Christmas holiday – Dec 15-27, 2010

Having completed the 3 day road trip for New England North West Tourism, I retired to a motel room in Armidale for the night.
Having been stuffed full of food for 3 days straight, I didn’t even bother with going out for dinner.
And toast and coffee was enough for breakfast the following morning, too.
Around midday on the Thursday, Cath and Max arrived from Sydney (about a 5 hour drive).
We hit the road to Lawrence where we spent the night with Cath’s mum.
On Friday, it was back on the road, headed for Caloundra on Queensland’s dubiously-named Sunshine Coast.
We spent four nights at Caloundra, and it rained on and off the whole time we were there.
Which wasn’t all bad… we took Max to Australia Zoo at Beerwah, and the day we went, it was 17 degrees C and there were very few people there, which was nice.
It meant I could get some reasonably nice photos without having to elbow crowds out of the way!
The last night we were in Caloundra saw a very pretty moonrise, and I decided to wander down to the river’s edge in front of our resort for some shots.
Once down there, I discovered this little dinghy anchored maybe 10 meters off shore.
Realising that there was almost no light shining on the dinghy from where I was shooting from, I raced back up to the room and grabbed the torch from the bedside table.
I shot manual exposure for 2-3 minutes (I took a series of shots) and “light-painted” the dinghy with the torch.
I have to say I am very pleased with the results.
After getting a handful of nice shots of the moonrise, I repositioned myself on the beach so I could shoot the dinghy without the moon in the background.
This gave me a MUCH darker scene, which allowed for a 5 minute exposure.
Again, I light-painted the dinghy for a couple of minutes during the exposure, knowing that there would be a heap of movement as it bobbed around on its mooring, but that the background (the northern tip of Bribie Island) would be nice and sharp. The long exposure also gave me some short star trails which added nicely to the mood of the image.
After our time on the Sunshine Coast, we headed south to the Gold Coast for a further 3 nights, departing there on Christmas Eve.
I don’t know why, but I didn’t take one single photo on the Gold Coast. Still scratching my head over that one.
Then, it was off to Ipswich for Christmas lunch with the Queensland branch of my family, then back on the road to Lawrence that afternoon.
Christmas Day and Boxing Day in Lawrence, then back to Sydney on the 27th and back to work.
And that’s how I spent my holidays!