Weekly Recap - Week 32
The weather was perfect for most of the week. So this recap is filled with exciting stuff!
Take a read :)
Melbourne Zoo
We started off on Sunday by going to Melbourne Zoo, just out of the spur of the moment and last minute, some time after lunch.
It actually ended up being quite busy at the zoo, due to the wonderful weather. In fact, most of this week, even though it is still winter, was reasonably beautiful weather.
For the zoo, it was sunny and 18 degrees with minimal wind, which made it a comfortable afternoon for everyone.
The kids really wanted to visit the #butterflies at the zoo, so we did just that. And I managed to snap a photo I’m quite happy with:
Days to Self
On Monday, being a week day, I had some time to myself that I used to edit some of my photographs that I had taken the week before, and share on my various channels. If you’ve been following me, you have been seeing a steady flow of some of my practice edits and my creativity as I learn.
I started Monday off with a visit to the dentist though, as I was concerned with some cracks I was getting near the gum line of my teeth. It’s something called #abractions and can be caused by both hard brushing or cracking over time due to grinding teeth or the angle your teeth are at causing pressure up near the gum lines. This wears away the enamel over time.
Anyway, I went and got myself two injections and 3 fillings to cover those up and look like new. My face was numb all the way up my nose :D
Here’s an edit I did of a mushroom on Monday:
Brimbank Park
With a new 150-600mm telephoto lens, I also took a few days visiting my local #BrimbankPark to take photos of birds and wildlife in the area. I really enjoy doing these activities on my own, as when you are playing around with settings on the camera, figuring and learning as you go, it is quite meditative and slows the mind down.
My mind tends to go all over the place, and I enjoy challenging myself and learning new things, and tend to get bored of things quickly if they are no longer a challenge and become too repetitive.
I’m glad I got to practice on an old camera before investing into my new equipment, because I’ve committed a full year into photography as a hobby already… a majority of that on the old #Nikon #D7000 #DSLR.
I can tell that photography is a hobby that will stay with me for a long time. As there’s so much to learn. Every photo I take and come back to edit, I learn something new. How could my settings have been better? What composition would have been better? Did I use the correct lens for the job? Is my colour grading off post-editing? What and how do I fix that? I’ve used too much contrast and detail, and now it all looks crunchy, how do I fix that?
It really never ends.
I’ve played around with a variety of photography styles now. Starting off with pure macro of fungi, then also trying out these bird photos.
I’ve gone from looking down at the ground for little mushrooms, to looking up into the trees with the change of season.
We’re going from mushroom season, being mid autumn to the end of winter, into now spring where birds and other life are coming to life with new offspring.
Looking up into the trees makes me find all kinds of cool things, including koalas, bats and other birds I had never seen before.
Now, when I bush walk - I take my time, tread carefully and take in all that information and scenery.
Sanatorium Lake
With my mother retired now (Hi Mum! I know you are reading this!), I like to take the opportunity to spend more time with her.
The beauty about my line of work is that I get a lot of my days off on week days, when everyone is at work, but my mother is at home twiddling her thumbs (or painting in her studio!) - so it’s a perfect opportunity to just go for a walk out in nature.
Of course, I wouldn’t miss a chance to bring the camera gear while out as well, especially on hikes I have done numerous times before and know back to front, and know that I have enough time to explore while walking.
We actually went out with a specific goal on this walk, and that was to find a mushroom called the Pixie’s Parasol. These are tiny little blue mushrooms that you probably never knew existed and had never feasted your eyes on before.
I knew they would still be around, as I had just seen someone I follow on iNaturalist observe some in a different location.
Initially, I was not having any luck finding them. My mother was helping me out as I was busy snapping other photos, like this one, which is this weeks favourite:

That’s a Yellowleg Bonnet Mushroom and it was just over 1cm in height, growing on a tree trunk.
My mother kept scouting ahead, and guess what she found and yelled out to me?
That’s right, she found some of the Pixie Parasols we were looking for along the trail!
These guys were less than 1cm in height, and due to the way the log was sitting and my reach with the tripod and camera, I had a slight difficulty initially setting up for a macro photo.
In the end, with perseverance, I got there and managed to take a snap of these two up close.
This was the first photo I attempted to Focus Stack in post-editing, and I had to learn new skills and still learned a lot more later on about which settings work best for my workflow, but I am happy with the outcome!
Focus Bracketing & Focus Stacking
Since I am on the topic of focus stacking**, what exactly is it anyway?
Well, firstly, there are two things:
- Focus Bracketing
- Focus Stacking
When you are taking very up close photos in macro realm. Your camera is generally within 15cm from your lens tip to your subject. Because you are so close, the subject you are trying to take a photo of is filling up most of your frame on your camera. As you see in my mushroom photos, the subjects take around 40% of the screen or more!
This means, the camera cannot get everything in focus at once. If you were to turn up your apperture to something like f22 to try and get more in focus in one shot, you would not be letting in enough light for one, but you’d also get a lot of what’s called chromatic abberation. I’ve linked a wiki article for you to read should you choose. But in lamen terms, colour fringing and the inability for the lens to focus all colours at one point. They are shooting all over the place, blue, red, yellow, and you get a lot of weird colours in your photos, especially along the edges of things.
Anyway, back to focus bracketing.
So you basically need to do something in the camera called Focus Bracketing. This is a technique where you take multiple photos of the same thing, in the exact same position over and over again (sometimes 50 or 100 times), each time with your focus shifting further and further back in the scene, from the front.
Thankfully, my new camera has this feature built in, and I only need to tell it where my start point in focus is, how far I want the focus to shift between each photo, and how many shots I want it to take.
So now you have a stack of photos you are bringing home. They all look the same, besides the focus looks different on each shot. How do you make 1 image out of that?
Thankfully again, there is software to help do this called Zerene Stacker.
What the software will do, is something called Focus Stacking. It will take all your photos and use its super powers to put them all into layers, align each one perfectly and merge all of the sharpest points of each photo into 1 final image, which results in the 2 sharp images of the mushrooms I shared above from the Sanatorium Lake walk.
Camera’s and software these days allow you to do other techniques as well. Including exposure bracketing, so that you can get beautiful HDR landscape photos with both the sky and the foreground in the perfect exposures. And you can combine this technique with focus bracketing as well! This is something I will try with landscape in the future.
Cape Schanck
On Saturday, we ended the week on another high. Now the wife and the kids were home, and it was time for some family activities!
We did Melbourne Zoo on the Sunday before, and this round, we did Cape Schanck!
It was another beautiful day. A top of 14 (seems cold, right!), sunny day, no clouds, no wind = recipe for a wonderful day.
We started at the #PeninsulaHotSprings at 8:30 AM. Crispy cold morning, hot spring water. Another perfect recipe. Wouldn’t have even bothered us if we had some light rain while there! A little bit of cold water on the face while sweating from the rest of the body in 40 degree waters - bit of a fire and ice combination there.
We then followed the hot springs with some lookouts along the southern coast of Victoria. Checking out the London Bridge, Dragon’s Head Lookout and ultimately, Cape Schanck.
By the time we got to Cape Schanck, the kids were getting tired. But they pushed through, and in the end, got to see some beautiful scenery that they never would have seen had they given up.
We even got to spot an #echidna that wasn’t afraid of humans and hung around hunting for ants for a good half hour.
I’ll likely share more of these photos with you in the next recap, as I technically didn’t edit them during this recap time period, and I don’t want to take away from this weeks choice of photo of the week! Which was that of my Yellowleg Bonnet Mushroom!
Task Completion
I am adding this section here again this week, as it keeps me on track and responsible to myself.
This week, I hit a good success rate again in task completion for myself.
I completed 79% of my tasks (33 out of 42). I’m proud of that again this week, and need to keep this up again for next week!
I’ll have a monthly recap to write about in the end of August, and hopefully that will tell me overall, how well I have been doing so far, not just week to week.
I shared a total of 9 photos this week, which is good. More than 1 photo per day. That’s a steady stream of edits and practice over the week, and again, getting better each time (in my opinion).
I’ve shared 5 random short posts with you all. Which again, just means I’m not that active on social media just posting random things. There’s enough information in my weekly recaps anyway, and much more detail for you to read!
Conclusion
Yet again, thank you for reading to the end if you did so. I’d love to get your feedback, any comments, suggestions or thoughts.
And until next time, see you next week!