Waterfall on the Taggerty River

Piccie of the day. I took this today high in the mountains behind Marysville.

Not just a "piccie of the day"

I was just going to put up a piccie of the day tonight because I was home late. But when I started I got just a little more ambitious.
Being the weekend Deb and I were out and about. We headed north-west of the city today, out into the gold-fields.
Deb and I paused  by the lake at Daylesford.

Where we had a delightful snack of local cheeses and coffee.

Then we continued to the west along a road we have never used before, past very scenic country interspersed with Nineteenth Century gold mine tailings and in places the ruins of quite elaborate engine houses that once housed the steam engines that powered the mines.

We fetched up in Clunes which is a town stuck in a time-warp. Clunes was the first gold-rush town in Victoria. This is the Anglican church there, as you can see they planned to build in two stages.
 
But then the gold played out and the town all but melted away so the second stage of the church was never built.

Finally on the way home I paused to catch shots of a rather nice sunset.

A long story to a short answer

A few weeks ago most of the five of us (Deb + me, E our eldest and Lu our youngest) went for a weekend drive to part of the Gippsland coast in east Victoria.
Io stayed home with Lilli (no dogs allowed in national parks in Oz)

It was by our standards a fairly short run of only about 2 and a half hours drive each way.
Anyway after having a relaxed lunch and poking around a bit we ended up at the rugged coast line between Cape Paterson and Inverloch.

Deb and Lu looked at the weather,

which was really threatening to rain and elected to stay near the car.

E and I decided to climb the stairs down to the beach to have a look at the rocks out towards this interesting feature called “The Eagles’ Nest”.


To give an idea of scale I would guess it is around 5 stories high with the cliffs about double that.

Despite the threatening storm and the late afternoon we took advantage of the fact that the tide was falling quickly. You can see as we crossed the area the platform was becoming exposed by the retreating tide.

Interestingly the rock platform at the base  is made up of sedimentary rock that was formed on a flood plain back in the Cretaceous about 115,000,000 years ago.

One beach to the east is the only current dinosaur fossil dig in Victoria known as the “Dinosaur Dreaming” dig. And in 1903 just to the west was the first discovery of a dinosaur fossil in Oz known as  the “Cape Paterson Claw”.
So as well as the usual hunt for starfish and periwinkles I had my eye open for fossils.
As we got closer to the Eagles’ Nest
I began noticing literally dozens of chunks of petrified wood in the stone.
This was the largest piece we found.
I like the way the water was rippling across it in this piccie.

And from another angle with E’s hand to give a scale.

As you can see it was a decent size and beautifully preserved. It was hard to believe it felt like solid rock, not wood, to the touch.

Now we come to part of the point of this whole story.
One of the local denizens was this White-faced Heron, Egretta novaehollandiae

I took a few shots of him before he took off.

For those of you who guessed feathers for this image you were 100% right.
 
Here is the un-cropped piccie

I told you I wasn’t going to be tricky!

First Piccie of the Day

Well here it is a piccie for today.

Sunset over the Brindabellas, ACT

Tomorrow the answer to What is it Wednesday

Do you think this is feathers like almost everyone else has guessed?

What is it Wednesday?

Melbourne CBD about to be lashed by a storm

No the piccie above is not my WIIW piccie.

After a long day at work I began looking through my personal archive to find a WIIW post.
Sometimes I find a piccie with minimal effort, others it take an age.

This time it was somewhere in between. However, one thing I did decide was that I have now shared an awful lot of piccies on this blog and have 1,000s and 1,000s more. 
Most of the piccies I have shared because I like them and it seems a shame to let my piccies languish unloved on a hard-drive somewhere.

So I thought I would make an effort to post a piccie most days even if I didn't have time (or energy) to do much else.

So my question is what do you all think of that as a concept?

Now down to the business of the day.
I promise that because I have already asked you to think, I will not be at all tricky with his weeks WIIW.

 So - What on Earth do you think this is?

Light on the Subject

A quick post tonight.
 I have had a rather frustrating weekend mostly spent shopping for clothes for work.
Have I ever said how much I hate shopping?
 I’d rather be out in the bush trying to photograph something like this.
The Hopetoun falls, Otway Ranges Western Victoria.

Or stalking one of these

A New Holland Honey Eater (Phylidonyris novaehollandiae)

Now I should throw some light on my What is it Wednesday puzzle from last week.
Everyone guessed something like street lights, or reflections of the same.
Here is the full image.
 
Can you see now?
And a shot taken from the same place using a long exposure.

I had the cameras set on a tripod to capture these shots.
The lights are on a wharf front crane unloading a container ship at night.
I posted this piccie nearly a year ago when I was experimenting with my then “new” camera.
I have my eye fixed on a new “new” camera but at close to $4,000 I think it will stay in the shop. For now!

What is it Wednesday?

Well once again it is cold wet and miserable down this way.

As I stood on a garage forecourt filling my car this evening, the radio was predicting snowfalls on the mountains around Melbourne. No wonder I felt a bit chilly!

I have just one word. BRRRRR!

Now as it is Wednesday I have to say: what on Earth do you think this is?

A clue, I have posted this piccie on my blog once before!