A couple of times a year I go out to Tapiola station, Dalby to help a friend who is agisting some Black Angus cattle I co-own with a friend.

The weekend is always fun fixing up the yards, fences, clearing paddocks, branding, tagging, castrating and yarding animals for sale.

It’s pretty hard to get images when you’re climbing fences and pushing animals through the pens while looking out for rogue bulls, but here are some images from the weekend.

To see all the images in this gallery go to this link in the database. The more recent images are from the last pages.

Storm clouds build over Dalby. Pic: Joanne Lane, www.visitedplanet.com

Evening cattle inspection from the ute. Pic: Joanne Lane, www.visitedplanet.com

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I was interviewed by Peter Lane’s “Chariots of Fire” program on YYYFM Radio this week. Yes we keep things in the family around here!

The interview can be found here:

It’s the second time I’ve been interviewed by YYYFM.  The previous interview can be found at this link.

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

I add this post with slight embarrassment, as my attempts to photograph the partial total eclipse here in Brisbane this morning at Mt Coot-tha, were hardly successful. As a journalist and documentary style photographer I don’t tend to play around a lot with equipment, light, lenses and other fancy stuff and that showed today. Still it was fun and I learnt a lot.

I bought some special paper to use as a kind of lens hood and rigged up a tube, at the shop’s suggestion (thanks Astropete at Mt Gravatt), to mount this over the camera. It wasn’t the best set up by any means, not because of what they suggested, but what I did! Light was obviously still getting into the lens and creating a kind of ghost illumination of the sun. Also my lens just wasn’t powerful enough to magnify the image and because I couldn’t get the paper completely flat it was slightly distorted. Read more

My latest post on Travel Wire Asia, and part of the Tourism Malaysia campaign, featured Bako National Park and some images taken from the Visited Planet database. Bako is in Malaysian Borneo and features the incredible carnivorous pitcher plant, wildlife like the Probiscus and Silver Leaf monkey and amazing walking tracks to waterfalls and beaches.

Here’s an excerpt:

YOU don’t have to go far in Sarawak to find the jungle. In fact you see it from the plane as you descend into the capital Kuching – a tangled green mass stretches out below you, actually covering three quarters of the state in Malaysian Borneo or 8.7 million hectares. Even if you’re not too sure of your maths, rest assured that’s a lot of jungle.

One of the best places to get a taste of this immense jungle and its inhabitants is in the state’s oldest national park, Bako, just a short bus and boat ride from the capital. In fact, there are few places in the world you can be in such a bustling city and within an hour in such intense forest.

Here are some of the images used in the article and a few more from the database.

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I was asked by Gale (Cengage Learning) to blog about the “Power of We” last month for Blog Action Day. I write for them every month, but the idea of this article was to blog about any project that is making a difference, a person who inspires you or anything where people are working towards positive change.

I narcissistically chose to highlight Cameras for Asia and the recent work of Visited Planet in India. Here’s an excerpt:

At one of my recent workshops in central India one young man really stood out. He loved photography and had a real eye for it. As I got to know Rajesh I also discovered his story – one of abuse with an alcoholic father. For him photography was a creative outlet and I was pleased to leave him a camera for his own personal use at the end of the week.

Photograph by Cameras for Asia student

Another recent workshop in south India was held in an HIV clinic. If anyone is at the bottom of the barrel in India it would be people who are HIV positive. Shunned and rejected by their families and communities they often lose their jobs when they are ostracised or become too sick to work. It was therefore a great opportunity to spend time with a number of children of HIV positive parents and teach them some photographic skills as up until that point they’d only ever taken photos on a mobile phone.

To read the full blog click here and consider checking out my regular column on Australian issues.

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