The end of the rainbow is not a sight that you normally see everyday, but it is something that we have seen a few times over the years.  What is definitely more rare to see is *both* ends of the rainbow, especially when they are in your own front yard!  This was the beautiful view from my front verandah today.

I’ve been lucky enough to make a couple of day trips down the south west coast in the last few weeks. While I am definitely a country girl, you can’t help but be awed by the majesty of the coastline in the Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park.

I can’t help myself, I take photographs of everything around me, both for reference material for my artwork and because my camera is just another medium to create art.

These photos were all taken within a short distance of my home, in the beautiful south west of WA. Enjoy!

Tawny Frogmouth Photo Stormy Sky over farmland South West Harvest Evening Shadows over Farmland Silouhette

I have just changed over from using Photoshop CS4 to Lightroom 2.4 for processing my photographs – all I can say is I wish I had done this sooner! As much as I resist learning new computer programs (fuzzy mummy brain I think), Lightroom is so quick to use compared to CS4, the time out I have taken to learn how to use it is going to be a huge benefit in improving my workflow, especially for batch processing. Here is a selection of the first images that I have processed through Lightroom from my road trip down south to Boyup Brook.

The only nitpick that I have with Lightroom is the watermarking ability or lack thereof. I have purchased the mogrify preset which allows me to use my standard watermark…but it places them at the same location in every image, which can obscure important elements of the photograph. Plus I need to make additional copies of the watermark for different opacity and colours so that I can select slightly more subtle watermarks to suit individual images better…either that or just continue to use CS4 and apply the watermarks manually for each image.

Other than that one issue, I can highly recommend Lightroom to any photographer looking to speed up their workflow.

These images below show a tiny part of the devastation caused by the deliberatly lit bushfire that raged in the Bridgetown area in January 2009.

These images were taken out the window of the car while we were traveling at 110km per hour on South West Highway, so please excuse the less than perfect composition and clarity, but I think they still show a very vivid image of the destruction that this bushfire caused.

And no, I wasn’t driving *and* taking photos at the same time!