Most of the time when photographing waves you need to use a telephoto lens to get close to the action. Yet towards the end of my session on South Arm (Tasmania) I decided I liked the grand view effect of the sea and sky combined so I switched to an ultra wide lens. The result was some lovely views on a glorious day. The only problem is that  you have to get close to the water to get the impact and … you guessed it … I got soaked … waist level; Tethys in a playful mood, oh and amusement for Muse&Mentor. Still, I got the pics didn’t I. And a thought that amused me … the island you see is Betsey Island, and the next stop out there … Antarctica.  A grand view indeed.

I am, as you know, fond of waves. And, like snowflakes, no two will be the same, even on the same day and same beach constant variations of wind, tide, current or just the moment you pressed the camera trigger will guarantee something different every time. So tempting always to hang on for just one more short, but there is always another beach another moment.

This little beauty was taken on South Arm, near Hobart, Tasmania. The break was quite a long way off shore, perhaps a hidden reef, so it required quite a lot of cropping to get the image I wanted.

Well I am back in the UK, having survived the rigours of a warm, even hot at times, Christmas in Melbourne and Hobart, compared to the icy blasts, rains and winds of the UK with I am habituated.

Of course, though it was primarily a social visit, I did take a few photographs; about 3000 … oh how I love digital; and will publish some images based on these over the next few days. But not yet, the jetlag has dulled the brain and the creative instinct. So instead, an Australian image from a previous trip that I had already processed.

Now though I am not primarily a wildlife photographer, opportunities do sometimes present themselves and this swan was standing by the side of the water in St Kilda harbour in Melbourne. Swans are actually quite vicious and aggressive creatures but they look cute and I took the opportunity presented. As often espoused in these pages, from time to time we all need to step outside our normal way of thinking; in so many ways of life.

Well I am back in the UK, having survived the rigours of a warm, even hot at times, Chrstmas in Melbourne and Hobart, compared to the icy blasts, rains and winds of the UK with

To my subscribers. Thank you for your interest in my images. I have no idea and care not what race, creed, colour, religion or nationality you are, yet for all the turning of the year will be here soon. So with a Northern European seasonal image I wish you all festive greetings and a happy new year.

These images were taken on the Dorset Coast (Jurassic Coast) in between Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door. It is a place called Man O’ War Cove. They were taken on separate trips (it is just about a day trip for me … 2.5 hours each way) and illustrate many things …

The first and foremost is what a beautiful location this is.

And the next is that this view no longer exists. Some months after the second trip a huge section of the cliff on the left collapsed, fortunately at night so no one was injured on this popular section of the coast.  I have not had a chance to return so the view may still be beautiful, yet it will be a different view.  The lesson is that we do not live on a dead rock hurtling through space, it is constantly changing, so  make images of what is there now as it may not be there tomorrow.

And though both images were taken on bright sunny days, the state of the sea is very different. That is one of the joys of landscape photography. You can visit the same place again and again and it will be different every time. Thank goodness for digital cameras and large memory cards.

Oh and red really does help draw your eye into the picture; in one case some canoes on the beach, the other someone with a red jacket. Purely fortuitous, I did not photoshop them in. Part of image making is luck.

And now I am back off to Australia for Christmas, so I may have few chances to post images until the new year.

The last blog entry was a cityscape, included to make a couple of points. I will explore this theme from time to time as it challenges me for it is not a genre that I am most at home with; and challenges are good.

So I continue with Melbourne, Australia, a city that has adopted me and I have adopted me and I have adopted as a second home.  Nothing in the city other than a few aboriginal place names (Dandenong, Maribyrnong) is older than Victorian times, so a collection of Victorian buildings sits alongside the modern and ultra-modern. The non-aboriginal place names are mostly British, names from homesick convicts and their guards who were never likely to make the return trip … Kew, Richmond, Balaclava, Malvern. Though I have just discovered a Brooklyn, now what tragic story does that tell.

And I explore this city as an adopted stranger so I photograph what so many take for granted. And I have taken for granted my birthplace London and have almost no images from it (unlike Muse&Mentor, who when visiting photographs what I take for granted in London’s fascinating buildings and history ) so I have made a resolve to try and rectify this error. These images are just a few of my collection from Melbourne; perhaps you can review where you live and see for the first time what you have always taken for granted; you don’t always have to travel to find images.

The modern

The tiles on a pub

And some images from the Royal Arcade, one of many Victorian shopping arcades

Including these fearsome Gog & Magog figures

And, with Melbourne, always the food

This is an image from London. I post it to illustrate a number of points :-

I am not naturally a cityscape photographer yet from time to time we need to push ourselves outside our comfort zone. It is good to recognise and work to our strengths, mine is landscape photography, yet we have to try something different otherwise we become stale and complacent.

I am aware that I post photographs from locations all around the world. Circumstances and a love of travel afford me that option from time to time. But not all of you can afford that option. This was taken a few hundred metres from where I was working. If your opportunities to travel are limited yet you want to create images then take a closer look around you and you may be surprised at what you find.

I have seen many others photograph this bridge. People with big expensive cameras, mounted on tripods; so they were taking it seriously. Yet they all stood to one side or another. So why not stand dead centre I thought, with a wide angle lens. Do something different from the rest and you get a result different from the rest.

Winter has arrived and it is cold, windy and wet. As the antithesis and antidote to this I publish this picture taken in Barbados. It brings back happy memories of waves lapping on the shore, warmth, easy going days, jerk chicken, flying fish cutters (a sandwich) and another rum punch whilst idly swinging in a hammock. … but easy on the rum punches, they slip down so smoothly, and have a kick like a mule.  Hope you think warm happy thoughts too.

So the previous post got me thinking … walking trips, waterfalls, compact digital … what else did I have on file that might turn into colour mosaics.

So about 7 years ago I did an odd walking holiday to the Yorkshire Dales. Why odd?  Unlike the awful JustForYou holiday it was no one’s fault really. The holiday company was http://www.colletts.co.uk/?gclid=CMG489eelLsCFU_ItAodiUcAnA and I have done a couple of trips with them and they do an excellent job … good food, nice accommodation and friendly walk leaders. Just chance though, my group was mostly full of ultra keen, ultra fit walkers, mostly older than me (embarrassing) and they wanted to walk, hard; so if I wanted to spend a time to stand and stare then I lost my struggle to keep up and just plain got left behind. Nice bunch though, so ‘odd’ yet no complaints.

So my photo opportunities were a bit curtailed, but we did have a brief lunch by East Gill Fall near Keld in Swaledale, and I got a chance to take a whole 2 or 3 photos before it was time to sprint on. And I found this image and worked on it. It needed quite a lot of cropping, particularly to remove an unsightly fence just above the fall; the eye/brain tend to edit out what they don’t want to see, but the camera is just mechanics and software. And I tweaked the colour, contrast, brightness, and more, but still the image never got beyond OK. So I tried flipping it to black&white and … pow! … the feel of the image changed totally, the impact from taking out the colour gave it a bygone days feel, and without colour to distract it became all about texture and pattern. Lovely.

I’ll add a second photograph taken just down the valley from the above. Flipping to black&white did not have quite the same impact, yet it did give the bygone days feel again, and solved a nasty problem whereby the branches of the tree that thrusts through the skyline had gone a weird blue and nothing I could do would get rid of it.

This image started as a photo of a trickle of water running over some leaves and rocks at the side of a waterfall. It was taken on a 5mp compact at a time when my main cameras were 35 mm film SLRs. The photo was taken on a bizarrely rainy holiday in late Summer on the Greek Island of Evia (see blog post ‘Harder Work’ Aug 3 2013). I tried sharpening up the image but the quality was not good enough to produce anything that had impact. So in a whimsical moment I decided to play a bit in photoshop, though not as much as some might think. I did not use any of the ‘artistic’ options, no twirling, swirling or solarising. Even the colours emerged from a modest level of increasing the saturation. Most of the work was around experimenting with  brightness, contrast, layers & blending changes. And what emerged was this abstract/impressionist image. All the elements of the original photo are there, the rocks and water and leaves, yet melded to this mosaic of shapes and colours. At the very least it teaches us that occasionally even humble photos hold surprising potential to create an image; sometimes the beauty of Gaia, our planet, lays it all out for us and all we need is the eye and the composure to record it, sometimes artists have to work harder at finding the image. I like it, a lot.