I read “Tuesdays with Morrie” some time ago about a former student visiting his professor who was dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS).

For the last six months I’ve been visiting a friend in hospital dying from AIDS on Saturdays after lunch. It became a routine: bike ride, market, Rudy. There is little that is honourable, decent or dignifying about AIDS and watching the slow deterioration in this friend has been agonising.

Like in the story, I enjoyed immensely the time we had together, even though Rudy was no philosophiser on life. His face would light up when he saw me, he’d whinge and complain about family members to me in confidence and we’d go downstairs in his wheelchair so he could smoke away to his heart’s content. Yes I took him – why should he have been denied a few simple joys in his last months? A nip of Baileys and a good dose of chocolate were our other great shared joys. Read more

I spent all day Friday preparing photographs for the FCCT / OnAsia Photo-journalism Contest. As usual I had left it until the last minute and had to do it all rather quickly so I’m under no illusion my submission was all that great but it’s a good process to go through – and it does refresh you on some of the better images you’ve taken in the last 12 months.

I like OnAsia as they utilize local photographers in the Asia/Pacific region with a focus on photojournalism and documentary images.

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Today I received a photo request for some “brown landscapes”. There were very few other parameters except for “no people”. Here’s a few I picked out from around the globe although it was hard to get past the landscapes here at home in Australia.

Fields near Volterra in summer, Tuscany, Italy

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust

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I was up at Caloundra (Sunshine Coast, Queensland) about a week ago and enjoyed watching the surfers dancing between the mainland and Bribie Island one sunset. Here’s one of my favourite images from that evening.

Kite surfing at sunset. Pic: Joanne Lane, www.visitedplanet.com

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Feel free to email Jo at admin@visitedplanet.com with your comments/thoughts/photo aspirations.  See and learn more at www.visitedplanet.com

A friend came around the other day and said I should have entered some of my flood images to newspaper’s, magazines or other sources. Flattering comments of course but I must admit all images I took were taken in a rush and with mud-covered hands so I wouldn’t necessarily agree.

Anyway they insisted this image kind of summed up the whole working-bee effort of Brisbane on the days immediately after the flood, the weekend of January 15-16 when thousands of volunteers took to the streets to help flood-affected households.

Let me know what you think. I don’t like the pole sticking out of the man’s head and it probably would have been better cropped as a landscape image to show the mayhem around as well with trucks collecting rubbish, volunteers like worker ants buzzing all over neighbouring properties and so on.

The image is of my father.

Man amidst the mud during the cleanup after the Brisbane floods.

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Feel free to email Jo at admin@visitedplanet.com with your comments/thoughts/photo aspirations.  See and learn more at www.visitedplanet.com