Midlands 2016-#9NS

It was a rather frantic day today and my intentions of leaving in sufficient time so that I would (a) not be travelling too late and (b) be able to catch the light for one of the photographs I had hoped to take, went out the window. However — speaking of “out the window” — before I left the office I got a nice shot of one of the raucous sulphur-crested cockatoos showing off in a nearby tree (although this doesn’t really count as a midlands photo).

Once I hit the road (after I’d figured out how to get my music to play in this week’s work vehicle, which turned out to be much more time-consuming and stupid than usual), it was just on sun-down and moving into dusk, and so I’d just about written off the idea of getting a north-bound photo. Just south of Oatlands, however, I spotted one of the “heritage” sculptures: a surveyor silhouetted on a hill, with real-life sheep nearby. It was quite dark by this time (I couldn’t see the controls on my camera), and a one second time exposure at maximum 20x zoom hand balanced on the wing mirror of the car was never going to come out all nice and crisp, but the shot has a certain atmosphere that reflects this part of the midlands and the time of year quite well. I like it, anyway.

Unfortunately it is now really really late … and I still have to finalise some PowerPoint slides for tomorrow.

Update to add a photo from the next day: There was a shot like the following that I had hoped to take on the road but I knew the timing for the light was going to be bad. I wanted to capture the last leaf of autumn, just hanging on to the European trees that have been planted at various places in the midlands; this is from outside the Tramsheds venue in Launceston before I started running the day’s professional learning session.

(The midlands series of photographs are a consequence of a self-imposed requirement to look for and take at least one photograph on each of my north-bound work journeys, to add some enjoyment to what could easily become a journey begrudged.)