... all I want for Christmas is some good light."

{Santa checks the "naughty" list...}

"DENIED!!!!!!"

And thus Christmas day dawned overcast and grey, as it has in the Illawarra since La Nina started in... well, it feels like about 1873 at this point.

While I've had some fun with the 7-14mm ultra wide angle up front for the last few days, it was time to return to my favourite lens of all time; the 40-150mm f/2.8 Pro all-purpose wonder-tube. However the 7 to 14 has inspired me to do something else; an Excel sheet that I now have on my phone which contains a list of photographic subjects, one sheet per lens type, that I need to get around to shooting. I did have such a list, but it was entirely in my head so opportunities were often missed. This way instead, I can plan ahead of time and have a ready-made list of subjects for the times that I feel in the mood to pursue some photographic imagery.

Also, since I've been pounding it out on the campo da calcio and/or the walking and running tracks for the last few days, I thought it might be a good idea to wind the physical side of things back a little bit. I didn't want to stop exercising entirely, however. A walk from one end of Puckey's Estate nature reserve to the other (call it 3 or 4 km including some side tracks to the beach) looking for photographic subjects seemed an ideal compromise.

However the birdlife (in particular the Black cockatoos that I was looking for) remained well hidden. I could hear the little sods, but I couldn't see any of them other than a couple of small, blue ones which kept darting between the bushes to quickly to be focused on. And as I said, the light was rubbish. So instead, I decided to do a little bit of macro work with my distinctly non-macro lens, but the 40 to 150 can do such work without even raising a sweat. However I think I may have been a little bit overaggressive in keeping it constantly at f/2.8. The depth of field may be a tad shorter than ideal.

Nonetheless, here I present to you some leaves of an unknown plant (I tried to identify it, but I really didn't manage to identify any of the plants that I photographed), complete with what appear to be seedpods to generate the next generation of whatever this plant may be.

Happy Christmas and New Year, everybody!