Another Beautiful Sunrise

Last night I headed to Bissoe at dusk to get ready to do some night time star landscape shots. I was there a couple of hours and got some nice shots. The one below is probably my favourite (it looks best viewed bigger). I've never tried doing star reflection in water before but have seen it done a few times. As it was a very still night I thought it was worth a try. I got down to the waters edge - quite tricky in the dark - and managed not to fall in. For all my star shots I use an extreme wide-angle lens (a Tokina 11-16mm, if you're interested). There's something very satisfying at waiting for the long exposures to finish for a first glimpse at the thousands of stars - many which the naked eye can't detect - embedded into your image. Clever cameras!  

Now, during the month of March it is possible to see up to five planets if you look in the right directions on a clear night. Looking westward, the two brightest stars in this photo, seen near the horizon on the right and reflected in the pond, are in fact planets - Venus (the higher, bigger one) and Jupiter (the smaller lower on).  Pretty cool, eh?

A 4:45am start this morning enabled me to make the most of what I hoped would be another beautiful sunrise. I wasn't disappointed. I had made the decision to look for birds on the first pond at the reserve, and set up a camouflage tarpaulin with a hole in for the lens to poke through. I laid on my side on the very frosty ground for an hour snapping away at a male Mallard and realised that I couldn't feel my feet. So I hobbled off, noticing that in that one hour my hide had frozen, and went for a brief run to get my circulation going.  After that, as the sun had fully risen, I started photographing willow catkins, part of the seasonal change that happens at Bissoe. Finally, I had a look under some rocks and found a small toad - about 3-4cm long.  I got a few shots and headed to uni to do some macro work on some matchstick lichen in the lab.