Floriade - Canberra

Thought I'd put a few photos of this year's Floriade on this blog - after all the Queen visited Floriade today, although it officially ended last weekend!  This will be my last post for a while as tomorrow I leave on my big trip to Ethiopia, Egypt, Jordan, and Israel with a week in the south of Thailand on Phi Phi Island to recover from all the archaeology.  I'm going with my friends Gael and Donna and we'll  be away nearly 2 months.

For those interested in the trips we are on look up PhotoAdventours.com  for Ethiopia, and Peregrine for the middle east countries.

I've been busy getting the house and garden ready for my housesitter - the dogs know something is up and they are not happy.  Anyway here are some of the flowers - of course the daffodils and most of the tulips were finished as it's getting quite warm now (27 degrees tomorrow) but there was still plenty of colour when I went last week.  I'll try and post these as a slideshow from Flickr.

Pastel Portrait

I am not very experienced with pastels or portraits so went to a 3 hour class recently with a photo I took of this old woman when I was in the islands east of Lombok, Indonesia.  I really enjoyed working in pastels and finished this last week.  I think she has a lovely expression on her face.

Old Indonesian woman