In some ways this follows on from what I was saying at the end of yesterday's shot. If I had to nominate the single biggest advantage of starting to PAD? You start to develop a much greater appreciation of the nuances of light; its colour, direction and quality. Prior to PADing I'd often see a scene and unless the light was exceptionally bad, I'd just fire away. Now, I can actually see the changes moment by moment as the sun rises, as the clouds conceal and reveal it in turn.

I had probably only 10 to 15 minutes of "good" light around Lake Belvedere this morning. After that clouds covered the sun, diffusing most of the light and leeching the colour out of it. The golden/reddish tint of this scene? That's no colour balance issue, that's what the light really was at that time. Down by the lakeside it was one of those "good to be alive" moments, though the fact that work was the better part of 24 hours away didn't hurt.

(What would I have done differently? Stopped down a bit more. At full size, the DOF is a little shorter than I'd like, but it's not so noticeable when reduced to web size.)

The aquatic landing of our feathered friend in the foreground was partly luck, partly timing. I was positioning the camera to capture more or less this scene anyway, concentrating on getting the reflection of the tree in the frame on the right, when I saw the duck inbound. I had just enough time to finish positioning and hit the shutter to capture the landing, though I wasn't fortunate enough to get any of the "close in" takeoff or landing shots that I would have liked.

Bicentennial Park / Homebush Bay is the area around which the 2000 Olympic Games were centred. (The suburb is now called Sydney Olympic Park, and sits within the City of Parramatta. Bicentennial Park sits within the suburb. It was formerly known as Homebush Bay.) You wouldn't think that it's rejuvenated industrial land and garbage dumps, would you?