One of the things I bought when I picked up the Nikon dSLR was a Lensbaby Muse, a selective focus lens. It's becoming my favourite toy - a great thing to play with because it introduces a real sense of randomness or flukiness in how photos come out. You can never quite predict the exact results, which I love.

I went for a walk today with the Lensbaby on the camera and came back with a few photos:

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Today's my last day of holidays, so I decided to get a bit energetic. I drove down through Sunbury to the airplane viewing area near Melbourne airport.

Twin prop job, if anyone can identify the plane type.

Also

• Probably a 707 flying overhead
• Five Miles Out - the shot reminds me a bit of a Mike Oldfield song, hence the title

While I was out, I also grabbed another couple...

I posted the last few photos (these ones from Simpsons Gap and Standley Chasm) to Flickr. Yay, 450 or so raw photos processed and sorted down to 66 to end up on my Flickr account.

The full set of NT photos is here, but to pull out two:


Black-footed rock wallaby on the move over the rock faces at Simpsons Gap

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It doesn't look like that good a shot, I know, but you try tracking a fast-running brown kite bolting across the ground with a 300mm lens on manual focus, while looking between the shoulders of people sitting in front of you...


This is a brown hawk. While they usually hover and circle overhead looking for prey, they'll also run down prey like lizards. They actually have very long legs, and they run...

Okay, a couple more photos.

One thing about the desert is, you think it's empty. You pull your car over, look out, see not a damned thing moving, so you think there's nothing out there.

We went out on a tour of Curtin Springs station - over 1 million hectares that runs up to 4,500 head of cattle, down to 1.500 at the moment, and our base for our explorations of Uluru and Kata Tjuta. We were probably the first people to head out onto those particular dunes in days,...