photography – dangermouse.net

Bondi to Coogee Walk

Today my wife took Scully to work, so I had the entire morning free. I decided to leave early and catch the train and bus to Bondi Beach, and then do the Bondi to Coogee Walk along the coast. I took the new Metro train to Martin Place and changed to a regular train to Bondi Junction, and then hopped on a bus to the beach.

I arrived there before 9am and the weather was fine and mild, with the forecast maximum of 22°C. I began the walk at the southern end of Bondi Beach. Here’s the view looking north back to the beach.

Heading south, the first major sight is the Bondi Icebergs swimming club, with its ocean pools.

The waves sometimes crash spectacularly over these pools, but the ocean wasn’t too rough today.

Rounding the Icebergs, there’s a view looking back north over the pool to Bondi Beach.

From here the path south follows a fairly new track with boardwalks built in the last decade or two. I’ve never done this new walking path before!

The path head south around a rocky headland called McKenzies Point.

Here there are sandstone cliffs overlooking the ocean, undercut by the waves.

Around the point we can see the next couple of inlets in the coast, with Tamarama Beach (hidden) and Bronte Beach (left).

There were bunches of surfers in the rough water near Tamarama. Tamarama is the roughest and most dangerous beach in Sydney because of the geography of the bay.

Tamarama Beach itself looks like this. It’s tiny.

Rounding the next headland we get a good look at Bronte Beach. Bigger and safer for swimming. Although the sea is still a little rough today after some heavy weather over the weekend.

Circling around the beach to the south side, we find Bronte Baths. Unlike the Icebergs Club, this pool is free for anyone to use.

A wider view.

The new walking track isn’t very well signposted. I followed what I thought was the track around the pool, only to find a dead end. So I had to track back and take a set of stairs up to another path above. On the way I took this photo of the pool from the southern end.

Eventually I found the correct path and continued south past Bronte. Here’s a panorama looking back to the north.

The next sight is Waverly Cemetery, the cemetery with the best view in all of Australia. A new boardwalk takes walkers along the cliff below the cemetery. Walkers here used to have to walk through the cemetery, which annoyed the local council.

It’s a historical and very picturesque cemetery. In fact I saw a group of three guys in there filming something.

Here’s the view looking back north once past the cemetery.

The next beach is Clovelly, which is a tiny beach in a very deep, sheltered bay. Unlike Tamarama, here the long cove calms the waters so much that there were toddlers splashing in the water.

There’s another free public pool here too.

Next along the coast is Gordons Bay, which has a tiny beach, but mostly used for launching boats, not for swimming.

And around this next small headland is our destination, Coogee Beach.

The beach has this cool rainbow decoration on the main central steps down to the sand. It wasn’t far from here that I spotted one of my neighbours, walking his dog! I said hello and he was surprised to see me too. He’d dropped his partner off at some work thing nearby and was walking their dog along the beach while waiting to take her home again afterwards.

I ended my walk at a cafe in Coogee, The Little Kitchen. I had the chorizo and chick pea shakshuka, which was delicious. They also had muffins, which turned out to be strawberry and chocolate, in the one muffin! I had one of those too as a dessert (but forgot to take a photo of it).

After a relaxing meal, I caught a bus back to Bondi Junction, where I stopped to look around the shops for a bit. I timed my departure to arrive back at North Sydney on the Metro in time to pick up Scully from my wife’s work. And then I had to walk her all the way back home from there! I spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing after a busy day…

New content today:

Some photos, some image processing

I mentioned yesterday that the shops next to Maggio’s Italian Cafe in Cammeray were being demolished. I took some photos but didn’t have time to upload them yesterday, so I thought I’d show them today. Here’s a view of the rear of the properties:

This is close to where I sit on a bench while I eat the lunch that I’ve bought from Maggio’s Bakery. There’s a nice shady bench where I can sit and eat while Scully hangs out nearby. So I saw the demolition work in progress while I was eating yesterday. And then when we left, I walked out to the street at the front of the buildings:

Here you can see Maggio’s Cafe (not the Bakery, which is in a separate shop a couple of doors to the left). The yellow facade used to be a small grocery store, and the white one next to it is also being demolished – I forget what sort of shop used to be there. (Google Streetview just helped – up until mid-2022 at least it was a place that did casual art classes, where you learn to paint while sipping wine, and then in early 2024 it became a display suite for new apartments. Possibly apartments which are now about to be built on the site.) It looks like the old brick facade is being kept – you can see it is intact, but all of the building behind, seen through the windows, is gone.

I suspect the plan is to build shops at street level, with a few floors of new residential apartments above. There’s quite a bit of this sort of urban renewal going on around the local suburbs at the moment.

I also took a photo today, at the University of Technology Sydney.

I liked the building shapes here. The left and right buildings are part of the university. The greenery-covered building with the suspended solar reflector is so-called Central Park tower across the road. I don’t quite know how the reflector is supposed to work, since the mirrors are angled downwards.

Okay… I found a website with some engineering information about it! There are also heliostat mirrors on the lower roof level of the adjacent tower, which reflect sunlight up onto the suspended mirrors. Interesting! In fact I think you can see one of the roof-mounted heliostats at the lower right corner of the sky in my photo.

I was at the uni of course for this week’s image processing lecture. The professor talked about machine learning in an image recognition context.

In the evening I made lemon pepper pasta for dinner, using another of the free lemons I got last week.

New content today:

Definitely spring flowers around

Adding to yesterday’s observations, today I noticed some cherry blossom trees in full bloom, with bees lazily collecting nectar. Spring definitely felt in the air as we got up to 21°C today, and tomorrow should be even warmer. It was lovely being out and about.

I took Scully for a drive to Allambie at lunch time, where I got pies for lunch. It’s a bit of a drive, but they’re the best combination of excellent pies and reasonable distance. And it has the advantage of being very close to a playing field where Scully can run around and get some exercise. It’s a soccer/rugby field and often very muddy after rain, but it’s been sunny for the past two weeks and the ground was nice and dry today.

Today marked the 14th day in a row where it hasn’t rained! It’s been so lovely not having any rain. It’s a constant refrain among people I meet on the street while out walking Scully: “Thank goodness for this lovely weather and no rain.” “It’s so nice that it hasn’t been raining.” “It’s good to get some sunny days in a row.” You can really tell we’ve had a ridiculous amount of rain in the first part of the year by how many people are super happy and excited by the fact that it hasn’t rained for several days.

And an amazing thing happened this morning. I was just pottering around and heard an awful raucous screeching outside, which at first I thought was a sulphur-crested cockatoo, and then as it continued in a distressed manner I thought it might have been a cockatoo that had been caught by a cat or something. I raced to the window to see what I could, and realised it was indeed a cockatoo, but not a white sulphur-crested one… it was a yellow-tailed black cockatoo! And not just one, but three of them! Feeding in a banksia tree right outside my living room window.

This is a rare species in this area, so close to the middle of the city. I’ve only ever seen them around here once before, in 2017. I raced to get my SLR camera and take some photos, but when I pulled it out the battery was dead, and the spare battery was dead too! So I quickly put one in a charger and hoped the cockatoos would stay there long enough for the battery charge up a bit.

The cockatoo making all the noise—and it was an almost continuous screeching, over and over and over without interruption—must have been a newly fledged juvenile, begging its parents (the other two) for food. I watched them and waited impatiently for my camera battery. After a few minutes I tried it, and it hard just enough charge for me to grab some photos!

Pretty cool!

Tonight I started the new ethics topic on Fishing. I have plenty of questions, which is good, as I ran out of time before getting to the end in the classes.

And for dinner I made a quiche, trying a mixture of half butter and half margarine in the pastry, to try to cut down on the saturated fats a bit. It worked okay, but was a bit sticky to roll out. I’ll see how the second half goes after it’s been refrigerated for longer.

New content today:

A relaxing Monday off

With none of my usual Monday ethics classes, I had a relaxing day off. It was still very cold outside, and I just took Scully on a quick walk at lunchtime. I picked up a bunch of packing boxes from the post office to have handy for mailing off boxes of Magic: the Gathering cards tomorrow, when my eBay auctions finish. it started raining on the way back, and we had to rush so that my large bag full of cardboard boxes didn’t get too soggy. Fortunately we made it okay.

I worked on uploading Irregular Webcomic! strips and writing annotations for them. I did another stage of the Lego D&D set, but haven’t taken photos of it yet. I’ll share those tomorrow.

I do have photos of this weird fungus I spotted while out walking the other day though:

It’s an anemone stinkhorn, apparently a common fungus in eastern Australia. The brown slimy stuff is the fungal spores, ready for spreading. The fungus emits a rotting smell to attract flies, which brush on the spores and distribute them.

Apparently a spider thought it was a good hiding place to catch flies.

When my wife got home from work today we walked up to the shops. She wanted to get some snacks for Scully, and I took the opportunity to take our empty container to the bulk food store to fill it up with rye flour for sourdough. Speaking of which, I baked a loaf today, and also made pizza dough for dinner, topped with pesto, pumpkin, walnuts, and blobs of ricotta cheese.

A while back I put The Flash (the 2023 movie) on my Netflix to-watch list when it came out, thinking it might be okay. But I didn’t bother starting it because I feared it might be one of those bad superhero films. But yesterday I checked some (non-spoilery) reviews and found it was generally well received, so I started watching it last night. And yeah, really enjoying it so far. I’ll finish it off tonight.

New content today:

Into February

It’s the 1st of February, last month of summer. This doesn’t mark anything particularly important, except maybe the monthly flea and tick treatment we give to Scully.

Thursday is always my busy day, with 5 ethics classes. I’ve realised my structure for this topic on hoaxes is a bit all over the place, and I’ve been experimenting with jumping back and forth in the narrative and asking questions in different orders. It’s a fun topic though and I think the kids enjoy hearing the various historical hoaxes that we discuss.

Another thing I worked on today was preparing a photo for printing as a large wall hanging for a friend of mine. He was musing recently that he likes images of doors and corridors and hidden spaces in buildings, and was considering getting something like this hang on his wall. I said that I have plenty of photos of things like that and pointed him at my Flickr account. He went through it and decided he liked this photo, of a door I took in Sintra, Portugal:

And then he realised that I’ve been selling prints of my photos, and asked me about printing and framing options and prices. After some discussion he decided to order a large print on a stretched canvas frame, around 80 cm tall. The version I uploaded to Flickr is a downscaled JPEG file in sRGB colour space. So I went back to my original 14-bit RAW camera image and reprocessed it at full resolution, and in Adobe RGB colour space for a wider gamut. I also cropped it a little tighter on the bottom and looser on the top, which I felt was nicer.

Then I had to get a quote from the professional print lab that I use and let my friend know. So he’s going to pay me for the print and in a week or so he should have it hanging up at his home. I should probably also mention that I’m happy to do this for anyone reading this who happens to like any of my photos on Flickr and would like a print.

New content today:

Inter-seasonal treat time

It’s that in-between period after Christmas and before Easter, when both fruit mince tarts and hot cross buns are on sale. So it’s time to make one of my favourite seasonal treats!

Yep, that’s a fruit mince tart, on a hot cross bun, topped with ice cream. I warmed up the tart+bun in the microwave before placing the ice cream scoop on. And then closed the top of the bun on it before eating. It’s delicious, but very filling!

I’ve also taken a couple of flower photos today and yesterday. Some crepe myrtle flowers that had fallen on the ground:

And some gum flowers and nuts:

During the day I had 4 more ethics classes, rounding off my busy few days. Took Scully for a walk. For dinner I made another new recipe from a TV show: spanakopita toasties. They turned out pretty good, a nice easy dinner for Friday night.

And it’s online board games night now. Last time I won three games of Jump Drive in a row, but tonight I had awful luck with the cards and lost horribly. We’re now deep into a game of Castles of Burgundy.

New content today:

December 5k, cake, and photos

Despite getting to bed late last night after the board games night, I was awake again early, although I managed to sleep until almost 6am. I got up and had breakfast, then after taking Scully out for a toilet I embarked on a 5k run. The weather was warm and very humid, as it has been for the past week and a bit. But it seems I’ve mostly recovered my form after the Europe trip, and clocked 27:21, below my standard goal time of 27:30.

I worked a bit on Darths & Droids comic script writing with co-authors. I got two strips completed and planned out details of the story for the next few scenes, which will make it quicker and easier to write the next few strips.

After lunch, my wife and I went out for a short drive with Scully to a place called The Little French Patisserie, a few suburbs away. I felt like a piece of cake for afternoon tea, to make up for all that exercise this morning! I had a slice of chocolate mousse cake and my wife tried a Christmas mince tart. It’s nice to sit and watch the world pass by on a busy street while eating yummy cake.

Back home I worked on some more photos from my trip. The Arch of Constantine, which is near the Colosseum (actually you can see part of the Colosseum on the right edge of this photo):

Back streets of the Trastevere neighbourhood of Rome:

And Castel Sant’Angelo and Ponte Sant’Angelo on the Tiber River:

But that’s about it. I’m getting pretty tired every evening because I’m not getting enough sleep yet. I’ve never had jet lag drag on this long before. Hopefully I’ll get longer sleeps soon.

New content today:

Tidying up travel writing

Today I knocked off a couple of travel-related chores. Firstly, I wrote up my report on the ISO Photography Standards meeting that I attended in Tampere a couple of weeks ago. I need to summarise the entire meeting and any significant outcomes for Standards Australia, and submit the report to them, within 4 weeks of the meeting.

That took up until lunch time. The weather was a bit rainy and miserable again, so I couldn’t be bothered going for a run today.

In the afternoon I decided to tackle a less urgent travel issue. I still hadn’t finished processing photos and adding them to my travel diary for our trip to Germany and the Netherlands last year! I was partway through the last day in Amsterdam, so there wasn’t a lot to do, but I figured I better get it done, now that I have another whole trip backed up, along with the trip to Japan in June this year. I didn’t want to have three old trips that I hadn’t completed photo diaries for!

For dinner tonight, my wife and I went out for the first time since getting home from Italy. We didn’t want Italian food, so we went to a French crêpe place. Almost every time I go there I don’t have anything off the regular menu, because they always have a couple of specials, and they always look really good. Today was no exception – they had a chilli prawn galette and a butter chicken one! I would have liked to try both, but I decided on the chilli prawn. Normally I’d follow with a sweet crêpe for dessert, but I had that salted caramel tart I bought yesterday still, so I saved my dessert for later.

New content today:

Late night Zoom meeting for photography standards

I’m up late tonight because I have a Zoom meeting for ISO Photography Standards, beginning at 11pm. I’m on a special ad-hoc committee to consider the issue of skin tone colours on photographic test charts. We specify various International Standard printed test charts that people can use to test camera colour reproduction. And of course skin tones are of crucial importance because of how sensitive we are to when they don’t look quite right, so many of the charts include patches of colours meant to represent skin tones. But the issue is that many of these were designed decades ago, and the representation is mostly based on European, light skin tones, with few or no darker tones.

So we’ve assembled a group of experts from around the world to consider how we specify these going forward, in a more inclusive way. We need to think about and discuss what range of colours to specify, how they should be reproduced and displayed, and how their reproduction should be quantified and measured. It’s complicated by the fact that our visual system is very finely attuned to skin tones, not just as flat colours that might be printed on a chart, but also by spectral reflectance, lighting and metamerism effects, subsurface scattering, angular effects, and salience effects caused by our brain’s innate ability to recognise the difference between an actual person and a patch of colour.

Some of the group members have been discussing in email the potential need to specify test charts with fully three-dimensional models of human faces with synthetic skin that includes translucent layers, which is a far cry from the traditional methods of testing camera colour reproduction with a printed flat chart with square patches of solid colour. So… I expect this Zoom meeting is going to be concentrating on what exactly the scope of our problem is, and how complicated we should go in addressing the fundamental problem of expanding the range of skin tones in our standards.

In other happenings, I basically spent all day today writing my lesson plans for this week’s new Outschool ethics classes, on the topics of Candy for the younger kids, and Fossil Fuels for the older ones. I also made quiche for dinner, using cauliflower leaves as the vegetable in the filling, which turned out pretty good. I’m pretty stoked to discover that the leaves on cauliflowers are not only edible, but yummy.

New content today:

Crossing the harbour for lunch

A dream I had last night: Someone gave me as a gift a guided climb to the top of Mt Everest. So I went, and eventually found myself at the summit with a bunch of mountain climbers and Sherpas. They’re all sitting there at the top enjoying the view, while I’m saying, “Whoa, no, this is way too high… I can feel the mountain swaying… I want to get down…”

Today my wife and I dropped Scully off at the dog groomer, and then we indulged ourselves by heading down to the ferry wharf: