Brisbane City At Night

A few years ago I went out with a couple of mates to do a night photo shoot of Brisbane. Back then I had a Canon Powershot S3 IS – it was a great little prosumer camera. The photos turned out really good but I was curious as to how my newer Canon 450D would perform?

Brisbane River At Night

The original guys couldn’t make it this time – Liam was overseas and Olger was sick (but we always knew that didn’t we )… so a couple of guys from work came along for a shootout (Jon and Ty).

After having one of the worst dinners I’ve ever had (old pizza from a little pizza takeaway shop at Southbank :/) we headed out to take some shots. We started from Southbank and headed North West along the river.

The full moon was out that night and was brilliant. The city looks so different at night and the reflections of all the lights off the water creates a nice effect. I especially love the Hitachi sign… it creates a massive red plume across the river.

As I expected the photos were so much better on the DSLR… the better optics and Image Stabilization did wonders for the sharpness of the photos… still want a new lens tho

Brisbane Ferris Wheel

Next we moved further down Southbank and took some shots of the ferris wheel. I was playing with the exposure settings to get some exaggerated movement in the ferris wheel. In this shot the exposure was 6 seconds… In hindsight it probably would’ve been better taking the photo from the other side of the ferris wheel as the foreground would’ve been better illuminated… oh well

I’ve never ridden the ferris wheel before… I sort of don’t see the point. Sure its fairly tall and gives a good view of the river and city but is the view that much better? Plus it costs 15 bucks a ride!!!

Thinking about it… a roller coaster around Southbank could be interesting

Buses At Victoria Bridge At Night

We slowly started making our way back to our work building (all of our cars were parked there)… next we stopped at the overpass joining the performing arts complex (QPAC) to the museum.

This shot was taken off that overpass and is another long exposure of the buses coming and going from the bus stop under the bridge. I really love this shot… it gives a sense of how busy the Victoria bridge can be at night. I didn’t count how many buses there were but even at 9pm on a weeknight there were still several buses per minute.

Traffic On James Cook Bridge At Night

Making our way over the Victoria Bridge and back to the CBD. We stopped on the bridge to check out the traffic running along the South East Freeway.

Still playing with the the long exposures and the traffic on the freeway makes a great test subject! On the left hand side we have all of the north bound traffic – you can see the red tail lights streaming into the distance.

On the right hand side we have all of the south bound traffic with all of the head lights streaming towards the camera.

Rocket Bus Near Casino

How about one more long exposure shot for good measure

This was taken at the same spot as the previous photo but is directly behind me. Diametrically in front there is the casino all lit up in bright purple. The end of the bridge here has turns left, right, and straight underneath to the Queen St mall.

This turned out to be a great spot to take long exposure shots as the city bound buses would come over the bridge and take one of those three options. This created some interesting effects!

In this case I’ve taken a long expose (30 secs) and caught a bus coming down for the last 15 seconds or so. The result is these long red tail light trails coming out of the back of a phantom bus… hmm… maybe it should be the phantom rocket bus?!?

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Since I’m on call for work I’m not allowed to go too far from work on the weekends

Oh well at least that’s a perfect excuse to do a little exploring around my local area. I live in Logan which is just south of Brisbane.

The first area I thought I’d check out is Mount Cotton. Mount Cotton has a national park which was donated from a deceased estate. The guy who donated it sold it to the council for $1 on the condition that they preserved it as a park.

The photograph on the right is a shot of the start of the walking track. There were plenty of Wallabies in the scrub to look at but they’re pretty wary of people.

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I really wanted to do a photo shoot with water -  I was pretty keen to try and capture the flow of a stream or waterfall. My partner had the great idea to go out and do a little day trip out to Springbrook.

So we hopped in the car and drove down to Springbrook. Springbrook was about an hours drive from Brisbane… maybe a little shorter if you don’t take a few wrong turns

The drive doesn’t feel like it takes that long but in fact you end up almost leaving the sunny state of Queensland and entering New South Wales. I was very surprised when I saw a sign pointing to Murwillumbah – only 30kms!

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The photo above is a shot of a small creek at Springbrook. This shot was taken at the first of many national parks at Springbroook. I used HDR on this photo to bring out the full range of the photo and did a little work on the colours to bring out the blues and greens.

There’s a few walking tracks you can explore and these shots were taken on the shorter walking tracks which were roughly 300m long and easy to navigate. There’s a couple of harder tracks that are between 4 to 6km long but they were partially closed as part of the track gave way in a storm.

The photo on the left is of a small stream. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough water in it to try and capture the effect of flowing water but it’s a nice little nature shot.

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The end of the first track we walked down took us to the top of a pretty big waterfall. Unfortunately the best photo of the waterfall would be taken from the bottom section of the track which was closed off. This photo on the right is taken from the lookout at the end of the track and was my first real chance to try and capture a water flow in a photo. To take the shot I put the camera in Shutter Priority mode and dropped the shutter speed down to 1/40 sec. Slowing the shutter speed means you capture more of the motion which gives you a whispy / flowy type effect with the water. I’m pretty happy with the result

I also had a play with a few other shutter speeds but wasn’t as happy with the results. If you slow down the shutter speed even more you end up with an exaggerated flowy stream of water – something you’d probably expect to see in a lord of the rings film.

After taking this shot we backtracked to the entrance point at the park and walked to the other side of the waterfall. There was more of a walkway over there which sat a little bit lower than the lookout so I was hoping to get a better shot from that side of the waterfall.

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And that’s where I took this second shot from. This is the same waterfall taken from the walking track. I’ve used the same settings on the camera again – shutter priority and 1/40 sec. I also played with the shutter settings some more here but 1/40 seems to be the magic number in this shot

This was as far as I could go along this track without negative political consequences

The track continued for another 4 or 5 kms and ends up at the base of the waterfall. Normally you can walk under the waterfall and take a track back to the start but a section of the track is washed away and closed until further notice.

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So this concluded our little tour of Springbrook National Park. The next item on the agenda was something called the Natural Bridge. The Natural Bridge is a rock arch over a creek (photo on the right).

A constant stream of water flowing through the top of a cave has created this amazing little cave. The cave is also home to a colony of glow worms. It was a pretty cold day so unfortunately we didn’t feel like sticking around until night time to check out glow worms… maybe in summer?!?

At the top of the photograph you can see the rock formation arching over to join the two sides of the creek. The water is falling down into the cavern and you can’t see it in this photo but there is a cavern structure to the left and behind the water.

The shot on the right is using the same camera settings before… shutter priority at 1/40th sec. I’m really happy with how this shot came out – I haven’t digitally touched up this photograph at all

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This is another shot of the Natural Bridge from a slightly different angle. The main reason I uploaded this shot is because I like it

Nah I just think that the little mound in the front goes really well with the blue water and the green mossy rocks… like I said – I like it!

From the base of the bridge it’s a very short walk to the cavern underneath – literally five minutes. As you move around the bridge it’s appearance really changes. I think it has more to do with the foreground objects – whether it’s a muddy little mound of dirt or a big mossy boulder it’s an incredible sight that I just couldn’t stop taking photos of. Trust me when I say there’s a lot of photos that I could’ve put up here!

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Inside the cavern is really amazing. It’s hard to capture just how incredible the cavern is on camera. It was a pretty dim sort of day so this hot is a little darker than I would’ve liked.

I couldn’t see any glow worms. It’s pretty dark so I don’t know why we couldn’t see them. Maybe they only glow at certain times of the day – not sure but we didn’t see any glow worms

A mate and I took a day trip to Toowoomba so we could have a play with our digital cameras. I just bought a Canon EOS 450D so I was keen to take it for a spin. I’m just getting into photography and my mate has a lot of experience so it’s a good way to learn a few tricks

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Toowoomba is 2 hours drive west of Brisbane and is located up in the mountains. The town is much much bigger than I was expecting and is a pretty cool place to visit. I guess that’s because it’s a bit of a regional hub for towns in South Western Queensland.

By Queensland standards it has some old buildings which is a refreshing change from all the “modern” (and I use that term loosely) architecture in Brisbane. The photograph on the left is a shot of the town hall in Toowoomba. I wish I took more notice but it’s an older building from the late 19th century I think (quite a few of the buildings were built around that time). This building was one of the first we found as it’s on Toowoomba’s main street – Ruthven St. The entire street is full of buildings that were built around the turn of the century / early 20th centure.

This was also one of my first attempts at using HDR software to capture all the range of highlights and shadows in the picture.  It was a bit overcast as well which made for some really striking photos – the clouds and the architecture give the photos a more dramatic effect.

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Diagonally opposite the city hall is St Lukes Anglican Church. Up close the church looks a lot younger than it looks in the photo – either the people who restored it did an amazing job or the people who built it took a lot of effort to make sure it fit in with Toowoomba’s historic appearance.

The church would look right at home in the old english countryside (well… maybe not in summer ). It has some of those famous Toowoomba gardens working for it. This shot is where a wide angle lens would’ve come in real handy as I would’ve been able to take the same shot much closer and capture more detail but oh well… I’ve got kit lenses for the time being so I have to make do

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Here’s a shot of the back of the church… I liked this shot because of the building and the bell tower on the side. It would’ve probably been nice to get a closeup of the cross at the top too because it looks great against the clouds and sky.

Thinking about it now we should’ve tried to go inside the church… there would’ve been some interesting shots with the stain glass windows and I wonder if the interior is as nice as the exterior.

Again I’ve used HDR in both of these shots to bring out the full range in the highlights and shadows. It’s the first time I’ve used HDR but I’ve got to say I’m becoming a huge fan

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Here is the old courthouse in Toowoomba. It’s an iconic landmark that I probably can’t do justice to here (pardon the pun ). We were at Toowoomba on the weekend and it looked closed so all I’ve got is this photo of the exterior.It’s another one of those buildings that would’ve been great to check out the interior… oh well maybe next time!

The courthouse was built in 1878 so it’s one of the oldest buildings in town – built even before Australia became a country! The other way to look at it is that it was built only 90 years after European settlement which means the white fellas expanded really far really quickly! The courthouse stopped being used in 1979 (which was a really good year by the way)… I only hope it hasn’t been replaced by one of those modern cheap pre-fabricated buildings that are so typical in modern Australian  architecture.

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The next item on our walk about Toowoomba is the train station. The train station is a vital piece of infrastructure in Toowoomba as it allows all manner of goods to be shipped to Brisbane and interstate.

The train station is another one of those classic Queensland buildings that we just can’t get enough of up here. I have no idea when the train station was built but it has a few pieces of railroad history at the station. I have no idea what they’re called but they have a few of those little go-kart type things that are used by workers to go up and down the tracks and check the condition of them. All human powered too! Not an easy job or one I’d be putting my hand up for… would get fit pretty quick though

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Well at least I know where those tired train workers would end up… there’s nothing that’d make a man work those tracks faster than knowing there’s a beer waiting for him at the end of the track! I’m guessing this would’ve also doubled as a hotel as well by the look of the balconies on the top floor.

You’d hope there were no trains running past the hotel at night cause I reckon a big coal train would shake that hotel around a bit

Being a photo geek (any maybe cause I’m allergic to beer… boo!) I didn’t stop at the pub… maybe I should have for some creative inspiration.

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By this point we’d covered most of the town center.Running out of ideas we went to the town’s information center which I have to say was probably the best information center I’ve ever been to. The staff gave us a map of Toowoomba and marked a few points of interest on it for us. So with our next destination mapped out we went to Picnic Point. Picnic Point is a 15 min drive from the town center but definitely worth the drive. Picnic Point is basically a park on top of a large hill. It has a great view of the country side around Toowoomba and as the name suggests it’s a great place to have a picnic! This photograph is of Tabletop Mountain… but to be fair I don’t think it’s really a mountain by official standards. Here in Australia any mound of dirt that’d take more than a week to shovel out is a mountain

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The last stop on our day trip to Toowoomba were the Japanese gardens. Toowoomba has one of the biggest and best Japanese gardens in Australia. The gardens are near the university and were setup by one of the Japanese professors at the university.

I was still in HDR mode when taking the photos of the gardens which is a bit of a shame – I don’t think using HDR was the best option here. Still I got some decent shots in so it’s not all bad

This photo is of the lake. It has a mini island in the middle which is connected to the outside by little red arch bridges. It’s all very Japanese and very awesome!

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Here’s a shot of that lake from another angle and you can see more of the little red bridges connecting various sections of the gardens together.

One of the things I really love about this garden is that it’s not really a pure Japanese garden but more a fusion of Japanese and Australian. Sure the styling is all Japanese but many of the plants in the gardens are all Australian natives. This is really important because foreign plants can struggle to survive in Australia’s harsher climates.

Also the use of Australian native plants brings out the Australian native animals (and some not so native ones ).

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Hehe… not sure if it is really meant to be a BBQ / Picnic table but I think it looks like one… and a really nice one by Australian standards. Beats those corrugated iron roof painted ones any day

Below is another photo of the lake. The lake forms the center piece of the gardens and everything is build around it. In the lake there are seven poles in a line. I’m not sure if it’s artistic statement of if there is some purpose to it???

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So I’ve got to admit it… Toowoomba really surprised me. It’s an awesome little town with a lot going on inside of it. I’ll definitely be keen to do another trip out there in the future!