Historical Honeysuckle
28 August 2019
The ones out there are far away...
21 August 2019
Like Father Ted’s cows, when you see a cargo ship out at sea in the distance, it’s hard to get any sense of the size of it. When you stand at the harbour entrance as it arrives though the size seems overwhelming. This is a bulk carrier, arriving unladen into Newcastle, NSW. It is almost 300 metres long and the height of a block of flats from sea level to the top.
Pelican
14 August 2019
A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican,
He can take in his beak
Enough food for a week
But I’m damned if I see how the helican!
Dixon Lanier Merritt (1879–1972)
Pelican is not just a bird but also a suburb of the city of Lake Macquarie, NSW, that’s a good place to take pictures of Pelicans.
The Moon in Dune
7 August 2019
The inhabitants of Tin City on Stockton Beach must have to tolerate a lot of curious visitors. I was one of the 40 photographers that turned up at dusk last Saturday on a trip organised by Canon Collective.
‘City’ is a bit of an overstatement, but there are about a dozen of these wood and corrugated metal homes in the dunes. The atmosphere of solitude that you want to evoke in a photo is made hard to conjure because of the huge number of footprints in the sand everywhere and of course dozens of photographers all wandering into each other’s shot.
This was my last shot before leaving – actually a composite between a 30 second exposure for the dunes and five seconds for the sky. Even then the sky needed darkening and the dunes lightening in post-production to get the balance I was looking for.
Fernleigh Track
1 August 2019
Yesterday’s evening stroll took us along the Fernleigh Track, a disused railway that’s now a footpath and cycleway. There are various bits of railwayana and track along the way, some decayed and others better preserved. A highlight is this 180m curved tunnel under the Pacific Highway. The picture was practically monochrome anyway, so giving it a high contrast black and white treatment seemed to be the right thing to do.
There’s over 15km of track and the walk only took in about 2½km so there’s plenty more to see another time.