from my camera, I concluded that I still need to do a little more work to optimise the quality of the results, but I also think I’m going to enjoy doing so.

Flower from one of the Clematis species, with small spider; near Tessellated Pavement.

Tessellated Pavement, Eaglehawk Neck.

Pied oyster catcher, Tessellated Pavement (cropped and enlarged).

Cape Raoul from the car park near Remarkable Cave.

Remarkable Cave. This sea cave is at least 50m long, and, at low tide, you can walk its length.

At high tide, and with a good swell, however, you don’t want to go anywhere near the inside!

Waves breaking as a big swell rolls in to the bay near Remarkable Cave.

     Mum at Lime Bay.

Gum trees growing around the dry lagoon behind Lime Bay.

  Swans near Premaydena, Tasman Peninsula.