triplog

Last weekend we headed out of Townsville and up into Paluma Range National Park, camping first at Crystal Creek, then at Lake Paluma. The ranger there told us about a family of platypus (platypii?) on the other side of the lake, so at dusk we canoed over - and managed to see them. They’re very shy little creatures, we had to be completely silent and just drift the canoe - the footage above was shot on the second night we went out to see them.

Jane’s been diving almost everyday, here’s a shot of a manta ray (one of two that hung around feeding). She’s also got some video of this, I’ll try and get it up here.

Update: Here’s the video…(it’s a Quicktime .mov file)

… there were a few manta rays hanging around, right at the end you can see there’s 2 of them drifting away. I love how they move, so supremely graceful.

Here’s a quick hacked-together sequence of one of Glen’s waves at the Bluff… Jane snapped the wave from the point using sports mode on the Canon SLR, so I stitched it together as a Quicktime clip. I’ll upload the photos proper soon.

I realise dumping a Quicktime clip on the page like this may not work for everyone, I may edit this later and maybe use FLV instead. Anyone have any preferences re. Quicktime versus Flash video?

Update

Here’s an attempt at an FLV file … click on the player below to play it…

The file’s a lot bigger, but that may just be cos I hacked the FLV export to test this out. Anyone have any comments or preferences?

And just cos I’m getting into the swing of this and have some video files lying around, here’s a little one Jane took at the Picanninny Ponds near the Victorian/South Australian border… The ponds are a series of limestone caves under wetlands, and since there was no surf we decided to go snorkelling. Beautiful, massive sinkholes, but you’d never suspect they were there just from looking at the marshes (apologies for the camera angle half-way through).

This one’s in Quicktime again, I couldn’t get the sound to export in the FLV.