What is it Wednesday?

Well a little surprisingly after the vile weather last night I was greeted by a beautiful dawn and hardly a cloud in the sky.

One bonus of early starts is I get to see dawn most mornings.

Now for this week's WIIW.  I suspect this is an easy one, but sometimes the ones I think are easy  are the the ones that stump people.

SO without further ado, what on Earth do you think this might be?

Speaking Out

I won't answer my WIIW tonight.

A quick clue, it is two things,  neither is anything like landscape sized. AND I have posted about them recently.

Now I wanted to quickly mention an important post Kathleen Jones has made about speaking out about child abuse.

I was really touched and very impressed by her post. Speaking out is a vital first step toward change.

My Piccie of the Day is a of dawn  I shot a few years ago in western Victoria.

The Cold Light of Dawn

Yesterday we drove from Hobart where we have been based over to Tasmania's east coast.

Our destination: the Freycinet National Park. On the way I noticed this semi-ruined boathouse and knew I had to have a closer look.It was very photogenic, and in the background the mountains of the Freycinet NP.

We took our time stopping for lunch along the way and finally reached the park just before dark.I caught a few photos, but unfortunately the weather turned nasty and we had to run for shelter. We drove to Swansea about an hour away where we checked into a chalet overnight.

This morning I was up before dawn. I drove back to Freycinet, hoping to catch the rock faces of the cliffs in the dawn light.

The difference between OK landscape shots and brilliant ones is the light. The best landscape pictures are captured in the warm light of dawn or sunset.

But it was not to be. In the ten minutes after I took this piccie of the clouds beginning to pink up more cloud had rolled in and it began to rain!I caught some shots anyway, but they were taken in a cold grey light not morning warmth.

A total lack of inspiration

I have come home tonight wanting to post.

But I am just too tired.

With the autumn running towards winter the days are getting shorter.

When I get to the station in the morning it is
That’s right dawn. (a crummy photo taken on my camera.)
Then when I get home at night it is sunset or later Now to end on a positive note. I have a job interview coming up next week (on Wednesday). I mentioned a while ago that I went for a public service job and the unit manager said she was really impressed, another panel member asked me to apply for a second job. I didn’t get either job.

However, the unit manager’s PA phoned and said they had another position they wanted me to apply for.
Of course I put in an application and they want to interview me.

It’s a strange experience to have people asking me to apply for jobs. Seems positive to say the least!

Mission Accomplished

Deb and I took off for a few days and headed to one of our favourite places in the world, the west coast of Victoria. Admittedly I haven’t seen the whole world (or anything like a sizable chunk) but I have seen some great places. And these few hundred kilometres of coastline pack in an awful lot of spectacular scenery.

I have a slight problem. I have come back with over 700 photos.

Even given the fact that I tend to take a fair number of piccies of the same subject (wouldn’t it look better from this angle?), I still have a couple of hundred photos from just a few days that I would consider worth sharing on this blog.

My imaginary Uncle Harry would be proud.

Now I am not going to swamp you with all of them tonight. However, I did talk last time about going hunting.

Among other things I like photographing the sky. In particular I have recently conceived of a desire to photograph my first ever dawn.
I see plenty of dawns but for one reason or another I had never properly photographed a dawn. I posted about a disappointment recently.

Well on the second morning I of our holiday I was up early.
No use, complete cloud cover.
Disappointed again, I went back to bed.

Now defying the conventions of uncle Harry’s slide nights, I am going to jump forward a whole 24 hours.

The next morning I was up again before first light.

Fog.

But out to the east a hint of clear sky. I decided I would go hunting piccies of dawn.

I leapt into the car and headed east out along The Great Ocean Road.

As I drove East I slipped out from under the low bank of cloud.

And this is what I saw.


Now, next time I go on Holiday I can sleep in!

A Different Kind of Dawn Start, Emma Again and Disappointment.

Over recent weeks I have seen some really beautiful dawns while driving to work.
Now though, dawn is late enough that I miss it, by sunrise I am too close to the city and the roads are too busy and by then I am facing west not east.

I have photographed dozens if not hundreds of sunsets over many years.
Yet I have realised I have never taken piccies of a dawn.
So a few days ago, one morning I had off, instead of sleeping in I got up at my usual time.

Not being an absolutely dedicated photographer, I headed to the nearest location I could think of where I could get an uninterrupted view of the eastern skyline.

This spot happens to be one I have posted about before, the Arthur's Creek Cemetery.

So there I was setting up my tripod and camera in the dark.

Of course I thought of the people buried there. My thoughts once again went to Emma who bought a plot next to her young husband. Yet as far as I can tell she was never buried at Arthur’s Creek.

As a writer I feel almost compelled to weave a similar story into one of my tales.

Someday.

So I stood in the dark and waited for the sunrise.
My first photo of the day.This piccie is very misleading, this was a very long exposure. So what seems a light eastern sky was in fact very dark.

But there was a problem.The dark bank of clouds in the above photo was advancing very quickly from the south.

I turned my Camera to face south where the sky was by now almost completely covered by cloud. The lights in the centre are some of Melbourne’s suburbs twinkling in the distance.

By the time the sun actually rose above the horizon...this was all I could see of the dawn colour.

So I packed up and drove home feeling somewhat disappointed.

As I drove I was given some consolation. The sky decided to relent just a little and I stopped briefly to catch this before the world was completely flooded by daylight.