Personal Favorites

Santa Clarita Nights
This past winter we had above average rain/snow falls here in California and this has created a wonderful bloom of wild flowers in the last few weeks, which are of course a photographer's heaven. Two weeks ago, I caught up with my mate Matt and he was kind enough to show me 'his' local hill of lupines near Santa Clarita just north of Los Angeles. I left SoCal at 2pm to make it up the 60 miles trip on the Interstate 5 to this location in time for sunset. However, Friday afternoon LA traffic had other plans for me and I spent the next four (!) hours in a huge traffic jam!! When I finally arrived at the location 10 minutes after sunset, Matt was already up the hill and told me I had two options: directly up the hill or follow the trail........of course I was ready for the first option and started racing up the hill - until loaded with my backpack and tripod in my hand lost my balance and tumbled a few meters down the hill From then was covered in dirt and soot from the burned branches from last year's wildfires - great!! Nice to meet you Matt - yes I always look like this..... By now the good light was truly gone and so I could fire only off a few shots and be good with it......still a wonderful memory of this evening!
Zabriskie Sunrise
I have a bit of a love and hate relationship with Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park. It is an easy accesible spot in the park, is suited for sunrise or sunset and is one of the stunning and striking geological features of the park - however I find it incredibly difficult to capture the beauty of this location and to represent the subtle textures correctly - without going overboard. I hope I managed with this image.

No. 5 is Alive!
When, a couple of weeks back, I headed down the Great Ocean Road from Melbourne, I arrived at the Twelve Apostles in heavy rain showers at lunch time. Sitting in the car with rain belting on the windows I checked the weather forecast once again and there was nothing mentioned about rain. Even the rain radar didn't showed anything. I was getting a bit worried that my client and I had done the 4-hr trip for nothing and wouldn't get any great shots. I decided to proceed further westwards along the Great Ocean Road as the weather seemed to be clearing up that way. Thankfully the rain stopped pretty soon and we were getting great images at different spots. For sunset, we had planned to return to the Twelve Apostles and to my delight I discovered that a small waterfall had developed along the cliff face due to all the rain before. Cool!!! Now I was just anxious the weather would hold up until sunset and not cloud completely over as it does so often at this location. In fact, I had been there four times before with no reportable sunset image. In the end, this fifth attempt was very rewarding - it was a sunset that will be ever etched in my memory.

Been waiting a long time
I had this image in my head for a long, long time. When I scouted various locations along the famous Great Ocean Road a few years back, I came across this lesser known location and I immediately realised its potential for a great panorama. Capturing the panorama in daylight I was somewhat satisfied, but I poundered about how I could I turn this into an extraordinary image - the solution was adding the Milky Way!! It is only during certain times of the year when the Milky Way is relatively low on the horizon - a couple of weeks back was such an opportunity. Now if you have been to the Great Ocean Road - and I have been numerous times - you know that it can be a windy, cold, cloudy and miserable place. Which is not good if you want to capture stars or the Milky Way with long exposure shots. After a couple of attempts I was finally lucky. I was at the Great Ocean Road for a private photography workshop and the conditions were for once great. I had worked out before that the Milky Way would the horizontal between 2-4am, so come 2am and I swung into full gear, drove to the location and I could not believe how clear and calm the night was. While I took this 12-image panorama, I witnessed around 30 meteors burning up in the sky. It was just a very magical - one that I have been waiting for a long time.

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