Tag: covid-19

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365 days / 1684 days

I started uploading photos taken in 2021 to Flickr on January 13, 2021, including these:

Evening cloud Lone person on Penguins Head rock shelf

Today is the 1684th day of 2021’s photo processing, the last publicly accessible upload I made from 2021 was:

Vivid sunset

I might not seem to be accelerating that much (2020’s photos took 1775 days) but I have mostly complete uploads from 2024 and entirely complete for 2025, so I only have 2022, 2023, and part of 2024 to catch up.

The literally thousands of photos I took in a two week period in Europe in 2022 will be a journey though.

2021 retrospective

Culburra

This photo is something of a favourite of the algorithms that display my photo history to me, and I’ve stared at it so much in the last four and half years that I honestly have no idea now whether or not I like it:

Half broken wave, Tilbury Cove

More: Penguins Head, Tilbury Cove, Warrain Beach, more Warrain Beach. (Just this sequence, about a week in real time, took me two months to upload.)

Newcastle

Ocean, ANZAC Walk, Newcastle

More: Hang gliders, clifftop views

Auburn Botanic Gardens

Goose

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COVID ephemera

Exclusive: 100 More Chemists to Offer COVID

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Milk Beach

Last light off Sydney City, from Milk Beach

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Lockdown sunsets

Rainbow over the Opera House

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First dawn (after travel limits lifted)

Gap bluff

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Christmas storms

Fire and rain

More: storms, last light

Golden last afternoon

Easton Park playground

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366 days / 1775 days

I started uploading photos taken in 2020 to Flickr on February 27, 2020, including these:

6th birthday cake Alice in Wonderland cupcakes

Later in 2020 it became A Thing to count every day as part of March 2020 (ie, today is the 1773rd of March, 2020), In that spirit, today is the 1775th, and also the last, day of 2020 in terms of my photo processing.

Fittingly, today’s final upload features these “2020 SUCKS” cupcakes my kids decorated on December 31:

2020 sucks cupcakes

2020 retrospective

Fires

New Year's Day, 2020

More (and, December 2019)

Rain

By the time I was uploading my mediocre videos of heavy rain from January and February of 2020 (this one was uploaded in January 2024), it was becoming a little hard to remember why I was so excited about it.

Rain at Victoria Rd and Darling St, Rozelle, time lapse

Video

March/April COVID-19 lockdown

Adore Pharmacy Rozelle entry warning, March 2020

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Autumn, Japanese maple edition

Backlit Japanese maple

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Autumn, there are in fact other varieties of tree edition

Last light on autumn leaves

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Autumn, Auburn Botanic Gardens edition

Backlit leaves

More, bonus snake

Autumn, morning walk after rain edition

Autumn leaves on windscreen

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Winter rains

Wet leaves

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Blue Mountains getaway

Backlit shrubs

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Bay Run at night

City lights reflected, Bay Run

More, September at sunset

Spring rains

Tulip

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Boxing Day storm

Boxing Day storm front

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Auburn Botanic Gardens

This entry is part 15 of 21 in the series Autumn

May 2020

This album comes via a quick detour to update Wikipedia so that I understood how school reopenings worked in New South Wales in 2020, specifically:

From 11 May [2020], students returned to school one day a week with a plan for a phased return over several weeks. From 25 May, the phased return was replaced with full-time schooling.

Wikipedia: COVID-19 pandemic in New South Wales (2020)

I had decided in advance that when school went back — it was remote for seven weeks, and two weeks of Easter holidays — that my spouse and I would then immediately take a week off work. Thus, the week of 25 May, we went somewhere each day in Sydney to explore, of which the most photogenic was Auburn Botanic Gardens in late autumn colours.

Fallen autumn leaves
Backlit leaves Leaf litter Japanese Garden, Auburn Botanic Gardens Cape Barren geese, Auburn Botanic Gardens Swamp wallaby, Auburn Botanic Gardens Reflected branches, Billabong, Auburn Botanic Gardens

All photos.

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Japanese maple

This entry is part 13 of 21 in the series Autumn

May 2020

Prime example of why I can’t declare photo bankruptcy: autumn in my mother’s garden in May of 2020.

By May, there was very little COVID in most of Australia, which had closed its borders to non-residents in late March and would not re-open them for tourists until February 2022. The weekend of 16/17 May was the first significantly unrestricted weekend, and so we went to visit my family post-haste.

Backlit Japanese maple Detail, backlit Japanese maple Curling Japanese maple leaves Very very last light on Japanese maple Sunlit Japanese maple Backlit Japanese maple

All photos.

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First dawn

October 2021

The 11th was the date when NSW stopped having a 5km travel limit, so I left home before sunrise and drove to The Gap to watch the first far-from-home dawn.

Of course, it was damp and cloudy and dark, no dawn to be seen. There’s more variety in the transforms on the photos than I usually do, because the light was so average.

It was great.

Gap bluff Pool at the foot of Gap Bluff Watsons Bay on a rainy dawn day, first day out of lockdown Stairs up to Gap lookout Gap Bluff and North Head
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First Sydney lockdown

March & April 2020

I was looking through my phone photo detritus from the time of the original closures (which were not as strict as the July to October 2021 ones, during which I mostly stuck to photographing sunsets rather than sign-of-the-times images).

Early on, this kind of sign was unusual enough that I photographed it especially:

Adore Pharmacy Rozelle entry warning, March 2020

I never figured out if the placement of a hand hygiene sign next to a cheap will preparation sign was deliberate, and if so, intended to be funny, shocking, or just attention-getting:

Hand sanitising warning, April 2020

Speaking of bleak, we played one game of Pandemic but it got awfully real with outbreaks in East Asia and Russia:

Playing Pandemic in lockdown Playing Pandemic in lockdown

Our local Flight Centre was lookng forward to welcoming us back for several months. It closed permanently nearly a year ago now:

Flight Centre Rozelle during lockdown: it never re-opened

I’ve never been to a ANZAC Day dawn ceremony in my life, but I did happen to be awake at dawn, so went and stood in my yard as was the style at the time.

Private dawn ceremony, Anzac Day Anzac Day 2020: no gatherings, just signs

Someone somewhere was audibly playing The Last Post.

"Smile" chalk drawing, lockdown chalk art

All photos.

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Milk Beach, last days

July/August 2021

Starting 5pm Friday July 9, we could only travel within 10km of your home for exercise/recreation in Sydney. I’m not generally a fan of bright-siding these restrictions (“my workaholic husband has ditched the corporate rat race, any chance we could stick with widespread house arrest, it’s been just great for his blood pressure?”) but it does inspire a certain amount of scouring one’s vicinity for places to be. The ocean beaches are all slightly more than 10km as the crow flies from me, but some of the harbour beaches such as Milk Beach remained accessible.

I walked with a friend there during daytime and after that decided that a family excursion at sunset was called for:

Sydney city, late afternoon, from Milk Beach Last light off Sydney City, from Milk Beach Sydney City silhouette after sunset, from Milk Beach

The other reason to frantically find family excursions, as I told my family gloomily, was in case the rules got stricter, which indeed they did, a 5km radius from August 16. So the evening of August 15 we traipsed out once more to farewell Milk Beach for the time being, not, seemingly, the only ones:

Watching the sunset at Milk Beach Last light, Milk Beach

All photos.