Road trips and me

/0 Comments/in /by

You might notice from my gallery, my facebook post and my instagram feed I’m someone who loves a road trip.

It wasn’t always like that. When I was young I had dreadful motion sickness and so our road trips being 2 hours away from home was plenty for me.

However when I was 17 years old my sister and I did a 1700km road trip to the Gold Coast, yes where I live now. I didn’t do a huge amount of road trips after that, but enough to keep me keen.

That changed two years ago when the hospital I loved working at, as a nurse, closed and I had the time to do something that had been forming in my mind for 6 months, a road trip to North Queensland. It was only for 10 days but I drove from Cairns to Uluru and saw amazing things, captured incredible sights and knew this wasn’t the only road trip I’d be doing.

From that time I’ve embarked on more road trips, more opportunities to capture Australia from all corners. My plans for this year are quite ambitious but we’ll see how they go.

Last month was the first road trip for the year. I drove from Adelaide to Broken Hill to the Great Ocean Road and back to Adelaide. I also got to visit friends and family along the way and all in the space of 5 days. People think I’d gone for weeks but it all happens in short, intense bursts. I’ve also had quite a few people asking to come along but to do what I do in the time I have needs a lot of focus. Most of the time on the road I just drive, photograph, sleep and post. Eating usually just happens when I’m driving or posting.

One of the reasons I wanted to capture the Great Ocean Road was that I don’t know how long the 12 apostles have left. To be honest I don’t know how long any of us have left on earth so I want to make the most of it. I don’t want to sit back and wait for later when now is available.

What I see is beautiful and I want others to see and experience it as well. In saying that welcome to 2019 and we’ll see where we go.

2018 – That’s a wrap!

/0 Comments/in /by

My 2018 was huge and so I chose a photo from each month (almost) and have presented them in order as a way of condensing down the year. Of course there were many more outings but this is a small sample.

January 1st: Flying out of Adelaide when I was about to embark on my 4000+km road trip from Alice Springs to Perth.

February 25th: Storms means lightning and even though I would have preferred to have the lightning over the Gold Coast this was as close as I got.

March 31st: Easter Saturday when I went to O’Reillys and these red browed wrens were willing to have their photo when distracted by the leftover seed.

April 22nd: Another road trip, this time Brisbane to Donald to Melbourne. I left Donald while the stars were still out so when I got to Waubra the sun was rising and I got to see how big and loud these wind turbines are.

May 11th: In my desire to capture autumn colours, even though I live in the Gold Coast, I drove down to Armidale and discovered this gorgeous chapel covered in autumn leaves.

June 15th: The night I got this shot I wasn’t feeling that motivated but I’d driven to Maclean, NSW, and had done all this research for better milky way photography so I went out and found the darkest beach with a camp fire in the distance.

July 28th: The plan has always been to go to W.A. in July but when I discovered the blood moon was at the end of the month and this was the only state you’d see the whole eclipse it determined what date I’d be there. 

August 7th: This was a local shot. I saw the cygnets while going for my morning run so one morning instead of running I got my camera and took photos instead.

September 23rd: I was meaning to get a sunrise shot at the Swell Festival at Currumbin beach the whole fortnight it was on. However this was the last day and it was also the most incredible sunrise with it.

September 30th: I’ve lost count of the sunrises I’ve tried to capture at Burleigh. Even yesterday I was there at 4:30am. I want to capture its character and this is the best one I’ve got. 

October 31st: Volunteering on the YWAM medical ship in PNG was a huge step in my photography. I wasn’t sure what I expected but when I saw the position I knew it was something I could do. This photo was the moment that I saw this elderly lady transform into someone proud of her culture and her people and I caught it.

December 20th: Right before Christmas I drove up to the Brisbane lookout and waited for the fireworks to go off over the city. I also met a lady who was photographing next to me and she unintentionally inspired me to buy my new camera.

So that’s a wrap. It was difficult to scale down to 12 photos but it shows where the year has taken me and even though its been quite a few places it feels like nothing compared to what I’m wanting for 2019. Thank you all for your encouragement, likes, joining in my journey and being a part of this.

Now it’s time for 2019. I’ve already been out and photographed today’s sunrise and it was incredible. I also may have finally had my computer die today. It’s been slowly coming but this might be it. However there’s always new things around the corner, including I guess a new computer.