One of the joys of photography is watching the landscape as it transforms through the hour before and after sunset or sunrise. The sequence of photographs here were taken either side of the sun setting at Cape Woolamai in Victoria’s southern coast. The first image has a soft golden light consistent with the “golden hour”. When the sun reaches the horizon, the light is intense and the shadows cooler. Right at sunset, the light’s temperature has warmed further, bathing the landscape in orange and red hues. And once down, all that is left is the deepening blue of the twilight sky reflected in the ocean and the darkening rocks, with only the faintest hint of the sun (now below the horizon) remaining.
All these images were taken using neutral density and polarising filters, with exposure times close to or at 30 seconds. Long exposure is a technique I enjoy, because it simplifies the scene and creates a sense of tranquility that matches how I feel, even when I’m watching a surging ocean. In this case, the waves were three or more meters high - enough to shatter over the tops of the rock formations you can see here, which reach two or three stories above the ground.
The route to the water’s edge was daunting. It involved a track traversing a steep ravine wide enough for only one. I slid down on my backside, using the spikes in my tripod to help control my descent. Once down I was confronted with waves taller than twice my height, and so I sensibly stayed away from the edge of the water, which one minute was large rocks and the next violent currents and wild sea-froth. At the bottom, small tufts of native grasses sat just above the high tide line, making a perfect foreground in the composition above, which was framed using my camera vertically and tilted down.
I really like the repeat patterns in the image, first of the grasses and then the rocks and finally the jagged upthrust of granite. The grasses, and the curving line of the water’s edge leads the eye strongly to the distant uplift, and the light on the granite is beautifully rendered in warm tones typical of the golden hour.
As the sun began to sink, I contemplated staying to capture the Milky Way, but that would have meant two hours or more waiting in the cold, followed by an ascent with only my (admittedly powerful) head torch for light. On my own, not really an acceptable proposition. So I climbed out and used the last of the dusk to capture the Pinnacles and the sea beyond from the cliffs. The images below show the scene as the light dwindled.
Cape Woolamai is a tombolo (a spit of land) that extends into Bass Strait, formed by volcanic action and marked by spectacular coastline, mostly inaccessible. The ocean here is fierce. This was my first trip to this particular spot and while I did plenty of on-line research I was not expecting such amazing natural sculptures. It is hard from the photographs alone to conceive of the scale of these natural structures. If I’d had a companion, I would have had a model to provide perspective. As it is, all I can do is point to the what appear to be small pebbles on the beach in the image below and say, without any exaggeration, that each reached my knee or higher.