With Christmas nearly upon us for another year, I feel the need to present my final images of 2017. As you can see the obsession with high country huts continues unabated. A crazy bike ride through a lightning storm with a blown tyre yielded a view of Witzes Hut that is hopefully evocative of the isolated and dramatic scene. Alone in the wilderness with nothing but thunder, torrential rain, and wild horses for company… the things us landscape photographers do!
With only three days spare I once more set out in search of landscape images. The weather was cloudless and windy to the east and north so I headed west instead, making for Adelaide. It’s a long drive in the dead of night. Big freight trucks rattle along and the occasional lonely town slips past, but mostly it’s just hours and hours of staring into the little cone of light in the darkness. The South Australian border came and went, then finally the steep descent into the city began, fortunately still well ahead of dawn.
So here we are again with another exciting instalment of my life as a landscape photographer. Ha! Yeah, okay, that was a bit much. As you can see from the images, I haven’t exactly journeyed to distant realms these last few months. That never ending duty of keeping ahead of the bills has placed my focus elsewhere for the most part. However, I did manage to see the snow once this season, and hopefully made the best of it.
With my wife and our little boy on a plane to Sydney for a family event, I was free to go in search of photographic potential. Getting them to the Melbourne airport on time for a pre-dawn budget flight was nothing short of a nightmare. What Machiavellian mind created that twisted hell I know not, but suffice it to say some peace in the mountains was certainly welcomed afterwards.
This collection of new photographs is the result of several journeys, some more successful than others. I could write about the surprising bit of luck finding colourful light over Portland’s Cape Nelson lighthouse whilst on a father-son trip. Or the quiet, almost cathedral like atmosphere we found at the Redwood forest the next morning. Alternatively, I could pontificate whimsically about the glorious morning I had in the Blue Mountains where golden sunlight flowed like wine over the ever-popular Bridal Veil Falls. I could even, should the mood take me, describe with increasing excitement the many days I’d cumulatively invested into scenes at Bermagaui and Merimbula which, hopefully from these images, finally translated into something beautiful.
This little cluster of images is the result of three separate trips. I won’t bore you with the details of days spent finding and working on other scenes (not shown) that ultimately failed due to sub-par conditions, but instead focus on the keepers.
I’d hatched a plan some years ago to hike “The Castle” in Morton National Park, but had been putting it off each year because I couldn’t find anyone crazy enough to try it with me. I’d say “who wants to drive 30 hours and hike something stupid steep and dangerous in the dark for a single photo?”, but curiously there’d been no takers. I seem to have little difficulty doing silly things in the name of photography, so eventually I decided to have at it alone and see what happened.
In the summer of 2017 I was fortunate enough to find enough time for some extended trips in my never-ending quest for the perfect Australian landscape photo. Adding several thousand kilometres onto my odometer, I was able to range from the Victorian coast, revisit some NSW national parks and coastal regions and even dip my toes into Queensland.
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