This is Settlement Wines, I highly recommend their gourmet pizza and fortified wines – both ideal for a wintery afternoon overlooking the vines. Just make sure you bring a jacket. (And yes you northern hemisphere people, it can be winter at this time of year!)

This tiny little plant was happily growing in a nice protected nook on the long dead and uprooted tree from Fantastic Dream/Rooted. It’s one of the few times in recent memory I’ve been able to take a usable flower macro shot while outside. Damn wind plays havoc with the focus at a wide aperture.

You can clearly see this tree is well rooted.
“Root (verb and noun): synonym for fuck in nearly all its senses: “I feel rooted”; “this washing machine is rooted”; “(s)he’s a good root”. A very useful word in polite company.”

Previously seen in Fantastic Dream.

Couple of little mushrooms growing in the grass out front of one of the wineries H & I visited on our recent road trip. I still really appreciate having a macro lens in my kit and being able to get shots like this without stuffing round with close-up filters or whatnot.

Yeah, I’ve got a few of these ‘vines stretching off into the distance‘ shots, but what the hell… let’s have another!

Last one from the cave region for now – this was a sinkhole that in Victorian times was converted into a relaxing garden by the then landowner. But what’s funny is that to this day it stills feels like a Victorian era garden. Strange how something as simple as the style and composition of flowers in a garden can actually retain a sense of time.

This is one of those shots I’ve passed over or ignored quite a few times, but today I managed to find some processing tweaks that I liked. From the same winery as Creeper.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a filler shot, but I really like the depth of field on these vines. 100mm macro on f/2.8. Love the wide-open f-stops.

My posting schedule tends to go to shit on the weekends, and with this being a 4 day nail-someone-to-a-cross weekend I’ve gone straight into lazy mode. C’est la vie.

Simple B&W one today, with nothing to really say about it. Short n sweet I guess.

I intentionally took this shot as a hark-back to Blue Bark 2 (also similar: Blue Bark, Canopy). Blue Bark 2 was one of my earliest posts and for such a simple idea it can be a quite effective shot. Try it sometime.

I’m feeling lazy, so here’s a flower from some distant point in the long forgotten past.

Ever since I got my macro lens I’ve been meaning to grab one of these frangipani flowers from the tree down the road and see how the macro compares to the close-up filters I’d had to work with previously. Answer? The macro probably has better image quality, but the filters weren’t half bad!

These are the brightly coloured tiny flowers I mentioned in my Caterpillar post the other week. You can see why, in an endless green forest, this little flash of colour constantly caught my eye.