This winter in Canberra it’s been cold – properly cold, like I remember it being when I was growing up and we would get those deep frosts that cover everything in white until well into the morning. It’s also rained more than usual. So you might think that up in the Snowy Mountains, only a two hour drive away, there’d be a bumper year of snow and all the ski bums would be going crazy and talking about Aussie Pow. Well, strangely it’s not so – the snow season has sadly been a fizzer so far this year. The call of the snow is strong, though, and last weekend I joined an intrepid gang to go on an overnight backcountry ski trip.

As it turned out, the trip involved entirely perfect weather, great company, nice snow, and a full moon on a clear, bright, sparkly, and utterly chilly night. We skied from Thredbo top station out towards Mt Kosciuszko (it bemuses me how you’d never know it’s our highest peak by looking at its unimpressive, rounded outline), dropped into the Cootapatamba valley, then skied to the summit and back down. For July the snow was incredibly thin, but there was definitely enough to ski on if you kept an eye out for rocks, and more than enough to make the surrounding hills quite spectacular. At night the full moon was bright enough that we cast shadows and didn’t need headlamps to walk around. The air in the valley was totally still, and it was just awesome to wake up in such a beautiful part of the world.

I’ve redesigned the main page at cutflat.net using fancypants html 5 and jQuery. It’s got

• A fullscreen background image scaled to the window size
• Larger pictures in the collections
• New pictures in collections
• More collections – all the coffee photos form a new collection, for example
• Keyboard shortcuts in the gallery viewer (use left, right, and escape to navigate inside a collection)
• A pop-up thumbnail menu underneath each collection gallery

Take a gander and if you have any comments or suggestions, let me know; I’d love to hear them.

These photos were taken from a plane at cruising altitude over Western and South Australia. The scene is blurry because the window was grubby, as they always are. I like the tilt-shift-like effect it’s had on these pictures; I feel like it adds to the surreal feeling that the desert always gives me, even from 10km up. I’ve post-processed the images more than usual to try to clean up the haze that’s inevitable in pictures from that height.

I wonder whether anyone was driving along that little bit of that long dusty road that day?

While I was overseas I drank a lot of coffee. I drink a fair bit of coffee here in Australia, but man alive, Italians know how to pour a good espresso, and I thought it would simply be rude not to sample roughly as much as possible while there. After a few days I decided I would try to take a picture of each one, because in fact coffees are extremely photogenic – the different table textures and cups, and sugar packets and saucers, make each one interesting. I’ve ended up with a set of photos that I’m quite pleased with.

These coffees are from Italy, Switzerland, Croatia, and France. The Italian ones are the really short, delicious ones. Swiss coffees are, for the most part, what we would call a long black here – and as much as I hate to confirm a cliched stereotype, the quality of the coffee really does decrease the moment you cross the border from Italy. The take-away coffee is from France, where you can buy a reasonable espresso on a train.

If you’re interested, you can see these photos in higher resolution in this set on flickr.

I love strange and funny signs and this is one of my favourites. I think it is pretty self explanatory – it’s all the things not to do in the Italian alps. Don’t light fires, no loud music, don’t ride your moterbike into cars, and – especially – do not poke owls with sticks. They really don’t like it.

These two photographs are of the hands of statues. If there isn’t a band out there already called Hands of Statues, I think one should be created with that very name. You saw it here first.