Strand Ephemera 2021

Strand Ephemera, a biennial sculpture show on our beautiful Strand, is one of the Townsville City Council’s best visual-arts initiatives.

I began recording it on Green Path long before creating this parallel Words and Images blog so I have put this year’s gallery in the same place. It’s here, and it contains links to all my posts about previous shows.

Cameras for rambling greenies

The DSLR camera I have been using quite happily for five years was beginning to show its age before I visited Tasmania last November, miscommunicating with its lenses, failing to pop up its built-in flash on request, or under-exposing a series of shots, so I spent some time looking at replacements for it. That survey came to include most segments of the camera market, not just direct replacements, so I thought I might share its results here. I hope it will be useful but please bear in mind that it’s a personal perspective.

My needs are, as my title implies, off the beaten track. I want gear that I can carry easily enough while hiking and I want to take photos of birds (small and distant), bugs (smaller still but usually very close) and landscapes. People portraits? Rarely. Buildings? Sometimes.    Continue reading “Cameras for rambling greenies”

Littoral not literal

Most of my photography is documentary, expressly intended to show its subject as clearly and literally as possible. Occasionally, as here, I’m tempted into altering a shot for expressive effect. I saw these trees on the Strahan beachfront early one evening, when the light was already fading to mistiness and ethereality…

For a more mundane view of Strahan, try my other blog, Green Path.

Header image sizes in twenty sixteen

It makes surprisingly little difference if the header images are too small, e.g. 940 x ca 200 px rather than 1200 × 280 which is what twenty sixteen recommends. At window widths less than the image width it makes no difference because the theme re-sizes the image anyway; at larger window widths the image left-aligns but doesn’t right-align. And image height makes no difference at all to the functioning of the theme, unless images of varying heights are used in a slider.

Some of my sample images are tagged with their sizes. Height varies, and (to me) 205 looks a bit miserly, 280 dominates the page too much. ‘Townsville from Mt Stuart’ is 235px high, while my paperbark blossom is 205px high (mainly because that was easiest, working from the versions I had). Both have 12pt Futura titles.