Peter’s Blog

I need to place on record my feeling that overwhelmingly throughout my life, my contact with my fellow men, women and children has been a total delight.
It is a recurring pleasure which I experience each day and is among the precious things which makes my life rewarding and worth living, not least because moments of the keenest enjoyment can as readily occur with a complete stranger as with family and friends.

 


 

The Film Diary includes photos as well as video frames because it contains the blog’s biodiversity content. It is also the blog’s second biggest category, after Other. The video content dates from 2008 to 2021, when I ceased videoing. The photographs date from 2014 to the present.

 

The Brisbane Line was the e-bulletin of the now defunct Brisbane Institute, to which I contributed the articles featured, between 2006 and 2012.

 

Not The Brisbane Line contains my other essays from 2005 to the present.

 


 

A cherished dream, my book   One small place on earth …  discovering biodiversity where you are,   self-published in August 2019, has been long in the making. Jan Watson created its design template nine years ago. The idea of doing a book seems to have occurred during my stay with Clive Tempest, the website’s first architect, when I was visiting the UK in 2006. By the time Steve Guttormsen and I began sustained work on the book in 2017, much of which I had already written, the imperative was to create a hard copy version of a project whose content is otherwise entirely digital.

 


 

People may wonder why there is little mention of climate change – global warming on my website. There are two related reasons. Firstly, if former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2007 remark that climate change is the “great moral, environmental and economic challenge of our age” is true, we have not acted accordingly before or since. Rudd’s statement is only true if we collectively live as if it is true, Rudd included. Instead, our politics has wasted decades favouring business as usual, and a global economy excessively dependent on fossil fuels – in the wilful absence of a politics intent on achieving a low carbon economy. Secondly, although it is open to individuals to strive to live the truth of Rudd’s remarks, the vast majority of people, myself included, do not. I salute those who do. The precautionary principle alone makes me regard climate change as a current planetary crisis, but because I have only marginally changed the way I live, and still wish to fly, I am not inclined to pontificate on the subject.

 


 

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Other / 19.01.2017

I took delivery of my Canon XA35 camera before breakfast and before noon was in Steve’s office so that he could set up the camera for me, bless him. The extras comprise two large batteries and two memory cards. The battery included with the camera is only good for 145 minutes or so.

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Other / 18.01.2017

Today I completed the settings for the last four videos compiled from tape. There are now 426 videos on the page. I have over two and a half hours of material from memory card 1 shot with the demo camera, which will be made into the next species videos.

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Other / 17.01.2017

This evening Steve and I captured the 20 frames from the last tape footage and the first 49 frames from memory card 1. The latter include plenty of in focus wide shots, which I was unable to film for the past two years with the Sony.

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Other / 13.01.2017

Yesterday I collected two time-coded DVDs from Steve. One contained the last tape footage, the other the first memory card footage. Today I selected 20 frames for capture from the last tape footage. They completed the tally of 978 images for 2016 I am submitting to the Queensland Museum to add to my Image Library which is in its collection. I have started writing the document containing location information and species identity to accompany the images.

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Other / 05.01.2017

A good way to start the blog for 2017; posting my decision to buy the Canon XA 35. This evening I was with Steve. He downloaded the footage from the memory card to his hard drive and transferred 1 hour and 20 minutes worth to his edit programme. The footage included two night filming walks and the lagoon at the Sports Complex, dry on 30 December 2016 and full of water on 4 January 2017 with four Pacific Black Ducks swimming in it, after heavy rain three days ago. I am hanging onto the demo camera and hope to be able to keep it until the new one arrives.

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Film Diary / 28.12.2016

This morning I took the Canon into Palm Grove National Park to film the aerial roots of a Bangalow Palm, the fallen Moreton Bay Fig tree, volcanic rocks on the slope above the school path and a male harvestman on a rock where I once filmed six in close proximity. The greatest benefit of a fully functioning camera was accurate focus from wide to zoom. The sunlight created strong contrast which I tried to overcome by adjusting the exposure, but the controls are not as handy as on the Sony and will take some getting used to.

This evening two guests made for an extra large party on our night walk in The Knoll. The old crew of Mark and Dan only lacked Jaap’s presence to be fully reunited. This was the first opportunity to try out the Canon at night. Because it has a better sensor than the Sony, the focused beam of the spotlight resulted in over-exposure, particularly on wide shots. Resorting to a version of manual exposure improved the image quality without getting the exposure right. I filmed a great barred frog, a female poinciana longicorn beetle depositing her eggs in a tree, two resting… Read Complete Text