RIP E-410

I've bought a new camera, the latest Olympus, which I scarcely know how to turn on right now, but for which I have great hopes. Today though, I got around to downloading the photos from the Queensland trip taken on my old camera, and there are some I'm pretty pleased with. They're the last hurrah of the E-410, poor spurned thing. I do feel somewhat disloyal: it's served me well over the last seven years, when I returned to my Olympus roots after a short flirtation with Canon that ended with the EOS 20D's cliff-top suicide on the Isle of Skye.

The great joy of Olympus cameras for me is that they're so compact and light to carry; and though compact cameras as a breed have come on enormously in the last few years, I'm enough of a snob an aspirational photographer to want all the extra features and capabilities of a DSLR, even if they're a bit daunting to begin with. Being smaller, they're also less ostentatious in dodgier areas, and less inhibiting to shyer subjects. Not that the animals I came across in Queensland were at all bothered by having their photos taken. Especially these ones. All the bother was on my side.

I don't think I posted about these guys while I was away, thanks to internet problems, by which I mean no free wifi (Australia is as bad as NZ in this respect, though it is getting better). I went for a pleasant wander around Roma Street Parklands in Brisbane, which were just across the railway lines from our hotel, Traders (a fine hotel, apart from, ahem, the wifi issue), and thoroughly enjoyed the gardens of all different sorts. There were lots of birds, and lizards too - that goanna above was basking on a rock there till I disturbed him - but no other sorts of wildlife, since it is right in the middle of the city, after all. Until I wandered down another pathway, that is, and suddenly noticed this huge colony of ENORMOUS orb spiders (I think). Not poisonous, but so big, and so many of them, and their webs covering such a huge area strung between some trees and bushes and a lamp-post. I was horribly fascinated, and then went on my way shuddering. Out of kindness, I'll leave you with a more calming image. Unless you're an ornithophobe, that is.