Hamarana

I was meeting a friend for lunch but was early (as usual) so I went for a walk in the nearby street and alley.

For last week, an early rising took me down to Redhead beach. There was a storm out to sea, and the waves on the beach were just gorgeous. I didn’t really want to leave but you can’t avoid real life forever.

I’ve taken to rising early at least once a week, sometimes more often, to get down to the beach. I need the fresh air and to be away from the computer. Today, this is what I saw.

I cannot help thinking of these birds as being like small boys with short legs and really silly haircuts. They are built for speed, and I’ve had only limited success catching them on the wing.

and a closeup of one who was less fearful than the rest.

Shot earlier in the week, the day was horrid. Wet, miserable and not a bit encouraging for going out and doing photography. But, I had to submit my last for the Single in January challenge on seriouscompacts.com and this is it. Overly processed but a whole lot better than the really flat and tired looking image that came out of the camera.

We’re not quite to the end of my week four, but I’ve already decided that for this week, the word is sentimentalism. This brooch belonged to my mother, and even though she’s been gone for 22 years now, I still cant let her “stuff” go. I don’t have a lot of it, but what I have is important to me.

I was visiting Ausphotog this morning, and was reading a post in relation to cliche photography (they are having a comp for the 8 greatest cliches) and I realised that its exactly what I am struggling with. The very genre in which I became interested, initially, is one which is so done to death, its actually getting boring. And I have become bored. I don’t drag myself out before dawn anymore (well still once in a while, but I no longer set an alarm… over that) and I don’t make huge efforts to be somewhere near water for sunset. Because sunrise and sunset, with or without milky water and wet rocks foreground, has been overdone for so long its just getting tiresome. I’ve only just realised that I no longer get excited when I see a good example… because there are, literally, millions of good examples. I don’t even get very excited when I see my own decent examples.

I went out yesterday morning before dawn because there is one shot that I want. I should have consulted The Photographer’s Ephemeris first, it would have saved me the trouble of driving for 30 minutes to the location only to discover that the sunrise is all wrong for the time of year and I will need to be going there in June or July. So, I didn’t get that shot. I got the following one, for the Serious Compacts Single in January Challenge.

It wasn’t quite cliched but pretty close. Shot with an Olympus XZ-1 on a tripod and in shutter priority mode.

It a relief in some ways, not to feel pressured to go out at sparrowfart. These days, I go only if I am already awake, as I was yesterday. Afternoons are determined entirely by my level of motivation.

There is one problem associated with migrating your wordpress site from one place to another… that is.. images.

If you have uploaded images to the site, instead of maintaining them at a separate unrelated site (like Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, Imageshack and the like), you will have to reupload (or send them to an image hosting site) because all links point to the previous location. In my case, to images at hamarana.wordpress.com. I’ve just uploaded a few since the migration but I am thinking its pretty crazy to keep doing that, if I am, from time to time, going to be moving my stuff around.

I guess I need to reorganise – a lot.

I’m starting to struggle now, with having to shoot something every day.  I found the same thing happened last year when I did the Single in July challenge at seriouscompacts.  So, for this week, I think maybe the shot I did for today which was borne out of desperation and because I just didn’t have the enthusiasm for outdoor.

Switching from e-sack.com to www.hamarana.net was easier and quicker than I thought.  So its done.  I’ll do as I did in the past, and leave the wordpress.com site intact for now.  This poor little site has been back and forth from wordpress 4 times now, I think.  anyway, this is it for now.  The domain feels right.  Would have been better if I had been able to get hamarana.com back again, but there was no way I was going to pay hundreds of dollars for a domain that I built up in the first place, to someone who ran it into the ground.  I don’t want it anymore.

hamarana.net rules OK