I headed to the Sydney Royal Easter Show last Friday, mainly to see the woodchopping. Something a lot of people might not know about me is that another one of my hobbies is woodworking (Nick Offerman/Ron Swanson is my hero). I love timber and making things out of it, so I’ve always liked watching the woodchopping at the Easter Show.
Woodchopping was ‘invented’ by Australia back in 1870, down in Tassie by two mates who made a bet who could fell a tree first. These days the forestry industry obviously doesn’t use axes anymore, its all chainsaws, but the sport has grown and the skills are often handed down from generation to generation. We’re the best in the world at chopping hardwood, with other countries preferring endurance events with softwood. It’s interesting that there isn’t a typical axemen ‘build’. There are the big burly blokes with massive raw power, and there’s the slimmer guys that cut with more precision. The axes they use are ridiculously sharp, the steel that’s used almost looks as though its been chromed. At one stage a few chips landed right next to me, and the cuts are perfectly smooth. Considering they’re cutting across the grain of hardwood its pretty crazy. The timber that is used is Silver Top Ash, which is grown in Northern NSW. To give you an idea of the hardness, it has a janka rating of 9.5, and Jarrah which most people know and consider to be THE hardwood of choice for things, has a rating of 8.5.
There are three main events to watch. The standing block, where the block is bolted vertically on a stand and the axemen stand on the ground. The underhand, where the block is horizontal on a stand just off the ground with the axemen standing on top of it, chopping between their legs. And then there is my favourite of them all, the tree felling. The axemen have to climb up a ~4.5m log that has a block on the top of it, cut half way through it, climb down, then go up the other side and finish off the block. They climb up the log by cutting very precise notches in the tree, then putting in planks that they can stand on. It takes three planks to get to the top. It requires a lot of endurance, athleticism and experience to be good at this event. It is easily the best event to watch.
Photographing it is really enjoyable, because the stadium that its done in is quite small, you can get really close to the action. The only real issue is the background being quite ‘busy’, with people on the other side of the stadium, but I was shooting at f/2.8 so that helps. One of my favourite photos to capture is one with flying chips. It was a really sunny day so I was often hitting shutter speeds of 1/4000th, easily fast enough to catch the chips in the air. I tried to move around a bit and get different angles of the events and closeups of particular things. At one stage I actually found myself sitting next to the legendary Dave Foster. I was too chicken to ask him for a photo and im kicking myself now. At the end of the day I had watched it for about 5 hours and took 450 photos.
Going back through old photos is always interesting. You come across photos you can’t really remember taking and at the time for some reason either didn’t give them enough attention or edited them as if you were drunk and using your foot to move the mouse. This is one of those photos. Taken back in May 2010 at a not-so-easy-to-get-to spot at Whale Beach. Since taking the photo my own editing skills have increased and also the software that is used has added much needed things, such as lens correction to fix the distortion from wide angle lenses. So I went back and edited it again, and was pleasantly surprised.
Better late than never for these I guess!
Well there goes another year. Photography wise this year was very quiet for me, from February to December I actually only used my camera 7 times. And in January I was still overseas so that was different. To get back in to it I’ve started a ’52′ photo project, you can check it out here – http://www.fiftytwoclicks.com.
As for these fireworks photos, they are all of the 9pm show taken from Cremorne Point on Sydney Harbour. Even though there arent nearly as many fireworks at 9pm compared to the midnight ones I think they are better for photos. At 9pm it seems like its quite dark, but with a long exposed photo you still pickup a nice yellow glow on the horizon, this helps light up the city a bit. Having less fireworks go off at once is also better I find, as it doesn’t wreck havoc with the exposure. When you have too many fireworks in the sky then you are likely to get a lot of blown out photos, or have to compromise and take shorter exposures and layer photos together of the shorter bursts later.
All the photos are quite similar to each other, just different colours. Enjoy.
A couple of friends who I met whilst I was in Germany are in Sydney at the moment for a holiday so I took the day off work and drove them out to the Blue Mountains. The weather forecast wasn’t looking too good, with the threat of rain at any moment, but we were very lucky and it didn’t rain at all. The sky was completely blown out all day though, so photos weren’t the best, but I wasn’t really there for photos anyway. I was last in the Blue Mountains a bit over a year ago, but I was doing hikes in the valley; I can’t even remember the last time I was there to enjoy the main tourist attractions.
We went straight to Katoomba to see the Three Sisters first, and there was almost no one there, going on a weekday definitely has its advantages. From there it was off to Scenic World just around the corner. First up was the scenic railway, the worlds steepest incline railway. When I was a kid this thing was freaking awesome, and it still is at 26. The walk down the bottom through the forest was really nice, the pathways were very well done. After that it was back up to the top and onto the new(ish) skyway – a short gondola trip just across the valley in front of Katoomba Falls. On the other side the entire area was burnt out due to some giant idiot who thought it would be cool to start a bushfire. Luckily it didn’t do that much damage in the scheme of things. For lunch it was a quick drive back down the road to the lovely little town of Leura and some traditional Aussie meat pies from the bakery. And of course the trip wouldn’t have been complete without a detour to the lolly shop. It was a great day and I can’t wait to go back and explore some of the quieter hiking trails for photos.
