~ LIVING LIFE, NOT JUST SURVIVING IT ~
••• tiff firth photography •••

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

great ocean road trip 22.2.12


5.30 alarm o’clock this morning… yay an extra 15 mins sleep in again!! Every minute counts at this time of day!!

Some of us went the 12 Apostles boardwalk and lookout for sunrise and some stayed in bed. The cloud become more threatening as the sun rose behind the clouds and some of my last shots were the best ones for drama.


After our hot breakfasts at The Alcove (that’s the name of the café that I couldn’t think of yesterday) we headed out to overlook Tranquil Bay. That’s a lovely place for a pano stitch shot.


From Tranquil we drove to the Island Arch. Dave and I wandered around together to get our shots. This was an arch island and only in the last 5 years did the centre ‘bridge’ collapse leaving behind to large individual structures.

The Razorback was next. Again Dave and I took our shots together.
  
And I spent quite a lot of time at Loch Ard Gorge. This is the most magical little jewel of a place and is a gorgeous place to photograph. Dave, Jaime and Pete found me down there later and we clowned around a bit for ‘profile pics’

3 of us had made a temp reservation, weather pending, to charter a helicopter to fly us on a 24 minute (6 minute incriminates) photographic trip. We could ask the pilot to fly us wherever we wanted, and slower than the norm, and even a bit lower to avoid the overhead choppers. There are 5 choppers in this fleet and the oldest one is a year old and about to be changed over. The choppers are all going flat out all day every day and rack up the flight hours really quickly.

I think the pilot (Tom) really enjoyed our company and liked flying something that’s not the norm. He threw the chopper into a couple of turns that pulled a few G’s…… love that. He was excellent at making sure that both sides had the same view, so he turn 180 degrees for us to get ‘that’ shot, or ‘this’ shot.

If you get the chance to go up, grab it!!! And definitely late in the afternoon this time of year when the sun hits the cliff face to light them up. Mornings have them in shadow as does late autumn and winter!!

We had an early tea to have time for those of us who wanted to head down to Gibson’s Steps for sunset. The cloud had fantastic potential to light up, and light up it did. I think I PO’d everywhere. I kept on laughing out loud and giggling away to myself. The sky was that good!!!!!!


Dave and I had a couple of beers to wind down from our PO’s afterwards. He worked his one cracker shot and I worked mine. We talked about camera tech stuff and computer tech stuff. He sure is my tech head guru. I can’t do a photog trip without him lol.

We also tweaked my Australia time lapse and I developed a watermark for his images.

Top day, busy too!!

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