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 entries are selected items from the diary I keep whenever I film. To check location references, click on ‘Tamborine Mountain’ on the top information bar then hit the ‘Tamborine Mountain’ button on the map.

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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Website / 16.07.2014

For some weird reason when we added over 100 new XMLs to EOL, all but a few of the original XMLs vanished from my EOL gallery as if they had never been there at all, even though Andrew sought to make them compatible with WordPress.  All the new XMLs were successfully uploaded. After waiting a couple of weeks for Andrew to work on my corrections to the original XMLs, I decided to take matters into my own hands and re-do the lot from scratch. I then added over 100 new data files, which had been accumulating since the first new batch. All this took several days of long and concentrated effort. Andrew came to my place this morning and transferred all the XMLs from my downloads to his USB. He has some code checking to do before arranging for the XMLs to be harvested by EOL. As noted in my  8 May  post, we’ll see. Check EXPANDED PRESENCE ON EOL  30 March 2014.

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Other / 06.07.2014

Worked with Steve on new tapes and he confirmed that he had sent the final data file to Showrunner Productions in Perth, following succesive email requests to use my footage for their  ’72 Dangerous Animals Australia’  series to be shown by the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). Showrunner requested my ‘Giant Centipede’,  ‘Paralysis Tick’,  ‘Stephen’s Banded Snake’  and  ‘Grey-headed Flying Foxes’  vimeo footage.

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Other / 30.06.2014

Peter Hendry sent me an email on June 28 with the first Pancam ID, a small moth from a photo I sent him. Having emailed Chris Burwell with ID requests for a Pancam photo and 2 video frames on the 25th, I phoned him today regarding identification for a species video of an Earwig I filmed two years ago and he gave me information about the subjects in my email. I thought one subject was a Shield Bug and one a kind of Lady Beetle. The Shield Bug turned out to be a Soapberry Bug and the Lady Beetle an unidentified Shield Bug nymph.

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Other / 24.06.2014

This evening Steve downloaded the first video clips and photos from the Panasonic to his hard drive. We added photos and selected video frames for capture to Stills 18. I then deleted everything from the card and am awaiting a DVD from Steve with all the material from the download.

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Film Diary / 15.06.2014

From now on the plan is for the Pancam to be in my pocket when I take my morning walk, although opportunities will be restricted because it is the beginning of Winter. Today I filmed a very small moth on the garage. I would not have bothered to film it with my Sony camera. I also took a photo of the moth which filled the monitor. Taking photos (10 megapixels) is a new departure for me. It is so easy. Later I filmed a caterpillar on a fence and some mature and immature Shield Bugs of a type I had never seen before, on and near the trunk of a cycad in Driscoll Lane. Checking the footage this afternoon, I was impressed with the clarity and brightness of the images which are in full HD, ie 1920×1080, whereas the Sony films in 1440×1080 and cost nearly $6,000 in 2007. I returned to the cycad later in the morning with my Sony and tripod and filmed the Shield Bugs with the benefit of a dedicated view finder.

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Film Diary / 14.06.2014

Mentioning to Hugh Alexander last week that the Gopro isn’t a suitable back-up camera, he pointed out that there were bound to be pocket sized cameras I can point and shoot at macro range. And so it proved when I collected some tapes for my Sony camera on Wednesday and checked out some small camcorders. I extended my enquiries the next day, comparing camcorders from 4 manufacturers. Steve agreed to meet me today to help assess which camcorder best met my requirements. The selection boiled down to a choice between two Panasonic camcorders. I ended up buying a V210M, a Manfrotto monopod, a Belkin HMDI cable, a 3 year extended warranty, all at a price over $100 lower than the top of the range Gopro. The camera has a 16 GB memory, but I am using a 16 GB card.