Busselton Trip: Pt3—Gates and the Swooping Magpie Vineyard
On the third day of our recent holiday down at Busselton the wife and I went on the back roads over to the Swooping Magpie Vineyards. My primary plan was to get out on some back roads to try and find some interesting gates to photograph. The theory being that there would surely be some 'interesting' gates on the back roads around Busselton. But you sort of need somewhere to aim for, so I picked the Swooping Magpie Vineyards as our stop point.
Now not knowing the Busselton area that well it turns out that the road I thought was a 'back road' was pretty much the preferred way for any locals who were travelling west of Busselton via Vasse to that north west vineyard precinct. So as it turned out we actually encountered quite a bit of traffic on that road. However I did manage to find some gates to stop and photograph.
Of the five gates I photographed only two of them ended up looking worthy of posting when I reviewed them on the computer. Here is the first one.
As usual this scene looked better when you were there. It has an interesting cloud formation in the background and these two completely different gates chained together in danger of becoming overgrown with weeds. One gate is galvanised and is not rusting, and the other gate is older and not galvanised and is very rusted.
As it was October after some good rains the grass in the field was glossy and green but it is hard to capture that rich colour. The grass is so high that it is half way up the sheep out in the paddock.
[If you using a larger screen you can click the image to see it bigger (1,500 pixels wide)]
The next gate was about 20 kilometres further on and, as you can see, it actually stopped functioning as a working gate some years ago.
I took about 20 shots of this gate from various angles and as I take three frames for every 'shot' that works out to 60 frames. I have my Pentax K-3 set to take three frames at the press of the shutter button. It takes the first frame at the metered exposure, then the next frame at -1.3 EV and the third frame at +1.3 EV. This is not done for HDR processing. None of my gate pictures so far have been HDR processed. But if I take three frames like this then I should be able to pick one that has the 'right' exposure.
Anyway I really liked this gate because it had the dead grey-ish poisoned (assumed) grass in the foreground, the yellow-ish cut hay in the background, some green tracts of grass regrowing after the recent rains, the new-ish treated fence posts, and then the star of the picture—the rusted 'tossed aside' broken old gate. As always, hard to capture all this in one shot on a camera but I think I got close.
We got to the Swooping Magpie Vineyard about 3:00 p.m. Very friendly folk there. We had a coffee each and shared a whopping great scone about a third the size of a house brick. Complete with jam and cream—obviously.
As we were leaving I bought three bottles of their 2010 Cabernet Merlot.
I have since consumed all three bottles (well this was back in late October) and I would certainly buy it again if I saw it anywhere.
Barry.