Colliding Worlds in Tasmania

How I went back to reshoot my compositions when the light came good

This remarkable place in Tasmania was reached early afternoon at the end of a fairly long drive. It’s an unusual place - the sand dunes are expanding and gradually colliding with and eating up the rainforest. It was a fairly long trek round and up with my heavy bag and tripod over thick sand. It is always crucial when working in sand to be very careful with footprints - it is so easy to accidentally destroy your future compositions by thoughtlessness. When you are with others or in a group it is doubly important to be careful as you can never anticipate what others might want to set up.

So for such an open landscape it felt very claustrophobic as if we were constantly walking on eggshells both physically and metaphorically. It was cloudy and dry so there were no issues with raindrops but the uniform light was a little uninteresting. I made 2-3 images before I finally connected with the location and made something that had a bit of a sense of the narrative of advancing sand. It was easy to execute and as the light was flat there was little point in waiting after I had made the image. It just needed a tiny bit of left to right swing.

I moved on and tried a couple more compositions and wandered some distance from the first point where I and a few others had worked. Then things changed. The clouds parted a little and we got some lovely mid-to-late afternoon light. I began madly hunting for a new composition because the light had totally changed the atmosphere and potential of the place - but where I was nothing seemed to work. With session time beginning to move on I realised the answer was to retrace my steps to where I had started. By that stage only one group member was there - someone who had started elsewhere so there was no risk of straying into each other’s compositions.

I set up the main image based on my earlier composition and caught the wonderful light. A memorable afternoon and it was probably one of my more satisfying images from the whole trip. And a reminder to myself to always stop and think when conditions start to change in a session.