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Loving the storm sequences…

Utterly slammed at work all week but finished up with a shoot at a great house overlooking Ku-Ring-Gai Chase National Park.

Inland to the Hinterland…

Long walks through some ancient rainforests…

While we have been away, Brisbane and various other parts of Australia have suffered massive flooding.
Apparently 90% of the country’s wheat crop has been destroyed as well as countless thousands of people homes and livelihoods.

Check out some more incredible before and after photos here

Move the mouse across the images to see the before and after shots.

My new step dad Guy owns a 300 acre ranch in northern California called Lowecha. The name means Eagle spirit and the land is near the area in which the last surviving Mewok indians lived.

Guy has pledged to never develop the land and keep it as untouched as possible.

There are some huge ridge lines, rivers and valleys as well as massive thousand year old Redwood forests. It is also right next to George Lucas’s ranch and is reputed to be the inspiration for the Ewok characters and where the Ewok scenes from Star Wars were filmed.

There are mountain lions in the area and bob cats as well as plenty of deer.

We went out for some long hikes and a bit of racing around in the 4wd buggy…I love it out there.

Note the 180 days in prison for shooting the sign – enforced by the Hicks gun club…

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Wine! Great fresh food! Flo on a horse! Fresh air outdoors! More Wine! Broken Car! Fixed Car! Fun in the Hunter Valley…

Props to Kas for pointing me to this…

Oil in Eden: The Battle to Protect Canada’s Pacific Coast from Pacific Wild on Vimeo.

It’s one of the last bastions of Canadian wilderness: the Great Bear Rainforest, on BC’s north and central Pacific coast. Home to bountiful marine mammals, fish, and wildlife – from orca and humpback whales to wild salmon, wolves, grizzlies, and the legendary spirit bear – this spectacular place is now threatened by a proposal from Enbridge to bring an oil pipeline and supertankers to this fragile and rugged coast.

The plan is to pump over half a million barrels a day of unrefined bitumen from the Alberta Tar Sands over the Rockies, through the heartland of BC – crossing a thousand rivers and streams in the process – to the Port of Kitimat, in the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest. From there, supertankers would ply the rough and dangerous waters of the BC coast en route to Asia and the United States. Dubbed the Northern Gateway Pipeline, the project is of concern for three main reasons: 1. It would facilitate the expansion of the Tar Sands, hooking emerging Asian economies on the world’s dirtiest oil; 2. the risks from the pipeline itself; 3. the danger of introducing oil supertankers for the first time to this part of the BC coast.

Now a growing coalition of First Nations, conservation groups, and concerned citizens from Canada and around the world is banding together to say no the Enbridge project, in what is shaping up to be the defining Canadian environmental battle of our time. Produced by Canadian filmmaker Damien Gillis for Pacific Wild, This 16 min short documentary – featuring stunning images from the Great Bear Rainforest – provides a summary of the key issues involved in this battle over the pipeline, tankers, and Canada’s Pacific coast.

By far the best (long) weekend of our time in Australia so far…we drove 200kms north to a spot we found randomly on google maps called Port Stephens. The area is an old volcanic valley with a natural harbour about 2 and 1/2 times the size of Sydneys waterways.

Fantastic hotel, great food, long walks, whales tails, dolphins, kangaroos, amazing beaches, some very odd looking cone geography, HUGE national parks with bush stretching to the horizon, the biggest moving sand dunes in the southern hemisphere (apparently), and a bit phototastic…happy days.

After the hottest november in 150 years in Sydney, it has got VERY cold the last few day…

“Sydney has shivered through its coldest June day in 27 years, with the mercury plummeting to 4.7 degrees in the city.

Not since 1983 has a colder June temperature been recorded according to the Bureau of Meteorology.”

Rest of report here.

We braved a snorkle for some exercise and I actually thought the water wasnt too bad…turns out it was 16 degrees, a good 8-10 degrees warmer than the air temperature!

The southern hemisphere winter snow season has begun this weekend at resorts in Australia and New Zealand, with both having pretty good opening days… We are planning a trip down to the Aussie resorts although I dont have high expectations as the resorts are not very high and apparently get VERY busy…they have also had the highest average lift prices in the world for the last few years…

This was opening day 2009 – View from the top of Cardrona looking towards Wanaka: