Midlands 2017-#2S

This year is proving to have very few trips northward for work; here it is June, and this is only the second Midlands photo entry. I had a day trip to Launceston today, to meet with one of my PhD students and, later, one of my work colleagues. On the northward leg I was running late, due to the fact I spent ages trying to get the nearly brand-new hire car to connect to my phone, only it wouldn’t, and then I spent even more ages looking in its useless instruction manual to find out — eventually — that it didn’t even have an AUX plug (yes, first world problems, I know!). So, I couldn’t sing along to my music collection to keep me awake and entertained as I headed north; fortunately a friend rang me and we had an enjoyable conversation on the phone for most of the 2.5 hour journey (ironically the bluetooth connection worked for the phone, just not for the music).

On the way back, I knew I had to pick a spot for a photograph early, since it is the shortest day of the year and I was going to lose the light. I stopped in Campbell Town for a bite to eat, and took this late afternoon winter solstice shot of the Grange (site of so many of professional development sessions in recent years). [I thought that I’d taken one on another occasion and put it on my blog, but I can’t find it … so maybe I didn’t.]

[I have set myself a challenge to take at least one photo every time I have an extended northward trip for work, as part of a psychological ploy to help me enjoy rather than begrudge the journey; a challenge that I started when I was having to make many such trips.]

UPDATE: I’ve recently acquired an HDR program for producing “high dynamic range” images, and have been playing around with it from time to time. In addition to doing the usual HDR stuff (which involves combining images with different exposures) it has some presets that can be applied to single images to bring out some of the detail from shadows. Here is the above photo with a bit of Aurora HDR post-processing, and a crop as well. I think it better captures the colours I was seeing.