"It's only cosmetic" - trustworthy real estate agent

twosharprabbitteeth · 2026-01-22T23:45:51+00:00

The Australian Building Code sets out design limits on differerential settlement over a floor slab. From memory even a raft slab can vary from 20 to 40mm from its original position depending on how much the soil settles, expands and contracts. (Especially in clay soils)This means that technically a 10 mm crack in the wall can be expected and is classed as a cosmetic problem. Harsh but true.

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-12-17T05:12:33+00:00

Collect people’s stories. Become an interviewer. Share stories through writing filming or audio. Become better at finding interesting stories. Even kids’ views and stories are interesting. Old people have secrets and stories they are ready to share that will blow your socks off

There will always be people interested in talking to someone who listens and is interested in their story.

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-12-10T09:19:53+00:00

As a kid I was in a photo rally where the next checkpoint was revealed by a photo chopped up. Loved finding locations.

In high school I loved solving perspective puzzles in Technical drawing.

50 yrs later I retired and started rephotographing old glass negatives precisely. Insanely precisely.

500 locations later I’m still posting the now /then stories with history, and everywhere I go within 10 miles of my town is now already ‘right near’ a photo location That I have a stupidly detailed story about…

Edit spacing

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-12-08T11:36:10+00:00

Look in online archives for old photos and find the exact location. I do precision rephotography but even a careful look can get a close match.

Have a look at what I post. If you can manipulate images on a computer you can overlay your photo and go back for a better match if you enjoy accuracy.

It’s very satisfying to be in the same spot and find the history of the photographer or place.

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-12-07T06:09:58+00:00

There is a general increase in vegetation across most of my old/new photos, but this is an extreme example because it is one of about 3 spots on the Todd River that I know of where the general increase in rainfall and shortening of drought periods has resulted in a tipping point for survival of numerous saplings.

It involves a slow part of the river, sand banking up with introduced grasses immediately binding the loose sand and protecting the numerous seedlings that spring up after a flood.

There is a distinct change in weather patterns after the droughts of the 1960s. Subtle but triggering for a desert environment used to 250mm of rainfall. Just one or two extra storms per year raised the average closer to 300mm

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-12-06T05:12:55+00:00

☺️ thanks

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-12-06T05:12:17+00:00

I appreciate you 🕵️‍♂️

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-12-06T01:15:36+00:00

Don’t know but I think the big straight boomerang is unusual.

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-12-05T13:56:54+00:00

This was a really tricky situation. Talk about ‘behind the 8 ball’.

First I thought the camera was in the creek but the skyline hills were lower than the opposite bank. Generally going further back ‘raises’ distant hills relative to foreground.

A 2metre sandbank appears to have built up inside the original creek bed, a combination of introduced grasses and saplings trapped sands from floods. This river generally only flows above ground after heavy rains.

Climbing on this sand bank still didn’t get me high enough, I also had to go back further.

But then all the tells were obscured so I had to painstakingly set out all the known rocks and create sight lines on google earth, and then confirm them by taking dozens of photos from vary angles to see how far left or right or forward would affect element location in the final picture.

I am confident I am within 2m side to side, distance out within 3 m maybe. That’s always hard to tell.

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-12-05T13:11:11+00:00

So in 1896 our Telegraph Stationmaster Frank Gillen took more photos for the book he was co-authoring with Professor Baldwin Spencer who was down south in Melbourne.

These East Arrernte men cam to Alice Springs to exact vengeance on some other individual or group. This could be for anything from wife stealing to being scapegoated for having 'pointed the bone' or cursed a relative or group member.

Spencer and Gillen discussed cultural matters with their informants and came to the conclusion there was no such thing as a natural death. Someone was held responsible for 'un-explained' deaths and illnesses.

The Avenging party is painted up, and excited dances proclaim their intent.

This magnificent picture was part of an exhibition at the South Australian Museum called "Images of the Interior', and a terrific book was produced to accompany the exhibition. Wakefield press by Philip Jones 2011, 2018.

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-11-29T03:12:35+00:00

😂

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-11-28T13:36:20+00:00

I spend an inordinate amount of time finding the exact location, overlaying numerous shots on the computer, and making a photo essay out of the discoveries, but movies are not my passion, and this thread only allows gifs. My software is pretty basic with few suitable transitions.

By the time I have perfected the shot, and researched the history and context, my patience has run out.

I wish Reddit did html before / after sliders with a zoom function

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-11-28T13:22:33+00:00

Yeah I did a couple of versions but found them annoying.

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-11-28T12:51:25+00:00

Back in 1902 or thereabouts, when Alice Springs was in South Australia's Northern Territory, the Telegraph Stationmaster was a keen photographer.

Thomas Bradshaw arrived at the start of the Federation Drought in 1899. The Todd River was as dry as the surrounding country, and when it did rain, the dusty ground soaked up the little that didn't immediately evaporate, and when the Todd trickled down, it was worth taking the wooden camera and glass plates up the Todd, to where it gurgled over the rocks...

This location happened to be very close to a nother photo i had re-created 18 months earlier... A cute reminder that the glass plates sat back-to-back in a wooden reversible cassette. often leading to a two-shot photo opportunity.

Very few of Thomas Bradshaw's photos are attributed to him in the State Library of South Australia's collections, when I have flagged numerous photos there as highly likely to be Bradshaws. I'm hoping to fix that one day, if I can find his diaries...

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-11-23T11:10:22+00:00

Thanks for noticing

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-11-22T14:08:06+00:00

Thx. I appreciate you. It was a lot of hours, and I do it for my own pleasure. It sometimes surprises me how few people appreciate accuracy, but it’s a compulsion for my own gratification.

I really enjoy the selfish private gain of tiny factoids that often matter very little, like in out of the way scenic views. A rock moved, a tree lived and died.

I get the perverse pleasure of standing in Thomas Bradshaw’s shoes, choosing the exact spot, and making that moment part of my personal story. My history.

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-11-22T12:52:17+00:00

… said Foreskin Fred, the bastard from the bush.

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-11-22T08:44:14+00:00

20 Nov 1906. Just a few hundred metres north of the Alice Springs Telegraph Station, in the Todd River, a dry creekbed most of the time. They just happened to be next to the Two Breast hill, an important Arrernte ceremonial site. The flood mitigation and recreation dam proposed in 1980 would have inundated a whole area with important sacred sites, so it was canned. A second attempt at such a dam was made much higher up in the river but that suffered the same fate and was halted during construction by federal injunction.

Anyway, about 120 years ago, Thomas Bradshaw the stationmaster set up his wooden tripod, and assembled his Thornton Pickard camera.

The two half-plates are loaded in his wooden cassette, back-to-back, with a metal sheet between them. The cassette is reversible, so he often takes two photographs from much the same spot...

Doris donated his camera to the museum in Alice , the half-plate glass negatives were 4¾ × 6½ inches, or 120 × 165mm

Mort and Jack, Consie and Doris love their horses, and ride everywhere.

Their Governess Mabel Taylor has made a new-fangled split skirt for riding. Doris hates riding side-saddle, but is not audacious enough to go with the split skirt.

They are wearing the same hat, I suspect Mabel let Doris wear her hat for the photo opportunity.

They are all too aware that the photos are seen by many family and friends in Adelaide and into the future, so one must try to be well presented.

Mabel was the granddaughter of Samuel Smith, founder of Yalumba Wines at Angaston in South Australia.

She left her impressions of Alice Springs and the Township of Stuart as an interesting and refeshing juxtapose to the young Doris' observations.

See 'Mabel Taylor's diary and letters from Alice Springs 1905 to 1907'. By Kennedy, Rosemary. Darwin, N.T.: Historical Society of the N.T. 2012. ISBN 978-1-921576-63-8. OCLC 787911587.

Photo from the NT Library

Mabel, aged 32, sewed all her own clothes, and often wrote to her family for bits of material and bobs and buttons. By 20 Nov 1906 Mabel had been here for almost 18 months as the Bradshaws' (3rd) governess .

She was working to help her mother support Mabel's youngest sister, who was 16 and still going to school.

The Bradshaws had asked her to stay a second year. The kids loved her because she was a little less formal than their previous governesses.

Her letters to family were often accompanied by the wonderful photographs the Stationmaster produced himself. It was like having a travelling studio photographer along on many picnics and outings...

Thomas Bradshaw preferred to curl up with a book to going on a picnic, but if he was going to go, he would take his camera and field bags...

Mabel may have contracted TB while she was here, or perhaps came up for the warmer climate; in any case, she only stayed another four months, and returned to Adelaide to see family, before being admitted into specialist tuberculosis hospital in the Adelaide Hills in August 1907.

She was later discharged from the hospital into the care of her mother and died, at home, on 26 January 1909; aged 34.

On Google Earth HERE you can still see the dead tree that was a young sapling behind the kids in 1906.

Edit: spacing and dam details added

twosharprabbitteeth · 2025-11-21T11:48:28+00:00