Aussie Bloggers

We get some interesting visitors to our backyard, in the form of native birds. We have an aviary with budgies, and they tend to scatter birdseed around which attracts other birds. Here’s a selection of some of those visitors.

My favourites – the Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos. They are quite common around Canberra and you often see large flocks of them grazing on the sides of roads, or in parks.

Rainbow Lorikeets are also fairly regular visitors. Its always a treat to spot them, because they’re so colourful.

Now for something we only see occasionally. King parrots.

We also get the usual suspects, the various black coloured birds, and black and white ones – which I lump together as crows and magpies respectively (which amuses my daughter who does know the differences between the various types of black and black and white birds – but then what am I to know …I always thought Golden Retrievers were just hairy Labradors until a couple of years ago, when I learned they are completely different breeds of dog). Galahs hang around fairly regularly, and in the non-bird arena, we get our share of possums, and even once had a kangaroo out in our street (and we’d be at least one kilometre from the nearest bushland).

But for something really unusual, check this out.

No, just kidding!

But seriously, I’d be interested to know what interesting/unusual/pretty visitors you’d had at your house. Let me know in the comments.

Photo by John Kratz

I was interested to note that out of the top five Top 100 Aussie blogs, two of these are photography blogs. Also interesting to note is that these two photography blogs are ‘how to’ blogs.

The blogs are Digital Photography School and Photoshop Tutorials and Links. While the latter is about Photoshop, it does mainly deal with editing photos.

It got me thinking as to why blogs about photography and editing photography are so popular. I wonder if it’s as simple as there are more photographers than bloggers out there. I know since I got a Flickr account I’ve become more involved in the Flickr community with meeting real people and taking photos with them. Consequently I’ve created a new category on my blog called photos because I’m developing a real interest and enjoyment in it.

Of course digital cameras make a huge difference. If we had to take photos with film, get it developed then scanned to a digital format I’ll bet lots of people wouldn’t bother.

So you’ve learned about taking photos and how to edit them afterwards, but now you want to incorporate them into a portfolio and blogging is the perfect way to do this.

A blog I’ve been reading for a while is Boudist. Daniel Boud – the author – has had a great journey of a photography hobby becoming an interesting job. Read about it.

Another Aussie photo blog I came across relatively recently is Neil Creek – Photographer. He also writes for the aforementioned Digital Photography School and runs photography competitions.

What other blogs that focus mainly on photography do you read – particularly Australian ones?