I’m late again (whats new eh?) and have decided to stop apologizing everytime it takes me so long to update…coz its only gonna make it worse, lol..

I’ve been busy and have been extremely enjoying this holiday…unfortunately, my brother went back to school today and my sister went back to Scotland so I’ve got plenty of time now…btw, this is going to be a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong post.

“why?”

“…well, because I have to update on everything that happened in December so I can hurry up and start on this new year…this post is playing catch up.”

The Queen Mary Falls will be the main thingie but I’ll also throw in some pictures of our pre-christmas party (long overdue) and whatever I find in my December folder.

Queen Mary Falls

Ok, so Queen Mary Falls is located in South East Queensland – very very close to the border between QLD and NSW. The story goes something like this:

Queen Mary of England herself rode a horse through the waterfalls and loved the place. This was long ago when she was still a child. Well…either it was her or Queen Elizabeth but its called Queen Mary Falls so I guess the former would be correct. I’m about 10% sure.

I actually went twice. The first was to scout the place out as all good photogs do. The second was to pinpoint the good spots. (By first I meant my friendship parent took me there and by second, I meant I told my friends about it ad ended up planning another trip there!

Didn’t take many pics the first time as there were just the three of us: Me, Steph, and Mark (friednship parent). The upside is that I can some good pictures with steph!

Yes, I’ve cut my hair since then…

Oh, one thing cool about the first trip was that I got to test out my ND and ND grad filters…but me being me I forgot to bring my tripod AND filter holder that day!. Darn. For those of you who don’t know (which I’m guessing are most of you) an ND is a Neutral Density filter. Basically its like sunglasses for your camera so you can take slower shots in broad daylight. A graduated ND filter is the same thing but only the top half is darkened…anyway, you get this sort of effect:

You can see my finger holding the filter on the bottom right hand corner there! Anyway, the second time around the clouds weren’t as beautiful but I brought my tripod so got some nice shots.

Now I’m gonna stop blabbering and throw a bunch of photos so I can get to the next topic. The following pictures were taken on the second trip:

Perhaps this is a good time to explain that the Queen Mary Falls National Park is a nature reserve that consists of three main waterfalls and small streams. The main one is of course Queen Mary Falls followed by Brown Falls and the smallest one being Daggs Falls.

The walk to Daggs falls is amazing. Stop and appreciate Gods work.

…and its 1am…forget it, I’m done for the night…Will continue later…below is a gallery of the shots above and more. 91 pics altogether. Click for a 640×480 picture and feel free to request the pics u want forwarded to you. See ya soon!

Today I’m gonna blog about two road trips that I went on recently…the first was to Brisbane which was to celebrate Matt’s birthday…you can see his face on the previous post…

His birthday is one the 16th November 2008. He “used” to be staying in Toowoomba until just recently when he was called away from us to go to Canberra and work for Telstra. The story itself is pretty cool…according to what I know it went something like this:

Matt had no plans to leave Toowoomba (regional Queensland for non-Australian exposed peeps)…but he was looking for a job. He sent in his resume to an online website on a Monday (read Day 1) and got an unexpected call within an hour regarding his resume! These sites usually take days if not weeks for applicants to respond but his must have been outstanding! The conversation went something along the lines of this:

“Hey, can you come down for an interview tomorrow?” A little stunned he inquired where the interview would be taking place. “Canberra”, came the reply. “We would like to hold an interview tomorrow if that’s possible”, continued the voice on the other side of the phone. “Erm…”, replied Matt. “I’m now in Toowoomba…in Queensland” (Its a 2 hr flight). The voice said, “oh, what about Wednesday?” Matt thought for a while and agreed to meet for an interview on Wednesday.

(Matt correct me if I’m wrong but thats how it went in my happy head). No, I wasn’t there…So anyway, Matt shelled out just enough money for the flight first thing Wednesday morning. He didn’t have much and was putting everything on the line.

Day 3.

Early morning Wednesday Matt flew to Camberra and back. I don’t know the details but he was exhausted after that. The next morning (Thursday) he got a call saying that he got the job and would be required to start working the following Monday!!! This meant that he would have 3 days to get everything packed up and ready to go as well as say bye to everyone here! He emptied out his room in record time and within 48hrs he was ready to leave Toowoomba…Needless to say we had plenty of flour, eggs and water ready to send him off…unfortunately I was taking pics on the Polaroid so I cant upload them but it was fun!

A couple months later, his birthday arrived and we went down to Brisbane to surprise him…just a few of us: Me, Justin, Derrick, Steph, and Deborah (- his girlfriend)

Dont have a portait pic of deborah coz she was dressing up to pick Matt up from the airport so we went out for dinner in the city…

The original plan was to get a cake and hide in the room then surprise matt when he got there but as you know murphy’s law superseeds plans – “Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. First up his flight got delayed by an hour. Bare in mind that Deborah and Matt had a room but the three of us still had to drive back to Toowoomba that night. Nevermind, we thought we’d have more time to go sightseeing…which was true because as we were walking we say some people dancing.

Its pretty cool coz they had ad DJ, choreographer and all that jazz…

Thats the choreographer…can barely see his mic…

Theres Mr. DJ and his supporters…

whoops…and heres Mr blurry cam…you know you need a new prime when the 50mm f/1.8D isn’t fast enough…can’t wait to upgrade to the f/1.4…but gonna wait til the new f/1.4G comes out…

This one:

It looks so much better than its older brother which is trialed and proven.

Kinda wish Nikon would release an f/1.2 though…may be only half a stop faster than a 1.4 and prices would be overkill but why not? Canon has one…

OOPS…OFF TOPIC!

back to the dancing…there were some people really getting into it…

Quite a cool thing they had going there…anyway, we later on found out that Matt’s flight wasn’t delayed…rather the flight before his got cancelled and the people on that one was pushed to his flight which still managed to leave on time! …so they were at the hotel and we weren’t…Of course once we knew we immediately drove off…Deborah managed to get him to go out for a while while we snuck into the room with a 2nd key card to the room…

He was quite surprised although I kinda gave it away by forgetting to turn off the bathroom lights…all in all it was a fun day…plus, we had just finished our exams the day before and it was fun to get out…we had a good chat until about 1.30am in the morning…

When we left we made the mistake for following Derricks no-name-brand GPS which led us to some weird place with no electricity and half the road closed…I had enough when I heard the following instructions:

“Follow the course of the road until further instructions”

We doubled back all the way to the city (which meant we wasted 1+ hour and I took my own way back…the way which was familiar to me.