I wasn’t feeling very compositionally inspired on the Mornington Peninsula’s Rye Ocean Beach yesterday. So I handed my camera to a friendly fisherman while I put in half-an-hour’s surfing.

Here’s a shot of me warming up on the smaller waves …

Look no hands!

After a couple of kilometres sprinting up and down the shoreline to dry off, I tried my hand at a bit of surf-casting …

Fishing for relaxation

… yeah, right!

In reality I was on my way from Rye to Flinders and became distracted by the bracing wind and waves on The Tasman side of the Mornington Peninsula. I didn’t come back with anything in the landscape photography genre, but I enjoyed the bracing weather and watching braver, fitter and more reckless blokes than me doing their stuff on the beach.

A rainy day on my way to photograph some decaying trellis bridges on the derelict Healsville railway line: this bit of symbolism caught my eye.

Waiting for a train

The line was an extension of the Melbourne Lillydale link. The last train was on 10 March 1983. I don’t think the tree has been waiting quite that long.

Here’s another image from my struggle with the complicated, congested temperate rainforest in the Yarra Ranges.

Simplifying this landscape at Badger Creek without mist has been a challenge I’ve set myself.

The striped colours on the thick trunk (a eucalypt known locally as “Mountain Ash”, I believe) are fading now that the ribbon bark has been off for a while, so I’ll have to wait until next year for more. It was the light on those stripes, and my impression that the Mountain Ash look almost surprised to be surrounded by Jurassic Park-like tree ferns, that I wanted to communicate.

Tree taming

I made two more visits to the Mornington Peninsula last week. The first in what was excellent weather for a family day out. The second for Mothers’ Day with my family in good bad weather for landscape photography. So it goes.

On both occasions, my/our destination was the beach at London Bridge, near Portsea.

London Bridge is a much photographed hollowed-out-by-waves sea stack. This formation and the surrounding cliffs are made up of a friable sandstone that doesn’t put up much resistance to the Tasman Sea.

I’ve seen plenty of glowing images of London Bridge online. Here’s a link to a flickr search so you can see what I mean. But I find it a rather lumpen lump and I don’t feel compelled to add another image of it bathed in more or less believable golden light.

A few hundred metres southwest along the beach towards Point Nepean, though, is another headland that’s well on its way to becoming a sea stack. This too is shaping up to be on the ham-fisted side of the coastal aesthetic. Most of the photographic interest is in the pretty rock pools below it. But a crumbly clamber just a few metres beyond a sign warning of unexploded bombs—Point Nepean was a military training area until 1985—is a view of some altogether more sculptural sea sculptures.

Tide and sun were at their highest when I first saw these rocky novelties. So I determined to return after a couple of hours when, I guessed, some of the wave-cut platform would make for a more-interesting-than-surf foreground.

TPE had armed me with the knowledge that the sun would set almost directly behind the most interesting rock feature, so I was mildly concerned that this would overcook the scene.

I killed some of the waiting time making some photographs like the one below. Here I used a 10-stop neutral density filter to turn the squinty mid-afternoon beach view into something easier on the eye.

When I returned to my planned vantage point, a helpful bank of cloud on the horizon prevented full golden hour fireworks, which was a good thing.

Click on any of the images below for more or larger photographs. Worth doing because there’s such a lot of detail in these Nikon D800 photographs. I’ve also added a couple shots that didn’t make it into my recent Cape Schanck post.

I planned my first pre-landscape photography workshop reconnaissance on the Mornington Peninsula as a quick, no-time-for-photography orientation in three or four coastal locations: Rye, around Portsea, and Cape Schanck.

I started at Cape Schanck where I abandoned my plan and stayed until after dark. It was breath of fresh photography air in many ways, and I decided I needed a “day off”.

Cape abstraction — scroll down for more images and to see a larger version of this.

Although I’ve enjoyed my recent forays into bush and rainforest in the Yarra Valley and Yarra Ranges National Park, I have missed big views, big seas and big seascape light.

Cape Schanck has all of those big things—big time.

This part of the Victorian coastline was even more of a treat for this photographer, so used to escorting landscape workshop and photography holiday guests to beautiful but ever-more familiar coastal locations in the UK. Yes, eventually, I expect I’ll miss those iconic castles and reliably photogenic rocks on England’s Northumberland and Yorkshire coasts. Yesterday, though, they couldn’t have been further from my mind as I explored and began to make my own “establishing shots” of the kinds of places that castles might have been built if castles had been required to guard the approaches to Port Phillip Bay.

All of that, and I saw no more than twenty people all day!

I’ll be leading a series of landscape photography workshops on the Mornington Peninsula, including Cape Schanck landscape photography days, in the coming months. Click here to see the schedule for those and other workshops.

Click on any of the images below to go large

On another woodland landscape photography visit to Badger Creek in the Yarra Ranges National Park, I met a man who was enjoying a family day out with his partner and daughter.

“What camera is that?” he asked.

“A Nikon,” I admitted and, perhaps too quickly, moved the conversation on with my customary impending-gear-conversation evasion : “Are you a photographer?”

Not to be mist — this image works much better large. If you click on it, you will see what I mean. I used tree ferns and a light pool on the gum tree in an attempt to bring order to the beautiful chaos of a temperate rain forest.

When he told me that he was keen on photography and had a DSLR, I asked what he liked to photograph.

“People and landscapes,” he said, gesturing at the forest around us. “But I just can’t get any decent shots of this kind of thing.”

Almost as a reflex, I offered standard woodland photography advice: ”Mist and murk are what we need. It’s far too nice a day today for woodland photography.” Still on autopilot, I continued to rehearse mist’s contribution to simplifying the scene and, on my iPhone (!), I showed him a recent example.

He seemed convinced and pleased and said he’d be back with his camera on a murky day. (Or he may just have been humouring me! Keep nodding and the weirdo with the camera will go away!

After we parted, I began to feel uneasy about the “wisdom” I’d offered. Not only for my new acquaintance, but for me too. I realised that I’d been walking too fast, dismissing or postponing practically every composition I’d found. All morning, I’d been acting on that same implicit advice. I wasn’t making photographs because the weather was too “nice” for woodland photography.

No mist, no muse?

Could this mean that I had dug myself into the forest equivalent of the “only shoot in the golden hour” rut? Would I default to eschewing these beautiful rain forests and the bush around my home if the light wasn’t “good”?

Another piece of “wisdom” that I regularly give my landscape photography workshop guests is that there is no such thing as bad light; there’s only misunderstood light. (Coined by Donald McCullin). I admonished myself with this more useful truism for a while before resolving to make some mist-free forest images on a second circuit of the reserve.

It’s like a jumble out there. The in-spite-of-small-aperture soft foreground and background in this shot may make this image work better, focusing the viewers attention on the exuberant ribbon bark, or it may offend. I was carrying a 24 mm tilt-shift lens, but I didn’t use it because this composition required 70 mm and I couldn’t get physically closer without trampling the context. I suppose I could have shot it at 24 mm and then exploited the D800 large file cropability. Do both next time …

Have you found that you tend to make photographs of woodland when it is misty, or are you more open-minded?

[My daughter's response to the first photograph: "Watch out for the Gruffalo!]

On Sunday, I drove over to Mt Donna Buang to find and photograph Cement Creek.

I went there because, in my research for my forthcoming landscape photography workshops, I’ve seen lots of pleasing long-exposure images of this fern-edged mountain stream in the Yarra Ranges National Park. I fancied it as a good spot to take guests for some of those silky water and cascade shots.

I didn’t make any photographs of Cement Creek. Not one.

Tree spirits ready to take flight

At the end of a hot, dry summer there was next to no water in the creek and, on this first reconnaissance, the only way I could get myself close to the putative idyll was to climb over the elevated walkway’s handrail below the “Rainforest Gallery“. Not something I’d be comfortable directing my workshop guests to do.

So I need a return trip to search for realistic access points up and downstream of the Gallery site and, if nothing else, to drink flask-hot tea while sitting by the stream looking its best before deciding whether to photograph it just for me.

Ironically, the other photograph I didn’t take that day really could have been quite beautiful.

At early o’clock, on my way out I was on a blinkered, satnav-powered mission to get to Cement Creek ahead of Sunday “crowds”, I saw, but didn’t stop to enjoy the beauty of the wispy mist-draped Yarra River below Warrandyte Bridge. I haven’t seen the Yarra looking better, but my objective trumped common sense serendipity.

Photographer’s penance

Today, as penance, I gave myself an afternoon assignment to come back with three images taken on the Yarra riverbank that didn’t include the river itself.

It hasn’t rained very much yet so, in the absence of that lovely mist, the bushy banks are still far from looking their best, so I thought I may come back disappointed.

The result: three intimate landscape photographs on this page. I think I may be happy with them.

[BTW: if you are a photographer who knows the whereabouts of the "hidden path" to Cement Creek, I'd be happy to trade!]

Bush breezes

Resin negation