Calm Bay

This is Horseshoe Bay, Victor Harbor, South Australia, photographed on April 16^th, 2019. It’s a simple point and shoot at medium-high telephoto value, from the carpark at the Bluff. This is the trip where I was airing out the Fuji S6500, a very good camera with lovely lens and chip performance. I got some great shots that day, and this one is attractive for its simplicity. There’s enough resolution to see people on the far beach as surely as leaves in the foreground, and the lighting conditions were very nice that day. Just a nice photograph! Minor adjustments in IrfanView. Fuji FinePix S6500. Image by Mike

 

Ocean Beach

 

Whenever I visit the south coast, I’m always reminded that the next land south is Antarctica. This is the Southern Ocean, pounding in on King’s Beach, west of Rosetta Head, near Victor Harbor, South Australia. There’s usually a stiff sea wind on this coast, and often spectacular cloudscapes. You can see whales on this coast, and surfers brave the swells. That’s either cloud down on the horizon or the rise of Kangaroo island through the sea haze. I took this frame on my birthday roadtrip in April, 2018. A well-framed, well-exposed image on a sunny day called for minimal enhancements: contrast, colour and sharpness were tweaked just a little. Fuji FinePix S5600, automatic. Image by Mike

Ponies on a winter's afternoon

Click here to view the entire image at 1000 pixels wide.

On the road to Victor Harbour (South Australia) you'll pass many horse properties and not a few breeders. One of the most interesting and unusual sights is the dales ponies grazing in paddocks along the highway -- small, incredibly hardy ponies which are at home in the merciless winters of the northern hemisphere. Their winter coats grow in shaggy, to protect them from cold, wind, frost and snow ... although in Australia they won't have to endure much of that! This picture was oddly difficult to capture. The lighting conditions were deeply overcast on this winter's day, and the raw image was flat, murky, absolutely colorless. To get this result, I've used software to "tweak" the brightness and contrast, resaturate the color, and also sharpen the overall frame. To get good results on the darker pony, technically, I've tweaked the contrast too far: notice that the face of the white pony, and the rock, are actually burned out. To render this image fully "publication quality," I'd need to go in and correct those areas, adding color and detail from the original (flat!) image. But it's still a very nice picture as it stands, so -- here it is. Photo by Jade, 2006.

Just a stroll across the causeway

Here's a sight you would once have seen every hour of every day, but now you have to travel a long way to find. Clydesdales ... heavy horses ... shire horses ... working in harness. These days they're usually display teams, such as Mike Keogh's famous Cooper's Clydesdales, which perform at all kinds of shows; but the horse above, Skye, is one of eight or ten draught horses which take turns pulling the tram across the causeway between Victor Harbour and Granite Island. They're a wonderful sight. It's a short trip (you can hike it easily yourself in ten or fifteen minutes), and these horses work in something like two-hour shifts. It's amazing to watch them just lean casually into the harness and stroll away, as if the tram doesn't even exist! These horses are pets ... groomed, coddled, petted, cherished -- and they know it. Some of them are "showmen," who toss their heads and strut for their audience! Notice Skye's brand new shoes. The camera was one of the Fujis; the day was actually a little overcast and quite cold, and this picture has been enhanced to make it appear as a sunny day! Photo by Jade, 2007.