EOSM - Cats, Rocks, Food, Astro, COVID-19 & a snake (PICS)

EOS M6 + EF-M 32mm f/1.4 STM lens - My cat Mauii... who is about 86 cat-years old now.

EOS M6 + EF-M 32mm f/1.4 STM lens - a ray of light coming in from between the blinds.

EOS M6 + EF-M 11-22mm f/4-5.6 IS STM lens - Wallaby Rocks in the Sofala Goldfields

EOS M6 + EF-M 22mm f/2 STM lens - Burnt out trees after the Australian Bushfires at Dusk

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MAUII
My cat Mauii is a bit of a celebrity at the Vet these days. His Diabetes has all but disappeared but he's an old cat. At almost 18 human years old, he's the oldest cat on record with our local vet. They love him because he just purrs and watches them work around him and never complains when they take his blood or give him injections. Our other two cats seem to be aware of his advanced age and give him space. I spend a bit of time each week filming him with stills and video using the M6. I hope he can hold out a little longer.
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GOLDFIELDS
I took a drive out to the mountains this week... two trips actually. One was to the the Goldfields in the plains on the far side of the Sydney Blue Mountains. I used up more water that I thought I would and began to dehydrate. The heat coming off the rocks in the valley I was in exceeded 50C, even though it is Autumn here in Australia. I suffered serious dehydration with my pals and we had to abandon our search for gold since we were struggling just to dig for easy targets on shallow ground. I'd had some trouble breathing and with energy - although I think I can account for this now. I enjoyed the journey out there but regret that the heat and exhaustion cut short my hunt for gold.
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MILKY WAY
With our major cities powering down during the Coronavirus Pandemic, I noticed clean air and clear skies this week. The moon was below the horizon in the early evenings so I drove from the suburbs up to the mountains and spent a two hours under the stars after sunset. The bright side of the Milky Way isn't in our skies at this time of the year but the bright nebulous regions or the Great Nebula in Carina and the two jellyfish-like Dwarf Galaxies called the Magellanic Clouds, were visible to the eye. There's no obvious color that can be seen with the naked eyes when you look up at the Milky Way. Everything looks to be a milky blue-grey color. But the camera can see it more clearly with a bright lens and some crimson colors from nebulous matter were showing through.
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Setting the White Balance to 3500 Kelvin with the NiSi filter was a little bit too saturated in the violent range for me. I immediately altered the WB again.

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I used the NiSi Natural Night Filter to cut out some of the light pollution (if any) and this meant that I needed to tweak the White Balance to around 5000 Kelvin for these shots. I still ended up with a bluer hue when shooting to the north and a slightly violet hue when pointing the camera South. I took the pictures below within an hour after sunset ...so that might account for the color differences. I usually take my shots of the night sky with a Tungsten WB and that tends to produce a very blue tone to the images. I thought I'd follow the suggestions from NISI to try using something a little closer to 5000 Kelvin this tim instead of 3500 or Tungsten. The results, though far more white than blue, were still interesting without the warmer or cooler hues. I used a tripod, the 2-second self timer and the NiSi filter. No stacking. I set up on a dirt track in the mountains, took a few pictures using Manual Focus with the Magnify feature on the LCD and then left. It was 33C out there at night... unusually warm. The tiny insect eating bats were flapping around my head during the exposures when I turned my flashlight off.
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EOS M6 + EF-M 22mm f/2.0 STM lens - The Great Nebula in Carina (see pink area)

I used the NiSi Natural Night filter for these shots - mounted on a set of step up rings that enabled me to mount the 77mm filter that I had to the 43mm UV filter on my 32mm and 22mm lenses.

EOS M6 + EF-M 32mm f/1.4 STM lens - 3x image vertical panoramaLooking North towards the Orion Nebula (top left)

EOS M6 + EF-M 32mm f/1.4 STM lens - (8 shot panorama) - Southern Milky Way showing the Magellenic Clouds (right) near the Milky Way.

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SNAKE
Stopped to try and rescue a dangerously venomous (but extremely common) Red Bellied Black Snake on the way home from the goldfields. Sadly, it had just recently died and was probably clipped by a car a couple of hours earlier. My friend, who was driving, did not want to stop for it ... but I got him to turn the car around. You can see how far away he was parked when I took this image. He wanted nothing to do with this snake. We left it there and drove to the nearest town for cold fluids and ice cream.
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EOS M6 + EF-M 11-22mm f/4-5.6 IS STM lens - A potentially deadly Red-Bellied Black Snake

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FOOD & PANDEMIC INSANITY
We had a meal the night before at a local pub. I got a chicken schnitzel with salad and fries. I returned to the same place a week later with my wife but the number of coughing and sick people there forced us to leave and return home as a safety precaution. Yesterday I drove up to the Central Coast and noticed that NOBODY was abiding by the Social Distancing Measures introduced by our government. This resulted in police intervention in Sydney with the beaches forcibly closed and people in crowds sent home. What was I doing there? My parents house was meters away and we needed to get some groceries from next door. Our entire state is about to be locked down in an enforced quarantine in about 48 hours now. The shops here are stripped bare. I photographed the frozen goods isle (see pic), the meat isles, the cereal, canned goods, biscuits, long life milk and paper goods isles... all of which were empty. We live in strange times.
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EOS M6 + EF-M 32mm f/1.4 STM lens - Chicken Schnitzel with Mushroom Sauce

EOS M6 + EF-M 32mm f/1.4 STM lens - Chicken Schnitzel with Mushroom Sauce

EOS M6 + EF-M 11-22mm f/4-5.6 IS STM lens - Empty Shelves due to Coronavirus Panic

EOS M6 + EF-M 32mm f/1.4 STM lens - Anniversary Dinner

EOS M6 + EF-M 32mm f/1.4 STM lens - Australians refusing to obey Social Distancing Measures.

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COVID-19
Back in December, I got extremely sick for a few days and it was such a peculiar illness (like a mini-flu that hit me VERY hard and then left me coughing for weeks after wards) that I sought medical advice and yet doctors refused to test me. They now admit that I was probably exposed to the S-Strain of the virus.
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In my case, I'm dealing with my mother who is herself dealing with serious cancer... and my wife who has MS. So I was in a self imposed quarantine for almost 2.5 months, thinking it was just a really weird flu at first. This is why I haven't been active on the forum here for quite some time. I simply wasn't able to get out. And when it dawned on me that I appeared to have ALL of the common and several 'unknown' symptoms connected to COVID-19.
I thought the issues with my lungs was the result of all the bushfire smoke but at least three doctors and one nurse now think I was infected. It's lucky I isolated myself alone for so long. I even had my wife pass me things and disinfected my hands when I touched anything. I have my own bathroom and sleep at different times to my wife. Time will tell. I'll get some tests later if we get through this. The empty shelves at our supermarkets are a continued reminder of how this thing continues to dominate our lives. If I'm locked down here, I won't be headed out for a few weeks more.
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Good luck to you all. I'm watching the affairs of the world unfold on an hourly basis. Crazy times.
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EOS M6 + EF-M 11-22mm f/4-5.6 IS STM lens - My wife in the empty meat isle at our local store.

Great shots and insight as ever, some amazing images.

Make sure Mauii too at her age is OK through these difficult times - amazing image of her and cat pictures a hallmark of these forums

I'm Pretty sure I got these labels right.   There's a lot going on in the night sky... I'd be out there again tonight if it wasn't so cloudy right now.

Happy to hear you recovered and are healthy now.  Best wishes to your family, hopefully they stay healthy as well.

Glad to hear that whichever flu you had you seem to have come out of better than others.  I'm not i self Q. but staying home more and taking the time to look at older images and reconsider some and do some editing. Might finally tackle scanning those old Kodachrome slides from my earlier days. Stay well!

Glad to hear you recovered from whatever it was and took significant precautions to prevent spreading it, even back then...

Great photos and write-up!

As always, great photos and commentary.  This virus madness of cleaning out store produce and ignoring common sense rules is more than frustrating.  World wide pandemics are sure to increase with a lot to learn from this one.   All the best in family safety and hopes for a full world wide recovery, and soon.

Marco,

Interesting. Your description and timeline match several stories from others I've heard over the last 24 hours... It's sounding like Type-S (or Type-L) might've actually been what my family got mid-Jan, my grandparents got early Feb, and what I'm hearing other folks got also around Dec-Jan here in the states. My wife hit 103.5 with the most phlegm she's ever had and she's 35, got knocked on her butt for 2 days and then had a lingering cough.

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Interesting.

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Everything lines up both timelines, and symptoms and symptoms based off age group impacted. My grandparents both required medical attention, my wife got it bad-bad, but no medical intervention required, and my 3-yr old, it was like a cold. Hmph.

If that was Type S, I don't want to know what Type L is... That was awful enough.

RLight wrote:

If that was Type S, I don't want to know what Type L is... That was awful enough.

My experiences and observations have been reported to the authorities here. Australia has now been placed into a lockdown with each state isolating itself from the next. There's an occasional advantage in having a larger bodied camera (DSLR) and a larger lens with me... in that people assume I might be with the press (I'm not) but the smaller EOS M cameras sure make it a lot less conspicuous... and I'm able to take shots of what I see that are usually much better quality that my cellphone (iPhone) takes. As a freelance photojournalist these days, I like the image quality from the M cameras and their size is simply ideal for me to carry around pretty much anywhere.
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Australians have been told the new lockdown, which came into effect yesterday, may last as long as six months. I think this will have an enormous effect on day to day photography and even professional photography from all of us - since weddings are all off and all public events and concerts etc are cancelled. My wife works in theater so that's out as well. Not sure I'll be able to post much here other than occasional cat shots until I can take a drive. I could do that tomorrow but only if I avoid other people and don't attempt to cross the borders south.
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But I'm keeping my batteries charged and my camera handy. We're not forced to stay in our homes just yet - That would be classified as a "total lockdown here". So if my fellow Australians will simply show a little more sense, we ought to be able to get out if we're sensible and avoid others.
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M6 + 32mm lens- looking at Sydney (on the horizon) from the mountains

M6 + 32mm lens - I probably should have taken two shots here with different focus points

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I thought the Astrophotography shots from the 32mm lens and the 22mm lens were acceptable. I usually use a Tungsten WB setting so fooling around with the NiSi NN Filter required me to abandon that preference and the results were fairly pleasing. Though the tint in the filter still introduces a lot of violet and magenta that needs to be balanced out with a suitable White Balance.. These filters are only useful after sunset but for city shots they can be beneficial. If I had more time and was thinking more clearly at the time, I'd have taken some multiple exposures with different areas of the foreground in sharper focus.

Very weird times indeed.  Wisconsin has just gone into (stricter) lockdown.

Been going on daily hikes with the DW.  The ospreys should be returning from Florida any time now.  Be nice to get some BIFs.

Take care of yourself and your family (same goes for everyone else out there).  Keep regaling us with your wonderful photography!

R2

I'll bite and kick in a few from both my R and M6 II here...

Even on mandate, outdoor activity is still encouraged, with social distancing of course. The bugs can't live in ultraviolet for very long keep in mind. It's safer outdoors, than indoors, permitted no-one coughs on your while outdoors.

Editing photos and updating firmware on your camera only goes so far, you gotta move your legs and take some shots too

Keep your head screwed on in this time, I personally feel that although this present crisis will quickly abate, quickly being 2-3 months, much like 9/11, the world will never be the same after. In the words of my brother in law, we need to keep a larger margin of error going forward be it in timing, health, wealth, and spiritual matters. As the parable of the 10 virgins goes, when crisis hits, folks are only going to have enough oil for themselves soon enough; it'll be too late to respond if we have a much larger or more grave crisis happen in the world.