I’m off on my travels again. This time the day job is taking me around the world. The first leg of the journey was the loooong flight to Sydney, Australia. This is my first real visit to the city, so I did some homework. I knew I’d only have two evenings to shoot, so I consulted Stuck On Earth, the app for the Ipad by Trey Ratcliff. This helped a lot in narrowing down where I could go and shoot in the tiny window of opportunity I would have. For the first evening I decided to try and get a shot of the Opera house with Sydney Harbour Brudge. This is a standard iconic shot of the city and the place to go for it is Mrs. MacQuaries Chair. This is a point that juts out into the bay to the west of the Opera House.
I got downstairs in the hotel and was dismayed. It was bucketing down with rain. I nearly gave up then and there. I’d been wandering about in the afternoon and it was nice and sunny, just a few cotton ball clouds. Now, just 3 hours later, it was socked in gray and miserable. it was tempting to just stay in the hotel, but I’d flown thousands of miles and no guarantee that tomorrow would be better. I managed to borrow an umbrella from the concierge and grabbed a taxi to get me as far as it could. I then walked down to the harbour and luckily there is an overhang of the cliffs right there to shelter under. I talked to some Slovenians on a long trip to Australia and they told me that it had rained every evening for the last 4 days! Still, I set up, because I know that sometimes you just might catch a break. Sunset was at 7:30pm, so there was time for the foreground mist to disperse at least.
Just as sunset rolled around, the clouds lifted a little with the grey mist dissipating and I got really lucky. There was still some low hanging clouds drifting about the buildings to the north side of the bridge, which gave me an additional unexpected element to the shot which makes it unique. This isn’t a straight postcard shot and I’m delighted that I didn’t give up.
Nowhere near as iconic, I also got a nice cityscape shot. Similar premis, with the clouds lifting to give me something unusual. I’m delighted with these shots. They very nearly didn’t happen, but just going out there to the point on the offchance something might come of it is part of the fun of doing this.
I have one more evening in Sydney to try and get another shot…
More to come…..
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