Silence is true wisdom's best reply.

Ezra impersonates Clint Eastwood. Mount Wellington, Hobart. April 2012.

I figure that for today's Sunday Top Five we may as well try and be useful. Today I present to you My Top Five Quick And Easy Tips To [Hopefully} Take Better Photographs!

Go to where the picture is! Be prepared to get your knees dirty for the sake of a shot. Get down on the ground, climb up a tree, squat low and reach up high. Like a lot of things in life, even the most ordinary thing can look far more interesting from a different angle or a different perspective.

Don't fixate on the centre! If you're wondering why your photos might all look a bit 'the same', it could be that you are always focusing on the centre of the shot. Don't! Mix up your composition. Try and encourage the observer's eye to follow through the photo by using of strong lines or patterns. It's not always about the thing in the middle.

Know where your light is! Light can make or break a picture. Where you stand and where you point is all important. Whether you want to sun behind you or whether you want to shoot into it, you need to be thinking about its effect on your photo. Do you want a silhouette effect? Strong or subtle colours? Which way are the shadows falling? Also, the time of day you take your camera out matters. Both ends of the day will give you particularly nice shadows and colours. Shooting in the middle of the day will often mean you need to get creative with your composition.

Time is of the essence! If your like me and kids feature a lot, speed is critical. At any point your subject may move, bolt, fly away, stop smiling, cry, turn around, fall over hit someone, attack you or just get tired of waiting for you to take the picture. High shutter speeds and rapid fire shooting is often the order of the day. Practice getting quicker and quicker to the draw. Like the boys scouts, the trick is always to be prepared. I'll often spend a few minutes getting the settings right for the conditions, then keep it locked and loaded in your hand. Don't hang about waiting for something to happen, just shoot and shoot often!

Experiment! I used to shoot with film and then develop it myself. It is both a challenging and enjoyable experience. It can also be time-consuming and incredibly frustrating. Anyone who has spent the best part of a pre-dawn winter's day up to their chest in a river trying to wrangle out that ideal 'spooky river's mist' shot, only to find that somehow they've contaminated the fixer and now got spots on the negatives will know the frustration that comes with 'doing it the old-fashioned way'. It's also bloody expensive. Digital cameras have changed all that, and now I never have to worry about time spent on film processing costs or running out of shots. As a result, experimenting with our photos' composition has become a real possibility; we can fire off tons of shots and delete the unwanted ones later at absolutely no extra cost. Take advantage of this fact and experiment with your composition - you never know whether an idea will work until you try it.

As with any list of 'rules', they are flexible. Every camera is different and flash ranges and focus depths will vary. Muck about with your camera. Take the same shot a dozen ways and see what you have. Shoot with the flash when you normally wouldn't, without a flash when you would. Get in close and get down low. All of this will allow you to get to know your camera's strengths and limitations and [hopefully] you'll soon be able to judge any given shot intuitively.

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

Theme Thursday again, and this one is rather easy. I am Tasmanian, you see, and aside from being all around general geniuses - as I have amply described previously - we are also very familiar with the concept of WATER. Tasmania is the ONLY island state of an ISLAND continent. That means, we're surrounded by WATER. That should help explain why I take so many photographs of water . Tasmania was for a long time the place where the British (an island race terrified of water) sent their poor people most vile and horrid criminals. The sort of folk who would face the stark choice of a death sentence , or transportation to the other end of the world. Their catalogue of crimes is horrifying : stealing bread assault stealing gentlemen's handkerchiefs drunken assault being poor affray ladies being overly friendly with gentlemen for money hitting people having a drink and a laugh public drunkenness being Irish Fenian terrorist activities being Catholic religious subversion. ...

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

This is the moon. Have I mentioned how much I adore the zoom on my camera? It's Theme Thursday you see, and after last week's limp effort, I have been thinking about how I might redeem myself. Then I clicked on the topic and discover that it was BUTTON. We've been hearing a lot about the moon in the past couple of weeks. Apparently some fellas went up there and played golf and what-not forty-odd years ago. The desire to get to the moon, however, was not simply about enhancing opportunities for Meg and Mog titles and skirting local planning by-laws in the construction of new and innovative golf courses. No, all of your Sputniks , "One small steps" and freeze dried ice cream was about one thing , and one thing only : MAD Now, I don't mean mad in terms of "bloke breaks record for number of scorpions he can get up his bum", no I mean MAD as in Mutual assured destruction . When I was a young man you see, there was a lot of talk about the type of m...

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

This will hurt me...

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