Jan 03 2008
Photography and Holiday Weather
Well, it’s now 2008. It’s difficult to believe that yet another year is over. Time to make those resolutions again. One of mine is to save more and upgrade my camera. At the moment I’m looking at the Canon 40D.
Sorry, just got a little side-tracked. Part of my scarce vacation time over the festive period was spent on Fraser Island - off the east coast of Queensland, Australia.
While there was enough sunshine for me to get a little bit of a tan, there was also a lot of cloud cover and rain - not the ideal conditions to photograph a beach holiday.
To say I was disappointed with the weather is an understatement. I hadn’t had a proper beach holiday in about 5 years, so I was hoping for blue skies, cocktails by the pool and a nice tan to show off by the end of the week.
There were a few days of sunshine at the resort, and here is a photo that proves it! Still quite a lot of cloud cover, but enough sunshine to make this shot.
The one day I went on a tour to explore the rest of the island, it rained.
Fraser Island is a large sand island. There is no soil, just sand. This makes the terrain impossible to traverse in a regular car. Not being that adept at driving on sand in a 4WD, I decided on the tour, which took us through rainforest, forest and driving on the beach.
There was even to be a stop at the famous Lake MacKenzie - a beautiful lake which was perfect for swimming.
One stop the tour made was to the wreckage of a boat called the Maheno. Now I got a little excited. An above-ground, rusted wreckage in stormy weather - now this was something I could work with! Here are some shots:
Here is one after a little ‘enhancement’ in Photoshop:
One thing I noticed is that tempestous weather can bring on a gorgeous sunset!
Twilight in Australia doesn’t last all that long, so these colors stay around for about 3 minutes before they’re gone and there is practically no light left.
This photo was taken with my little Canon S80, which I bring when I can’t take the SLR. It’s managed to capture the colors in the sky pretty well.
Despite the weather it was still a great holiday.
I wish you all a happy and prosperous 2008!
