The Patch :: A bit of Green & Gold

This weeks the patch theme is your colours & celebration, which would normally suggests sporting club colours for an Australian, we are deep in the "real" football session at the moment, but I felt the our national sporting colours, green and gold would be a better choice, not that I'm following the soccer. I think the hockeyroos did good. In the back of my mind I remember that the colours are derived from the wattle, which does start to bloom this time of year, so I went in search of some and managed to find one brave young tree just starting to bloom. There are plenty of buds on the older trees so the bush should be a glow with yellow over the next few weeks.

The story of how these colours became official and in the public domain is interesting,

Christmas beetle in HDR

It must be getting close to Christmas, last night there were swarms of Christmas beetles [Anoplognathus] around every light.

HDRi treatment of a set of bracketed macro photos, something I have not tried before. (HINT a tripod is essential, to overcome ghosting and alignment issues). Here I am using Picturenaut's Adaptive Logarithmic (aka Drago) tone mapping which uses a smooth logarithmic roll-off for dynamic range compression of the highlights and the shadows. So as to preserve the colurs in both highlights and shadows.



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