Kinglake National Park

Wednesday was my day off for the fortnight, when Charlotte was in daycare and I could catch up on errands, housework and just anything I've been putting off. For my photography course an assignment we got a few weeks back was to experiment with shutter speed, using the same moving object. My first thought was waterfalls, but living in Melbourne there isn't much around. Then I remembered Mason's Falls in the Kinglake national park, where we used to go as kids for family BBQ's.

To be perfectly honest, I wasn't looking forward to it as much as anyone else who might be returning to a favourite childhood memory. I've only been back to Kinglake a handful of times since the 2009 bushfires, and never on my own. I won't go into great detail, but these cars that were plastered all over the newspapers and television in the days following the bushfires:

These are the cars Shane and I were driving, where we left them and ran.

So there were a lot of memories as I drove up to the area, and down National Park Road to get to my destination. Unfortunately the track to Mason's Falls has not been reopened yet, but I wasn't going to let that stop me getting some great pictures, just because I couldn't get my water shots that I was after.

I took the drive up to Mt Sugarloaf instead to see if I could get a picture of the city

This is with my 18-55mm lens, zoomed in as far as I could go. Obviously not a great picture, probably would have been better if it wasn't so cloudy to get a clearer view.

You can see from the above picture that the trees haven't fully recovered. The old branches are still there, but it doesn't look like they will ever carry new leaves. The trees are getting around this by creating new branches. So the trunks are covered in new growth, with the older damaged bare branches at the top

But I was able to get some nice photos of the new life coming through 

With the zoom lens (first time I've changed the lens over for pictures, big moment for me)

Playing around with the settings. Left = underexposed, right = good exposure

What I'm really proud of, is all of these pictures were taken in manual mode. Now that I've got the hang of changing the settings around as the light changes, I want to get some practice with different lighting conditions, and see how changing the white balance affects the final outcome.