What do you do when it’s low to mid-30s day after day after day? You go to the beach!

Our choice of beach this past weekend was Surf Beach on the south coast of Phillip Island – an easy 90 minute drive from Melbourne. We had a fantastic southerly coming in off the Southern Ocean that brought the temperature down just the right amount. There weren’t many people there and as you can see, the water was amazing! Shallow and warm – perfect for a family day at the beach.

This is one of the reasons I love Australia.

 

 

 

My searching for the identity of this bird has let me down so this one will have to remain unidentified, unless of course, you can help me out…

For Saturday, I offer up this cheeky little satin bowerbird. Bowerbirds build structures made from sticks and various bits of detritus.  These structures are called ‘bowers’ and are built to impress the females, who will check out the bower to see if they’re impressed even before they inspect the male. These birds seem to have a particular eye for anything blue and will pick up trash, berries, and anything else they find that’s blue to embellish their bowers.

I hope you’re having a great weekend!

Sorry, but I’m going to backup a bit here. I had prepared a couple of images earlier that I forgot to post so bear with me as I rewind to a picture from last (Canadian) summer. The timing of this image is the same rainy morning as the canoes that I posted last week. It was a very grey, wet, dark morning; not the kind that normally encourages me to get my camera out, but I’m glad I did.

 

 

I know, it’s just an ostrich right, but I quite like the background so I’m sharing it!

Looks like it’s back to work for me tomorrow. This was my last day of summer vacation. It went fast, but we had a good time. With all the travel earlier this year it was nice to just stay local, visit with friends, go on picnics, go on bike rides, enjoy time by the beach and some quiet days at home with the family.

The challenge now will be to keep up the blog while working. I’ll do my best!

 

Another from Thursdays adventure to the zoo.

Sadly just one more day of vacation before it’s time to go back to work. We enjoyed a day visiting with friends over lunch followed with a couple of hours at the beach. A perfect vacation kind of day!

Today, I’m pleased to share my first image from Melbourne since we arrived in August. I captured this image on Saturday night in a suburb called Middle Park in Melbourne. It’s right next to the much more well-known and more popular St. Kilda. The sun hadn’t quite set yet, but it was low enough for me to shoot this at f16, ISO 100 and 30 seconds. The water was quite rough, in fact it was spraying up over the end of the pier (hence all the water), but the long exposure smoothed it right out. This view is looking south out across Port Phillip Bay.

Hopefully this will be the first in a long series of much more frequent posts this year. It’s all easy while on vacation… I’ll see if I can keep it up once I’m back to work!