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Western Australian Wildflower Photos 2001
Introduction
©
William G. Leithhead 2006
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I took these photos during a three-month caravan trip to WA with my wife Glenyce in Spring, 2001, between August and November. Over a period of 3 months we travelled 18,000km westward from Melbourne, Victoria via Adelaide, SA, across the Nullarbor Plain to Perth, WA, northwards about 1100km to Exmouth, then south again to Perth. Heading south, we explored the SW corner of Australia, then headed east via Albany and Esperance, then retraced our steps back east across the Great Australian Bight towards Melbourne with a southerly diversion in SA via the Eyre Peninsula.
The 2001 wildflower season was regarded as comparatively poor owing to a drought, but we took about 1500 photos, many of them of wildlowers in WA. The best regions were around Eneabba, (north of Perth), Kalbarri, (further north again), and in the southwest and south coasts of WA. We diverged inland from the coast to the Stirling Ranges and to the inland areas around Hyden, which have rich flora. The WA plants are generally unique to the region as a result of the geological isolation after the ancient Gondwanaland period.
I use a Canon EOS300 SLR camera with ASA400 negative film, relying upon the automatic functions of the camera except for occasional manual focus and manual aperture over-ride to increase the depth of focus. In dull weather I occasionally used fill-in flash. We had the films processed along the way, and assembled the photos as we went, with much poring over wildflower books to identify our specimens along the way. I am reasonably confident of most of the names, but look forward to any further help the viewers can give.
In particular, I will be grateful if the viewers can offer suggestions towards the identification of the 80-odd unidentified or uncertain flowers which I have displayed separately.
The pictures have been scanned in from the prints, at 75dpi and 24-bit color. The thumbnails were reduced down as uncompressed JPG files, but the larger pictures are JPG files with about 50% compression. Many photos have been adjusted with Paint Shop Pro 8 to improve sharpness, contrast and color balance. I reserve copyrights on all of these photos but I am prepared to e-mail higher resolution pictures upon request.
©
William G. Leithhead 2006