School for Orphans of Cyclone Nargis

Cyclone Nargis left many orphaned children in its wake. A few of them ended up in this school set and supported by a local church. It goes without saying that the neater of the two dormitories belonged to the girls. The children board here in the school.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The two doctors then proceeded to conduct the first of what would turn out to be three clinics in three days. They determined that almost all the children were suffering from scabies and treated them accordingly.

Working diligently the doctors treated nearly 70 individuals including one student who had a wound that was not healing properly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As the clinic continued into the early evening, the students sat down to dinner in the same room that served as one of their classrooms during the day. This was quickly followed by the sound or a surprisingly melodious voice of a tutor delivering algebra tuition to a class of enthusiastic students. I have never seen or heard algebra taught in this way before as tutor sang out and the children repeated his teachings.

Faces of Myanmar

Myanmar is made up of many different tribes. These pictures are my first real attempt at taking portraits. 

The street seller standing at the corner was selling chilled water by passing water over a block of ice.

The remaining pictures were are of local residents in the village of Seikkyi across the Yangon River from the city of Yangon.

Geo Tagging Photographs with I-GotU Geo Tagging Device

I don’t know about you but geo tagging my pictures is a painful and time consuming task. Unless you have a camera that had geo tagging facilities, the rest of us have had to manually tag our pictures by dragging and dropping them into a mapping facility like that in Picasa or Flickr.  Then I heard Chris Marquardt (Tips from the Top Floor Podcasts) in one of his podcasts taking about geo tagging devices, so last week I just decided to order an I-GotU  9289.com which came to about $80 including shipping.

The device is deceptively simple and quite small having only one button and nothing else.  The device logs GPS coordinates at fixed intervals when it is switched on.  Every photograph that you take with your camera is also time stamped in your camera. So the trick is matching up the GPS coordinates with the pictures in your camera based on the time stamps.

This is done firstly by uploading the trip details from the I-GotU device with the bundled software named @trip using the simple uploading wizard. After the trip GPS coordinates have been uploaded, the wizard then asks whether you would like to add any photographs. All you have to do it to point it to the folder containing your photographs and the wizard does the rest attempting to match and allocate a GPS coordinate to all your pictures based on their time stamp.

Sounds simple enough. Just a couple of gotchas (1) don’t forget to check that the time on the device is exactly the same as the time on your camera clock. (2) annoyingly there is a “daylight saving” switch in the wizard and if you are not careful leaving it on will cause a log entry to have one hour added to them upon uploading and annoyingly means that the pictures cannot be mapped as they will be one hour out of sync. I recommend that you un-tick the setting and everything will be sweet

Don’t worry if you don’t quite get it right, the bundled software allows you to easily come back later and make some fine tuning and it will write the changed GPS coordinates back to your photograph.

I will update a few more tips as I play with this over the next few weeks

A Winter Afternoon At Sir James Hamer Arboretum

We had just had a lovely lunch at Credo in Olinda and bumped into some friends who had just come into the restaurant as we were just finishing our meal. Dressed in sports outfits they had clearly come from a spot of exercise. They recommended that we check out Sir James Hamer Arboretum which was hardly 5 mins drive away.

This spot is reached by taking either Woolrich Road or Chalet Road off the main Olinda Monbulk Road. This was the view that we were presented upon arrival at the car park.

We really were not dressed for walking but despite being a chilly winter day, we decided to take a short walk along Dam Road which is really more of a walking trail.

I think winter colours in Mt Dandenong offers has more variety than the usual forest green of summer.

Although we did not venture too far from the car park, just the views you can see from the photographs convinced me that I really should to come back and make a more extensive walk around the place. Hope you agree too. Oh and by the way there are BBQ facilities available too

[Photographs taken with Pentax K20D and Pentax DA 18-55mm Mk II zoom lens]

Wetlands In My Backyard

It was raining most of Saturday and I was getting restless. Sunday morning did not start any better and then the clouds cleared a bit and the sun started to peek out. I had seen an area of wetlands almost every day as I make my way to work. But somehow, I never really ever made the effort to get to it even though I had seen bird life from the highway which passes by this wetland. So this time I decided to investigate it properly.

I decided to be really brave and took along my 30 year old 50mm SMC f1.7 to see how I would fare without an fully automatic lens. This lens is older my my oldest son and was bought more than 30 years ago when I was in university in Birmingham, England.

I got the hang of it after a a dozen or so shots. I guess it is like riding a bicycle. You never really forget how to do it. The sequence I used was (1) set the aperture manually on the lens, then hit the “green” button on my K20D to get the exposure right and then focus, again manually.

I stumbled upon this scene just off the main trail surrounding the wetlands. The sun was struggling to break though which meant that I had pretty soft  light even though it was around 1pm in the afternoon.

Much I was enjoying getting to know my old 50mm lens again, I was glad I had my Sigma 70-300mm lens with me which allowed me to get this picture of an unusually twisted gum tree.

This tree stump was lying just on the edge of the stream that was meandering around the wetlands pretty much following the trail I was following.

 

 

 

I was faced by a problem in that while I could walk around the wetlands, I simply could not find a way to actually get to the wetlands proper. To add to my frustration the stream seemed to surround the wetlands area cutting me off completely.

Eventually I spied a couple walking their dogs emerging from what looked like the middle of the wetlands and lo and behold I was able to finally make my way towards my target destination.  As I hurried towards the direction the couple emerged from I passed by the remains of this fallen tree.

I was able to cross over a very narrow part of the stream and finally found myself in the wetlands proper

Most, if not all of the ponds were surrounded by high shrubs which  blocked by view. Using the breaks in the scrubs I kept looking for bird life that I could hear inhabited the area. Eventually I was rewarded by a pair of black swans feeding in their natural habitat.

   

[pictures taken with Pentax K20D, Pentax SMC 50mm f1.7 and Sigma 70-300 APO zoom lenses]

Trails Around Mortimer Picnic Ground, Bunyip State Park

I started my walk at Mortimer Picnic Ground. Despite being a rather chilly day, there were a number of families in the park and had fires going in the designated areas keep them nice and warm.   I headed north along Link Road. This road is accessible to authorised vehicles.

I turned into Williams Road and then hooked up with Windy Point Road and followed the road all the way to the top of the ridge. This is a shot of that junction.

Windy Point Road does get a bit steeper in parts so it is not exactly a stroll in the park. There are many tracks that cross and intersect Windy Point Road. Here is one such intersection.

Reaching Williams Ridge Road, I decided to walk no further uphill and instead proceeded along the downward sloping ridge track. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Williams Ridge Road is a smaller track than Windy Peak Road. Despite being on the ridge, you could only catch glimpses of the valleys below as the trees blocked out most of the views.

Just a short way after leaving Windy Peak Road, I came across the clumps of Grass trees (See previous blog entry) and then stumbled upon a small pond with completely still waters which gave me the following picture below.

The Ridge Track eventually joins the main Link Road again and winds through some pretty Tree Fern forests

The walk along the Link Road all the way back to the starting point at Mortimer picnic ground isn’t exactly easy. The road does undulate quite steeply in places up and down.

After spending the best part of 4 hours meandering around the trails, I was reasonably tired. Barely 20 minutes later I found myself in a cafe in Emerald with a Latte and a hot scone. What a way to end the trip

[pictures taken with Pentax K20D and Pentax DA 18-55mm MK II zoom and Sigma 70-300mm APO zoom]