More piccies + What is it Wednesday.

Last night I posted piccies of the Twelve Apostles at sunset.
In the interest of balance here are a couple of photos of the same coast at dawn.
The Apostles as the first light strikes them.(The stack right at the back is the one that featured in last night’s piccies)

The view from Broken Head about half an hour later.Now as it’s Wednesday, what on Earth do you think this is?

Holiday and a Kind of Milestone

You will have to forgive me but I am going to be posting piccies from our Holiday break for a while to come.
We left for the Western Coast of Victoria around lunch time and arrived late afternoon. Our first port of call was our accommodation to make sure we got checked in.
Then we headed out to make the most of the evening light.
This piccie is the 10,000th photo I have taken with my “new” camera.It is another angle of “The Arch” and was taken about ten minutes after the one I posted the other day.
The sun was dipping towards the horizon and you can see why photographers love evening light. The colours are just that much richer.

We leapt back in the car taking a quick detour along the coast to halt not far from the Twelve Apostles.
Staying clear of the usual tourist strip I cut across country arriving at the coastal cliffs just in time to catch the last of the sunset between one of the Apostles and the mainland.A final shot of the last moment before the sun sank.

What is it Wednesday?

Well for the past few days Deb and I have been travelleng along The Great Ocean Road west of Melbourne.
I have been in seventh heaven taking piccies like this.
These rock formations are on the coast at a place called Loch Ard Gorge.

Now because it is Wednesday I need to post this.

What on Earth do you think this is?

By Public Demand

More Piccies of the Twelve Apostles.
Not strictly one of the Apostles, this is one of the popular viewing points. The people on the top give you an idea of the scale of these cliffs.
In the old days the Twelve Apostles were called “the Sow and Piglets”
Then some marketing genius suggested a rename.

After the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge these are probably the third most photographed scenery in Oz (Uluru – Ayers Rock is probably no. 4)

The Apostles lie on the Great Ocean Road only three or four hours drive from Melbourne (depending which way you go) and as you can see very beautiful.

I hate them because they are so busy (by Oz standards).

But I love them because they are so beautiful.

These next three photos show part of why I like them so much.Every five minutes they change colour

Two of them mid afternoon on a sunny day. (I took this Sunday past in a gap in the storms).

This one was taken about five minutes after the one I posted the other day (just before sunset last Saturday).

And this one was taken about 15 minutes later.

Stone, sunlight, wind and cloud all combining to create visual poetry.

By the way I don't think the Apostles are the most stunning part of the coast.

More of the coast next time.

Wild Weather

Well that one wasn't too hard: four out of eight people who commented said water or ocean. Although some of those did have a bet either way :-)

I was really impressed with some of the other guesses, pencil, ultrasound and wood.

Well here it is

I shot this on Saturday during my break. Deb and I acted as tour guides for Deb's sister down along the Great Ocean Road. It is meant to be high summer down here in Oz, but it was blowing a gale most of the time. And on Saturday evening it really clouded over. You can see the sun is bravely trying to poke through the incoming storm!

Fortunately there were periods when the clouds blew off but the wind was constant.

It is a beautiful section of the coast and I can never get enough shots of it. I will post more over the next little while but I simply haven't had time to sort them yet.

A sample though, The Twelve Apostles at sunset the evening before. Unfortunately the clouds had built up out at sea and robbed the evening of the rich sunset colour.

This was taken the same afternoon as my “What is it Wednesday” shot. I thought it illustrated how wild the sea was getting. These cliffs are about 45 metres (147 feet) tall. Those are navigation masts on top not golf flags!

A Grey Day

Well all good things must come to an end.
Unfortunately our holiday fitted into that category.

On our last morning the early cloud didn’t burn off as it had on every other morning. Through the morning the weather alternated between windy and grey and windy, grey and wet.

We elected to meander along The Great Ocean Road in the direction of home.

We have travelled this piece of road on a number of occasions. The scenery is so spectacular we just can’t seem to get enough of it.

In spite of coming along here before we managed to find spots we hadn’t caught before.

Like this spectacular cove at the end of a little track, and from the same point turning about 90 degrees to the right.The sea was of course reflecting the sky and instead of deep blue it was grey and green.

At one point along the cliffs I found these fellows: Long Beaked Corellas, an Oz cockatoo.
These guys are normally associated more with the dry inland than the coast. They usually nest in hollow trees. I would have guessed they were looking for possible nesting hollows along the cliffs, except they don’t begin nesting until mid-winter (July down this end of the world).

A little further on was this feature, called strangely enough “The Arch”

Near Loch Ard Gorge the sun briefly poked out from between the clouds.

We elected not to stop at the famous “Twelve Apostles, because we have seen them before and with the holiday they were simply unpleasantly crowded.

Just to the East of the Apostles are “Gibson’s Steps”.Deb waited at the top and snapped a few photos.
This is Deb’s isn’t the look of the sea a total contrast compared to just a few days before?
Then as she waited a slightly portly, amateur photographer with pretensions to publushing came into sight at the base of the cliff.
It was so cool I had pulled a woollen jumper over my T-shirt.

While I was going down the stairs and from the beach I captured these piccies of the cliffs.Then it was a matter of climbing back up the stairs to see if Deb had blown away.
Now that is it, my protracted description of our holiday has come to an end.

Next time: an odd word

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!

Some Loons and a Few Odd Little Birds

Here I go again in an attempt to out do my imaginary Uncle Harry in the boredom stakes.
We stopped at the Bay of Islands with the girls. Unlike last time it was not blowing a gale, but the weather was cold and it rained intermittently. But the weather did not deter some loony locals. In the circle in this photo (number one daughter in the corner by the way)...
are these guys, surfing far off this inhospitable coast.Every now and then surfers are drowned somewhere on this coast, when the conditions change suddenly on a rugged coastline they can easily be trapped against sheer cliff faces. When you see them in places like this you can see why.

To continue boring you, another shot of The Grotto.
And London Bridge at low tide in calmer seas.
I took this photo of the cliffs facing away from London Bridge the previous time we were there. I noticed footprints in the sand at the base of the cliff at the time and wondered how anyone could have climbed down there.
Two weeks later and there were still footprints at the bottom of the cliff, lots of them.
So I had a closer look. In the vegetation covered bank at the base of the cliff are dozens of burrows.
Then it went click, Fairy Penguins live along this coast. During daylight hours they fish out at sea, then at night they come ashore to rest in burrows where they raise their chicks.
All these prints are the work of cute little fairy penguins.

This picture is from Wikimedia Commons

Next along to Loch Ard Gorge
Where there are these interesting but rather ugly stalactites.
Out at the point beyond the gorge you can see where the Loch Ard foundered. The formation with the arch through it is Muttonbird Island. The Loch Ard was wrecked on the shelf at the base of the cliffs in the extreme left of this picture. Somehow the two survivors made it past these cliffs, through this gap, to land on this beach.

From here we continued on to the Twelve Apostles. These nifty little helicopters run tourists past the Apostles. We decided not to go last time because it was really windy, and this time because it was raining.
So we made do with looking from ground level

Here they are again from a different angle to last time and in very different light.
We had hoped to go on to Cape Otway, which we have not made it to on either of our previous trips, but the rain continued to get heavier so we decided to head for home.

Having made Uncle Harry proud by boring you all to tears, that is all for a while from the South West Coast.

Of course we still have to head down that way to see Cape Otway, maybe in summer before the high season. So Uncle harry could yet ride again!

Next: I cast an eye over my novel.