Port Stephens

This blog post was written last week, and posted then.

However, as behind-the-scenes construction continues on this site, we had a “glitch in the matrix” which caused it to get sucked down a cyber-wormhole, never to be seen or heard from again.

At least, that is, until now!

Here it is re-written and re-posted:

Last weekend, Cath, Max and I headed up to Port Stephens, about a 2 hours drive north of Sydney.

It was a kind of belated-birthday getaway for me.

After a positively disasterous start to the weekend (details of which I won’t divulge here), I was up at 4:30 Saturday morning and on the road in search of a decent sunrise.

Not knowing the area particularly well (read: at all), I decided to just keep heading east looking for a spot which showed some promise. I figured I’d only be able to go about 10km before I found a beach facing east.

Along the way, I passed through a town called Shoal Bay, and the bay itself looked worthy of at least one shot.

Having got back in the car, I found that only 200 metres or so along the road, I came to a dead-end. From there, it was a case of stopping again, and lugging the camera gear and tripod over a wooden ‘boardwalk’ type track to Zenith Beach.

Zenith Beach provided a few different photo opportunities, but the best couple of shots came after the sun had actually cracked the horizon and I turned the lens to the west.

Then, it was back to the car with the idea of finding a nice little cafe somewhere, where I could pick up bacon and egg rolls to take back to the hotel for breakfast.

But as I headed back toward Shoal Bay, I happened to look out across the marina and was blown away by the rising sun falling on the rocks of the breakwater.

After breakfast, Cath and Max wanted to head to the resort pool, so I figured this would be a decent opportunity to try out some off-camera flash, and to put my newly acquired softbox and reflectors through their paces.

I was particularly pleased with this next shot.

Taken in fairly overcast conditions, I placed the flash to camera-left with a small softbox attached, and angled it at 45 degrees across the line of the lens. I then had a white reflector placed parallel with the lens to camera-right. This allowed some of the flash to be bounced back in on the left side of Cath’s face (from her perspective).

That night, I decided to brave the golf course and the largest, nastiest, most persistent mosquitoes I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. These suckers were BIG and would not be waved away easily. But, I wanted a nice shot of the resort, so it was a case of “kill or be killed”. Many dead mossies later, I returned to our room with this minute and a half exposure of the club house and resort reception.

Sunday morning found us back at the resort’s pool, where Max was having fun practising his ‘diving’ technique!

All in all, it was a nice weekend away.