Categories
Australian Animals Photography

Do you like the weekend off? I do. This photoblog is switching to weekdays only to stretch my photo collection out a bit.

I offer a yawny chuditch by way of concession with regards to this new arrangement.

Categories
Australian Animals Photography

So, to skip ahead to the present for a second, what’s Blender? Well, it’s free and open source cross-platform software for 3D modelling/animation as well as a post-production pipeline with compositing, grading, colour management, etc. All of its functionality is integrated, so hypothetically you could create an entire animated movie in Blender if you wanted to. (Yes, even the texturing and rendering and sound mix.) It’s Swiss army knife software with a brilliant, passionate community behind it.

If you want to see Blender at its cutting edge, the Blender Foundation released its latest short movie “Tears of Steel” an hour ago. The open movies leading up to this are the surreal short “Elephants Dream”, the funny animal cartoon “Big Buck Bunny” and the epic fantasy “Sintel”. Other Blender productions made outside the Foundation include Martin Lubich’s “Ara’s Tale” and the first feature-length movie made in Blender, “Plumiferos”.

Categories
Blender Stuff I made

Editor’s note: Once upon a time, the photo blog and creativity blog were two different blogs on Tumblr. They got imported into the same WordPress blog and combined into one single thing. This post is where the creativity blog begins.

Welcome to Quollism vs Blender, where i try to become a generalist using the free open source software Blender. Blender can do many useful things and i’m going to try to become not terrible at all of them. As i’m typing this, i’m doing a course to get better at modelling.

Genuine competence at any 3D-related skill will likely take some years. Seems fair.

This is a render of the oldest Blender file i can find in my 3D directory. It is a cloud. Very likely i produced it by following a tutorial. I’ll try to keep straight tutorial posts to a minimum. They are boring.

I do need a first post though and it’s either this or a badly rendered pencil. I like clouds better than pencils.

This project was last modified 30 August 2010.

Categories
Australian Animals Photography

This is Charlie the chuditch from Perth Zoo having a well-deserved lie down.

That’s about it from me for the time being. I’m taking a break from “Everything needs more quolls” for a little while to work in other media – unfortunately this means not having enough time in the week to keep taking, prepping and captioning photos. So it goes.

It’s been great sharing some lesser-known Australian animals with you all and it’s been really gratifying to see people reblogging and faving the images too. I hope you’ve found it interesting and learnt a thing or two about dasyurids and more. Many of the animals that i’ve taken photos of are in trouble in the wild due to habitat loss, introduced species and other factors, so i’m happy to give them all the publicity they can get.

That said i hope i haven’t been too heavy handed with the grim realities of conservation and that it’s made for a fun experience too. 🙂

Thanks again for watching. I hope to back here banging on about quolls in the not-too-distant future. Seeya!

Categories
Journals

Armadale Reptile Centre

On 10 August 2012, i was getting close to the end of my break from the dayjob and the weather was finally clearing up again. I’d decided the night before to head down to Armadale Reptile Centre – it’s about halfway to Peel Zoo along the same route and i guessed the sunny weather would be good for catching basking reptiles in.

Like Peel, Armadale Reptile Centre is packed in pretty tight and deceptively full of stuff – and there’s lots of little surprises! An early surprise was seeing many of the old enclosure labels from Perth Zoo back in the 1980s! The fellow who runs the Centre used to work at Perth Zoo back in the day and asked if he could have the signs.

Perth Zoo’s current reptile house is pretty good (better than back when those signs were around) but there’s something to be said for specialising in one particular area. Technically, yes, there’s more perenties at Perth Zoo’s reptile house, but if you like goannas, geckos, skinks, dragons (the existing sort) and turtles/tortoises, Armadale Reptile Centre is definitely worth visiting.

Goanna-wise you can see Mertens water monitors (being climbed on by turtles), a perentie, lace monitors, sand monitors, a yellow-spotted monitor, an ocellate ridge-tailed monitor who gets his very own beam of sunlight in the afternoon and a few black-tailed monitors, one of whom lies around on a boa constrictor.

Dragons are well catered for with more species of dragon than i can remember. Western bearded, Central bearded, spiny-tailed, uhhhhhhhhhh.. yeah, that’s about all i can remember. Skinks-wise there are king skinks (one of whom helps the monitor lie on the boa constrictor), bobtails, blue-tongues and of course there’s tiny native skinks running around too – like everywhere in Perth. (We got skinks!) There are barking geckos and leaf-tailed geckos (amongst others) in the nocturnal room.

They also have a saltie – an estuarine crocodile. It’s.. well.. not the biggest crocodile i’ve ever seen but crocodiles are bloody huge anyway and you can get quite close to it. The croc shares an enclosure with the bravest turtle in the universe, as opposed to the ones next door who panic and dive into the water when they’re not climbing all over the Mertens water monitor.

Snakes are well represented – at ARC you can see death adders, tiger snakes, many variations of carpet python, dugites, mulga snakes, water pythons, a boa constrictor (with monitors and skins sleeping on top of it), a crowned snake, Collett’s snake, a red-bellied black snake, woma, black-headed pythons, etc – more than a few of the most dangerous snakes in the world on one hand and plenty of cuddly pythons on the other. I never knew there were so many varieties of carpet python. Now i do.

If you’re not into snakes or lizards, Armadale Reptile Centre still has plenty more to offer. There’s not one but two walk-in aviaries full of happy little birds: one’s inside and has a black-faced cuckoo-shrike and a rainbow lorikeet among other residents; the other is partly outside and houses parrots and wattlebirds who think nothing of landing on you and saying hi – as well as magpies who sing happy magpie songs at you then try to rip your arm hair out or steal your shoelaces. There are many cockatoos, a great finch and parakeet aviary, a pair of Australian bustards up the back. There’s a pen of red and grey kangaroos with wallaroos and a lone emu. A common brush-tail possum is guarded by a small army of tawny frogmouths and a couple of fruit bats.

Tucked away in one corner though is one completely amazing non-reptile resident. You’ll find out more about him in a few days. He’s very photogenic and was a wonderful surprise – especially when he flew down to say hello.

Also there are dingos, donkeys and a licky pony. They have no quolls (the possum is the closest beastie they have to a quoll), but they have at least two books in their shop with pictures of quolls in them. (It’s not Armadale Dasyurid Centre, one must keep one’s expectations sensible.)

Over the next few days i’ll be posting photographs from my visit to Armadale Reptile Centre. I really enjoyed my half-day there so if you like what you see, get down there and check it out for yourselves. They are doing good work and deserve your patronage! Just mind the traffic on Tonkin Highway around the airport coming back if you have to drive up through it, coz d-amn.