photography – puzzling.org

January 6, 2025January 6, 2025

366 days / 1775 days

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

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 retrospective

Fires

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.

Video

After rain

October 2020

The tulip is just so extremely my bullshit (see also).

All photos.

December 24, 2024December 24, 2024

Bay Run after sunset

July 2020

The last sport my son was willing to play other than cricket (always willing to play cricket) was a season of AFL. I used to cycle the Bay Run circuit in the dark while he trained under the brutal lights of the football oval.

These are phone photos, but don’t argue with #GloriousSydney.

December 23, 2024December 23, 2024

Secret Valley Escape

June 2020

From the grounds of Secret Valley Escape, now Maya Sanctuary.

All photos.

December 19, 2024December 16, 2024

Raindrops

June 2020

All photos.

December 17, 2024December 15, 2024

Morning walk in autumn

June 2020

All photos.

December 3, 2024December 3, 2024

Snake

May 2020

From the same outing as the pretty autumn leaves, a suburban snake:

Snakes aren’t as common as the Australian mythos in which we fight a Sisyphean battle against them daily, armed only with our teeth and in some cases our Irish ancestry, but they’re also not as rare as some folks would like to be assured either. I’ve never run into one in a suburban backyard, but seeing them on farms or in the wilderness is not a surprise, and this is the second black snake I’ve seen in a botanic garden; evidently botanic gardens are just big and wild enough to sustain some non-curated predators.

This one in Auburn was definitely the most active snake I’ve ever personally seen though, it was absolutely gunning it across the path and up the hill on whatever hunting mission it was on. I wouldn’t have backed myself trying to outrun it. We paid a lot less attention to the canopy and more to the forest floor afterwards.

All photos.

December 2, 2024December 2, 2024

Auburn Botanic Gardens

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.

Cape Barren geese, Auburn Botanic Gardens

Reflected branches, Billabong, Auburn Botanic Gardens

All photos.

November 29, 2024November 25, 2024

Autumn near Orange

May 2020

All photos.

November 26, 2024November 26, 2024

Japanese maple

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.