Making the photo - 'Golden Brown (2024)'

With the release of a brand new image from my recent Great Ocean Road trip, featuring The Bakers Oven, titled ‘Golden Brown (2024)', I wanted to articulate in more detail my thought process for capturing the image and capture a more general insight into what goes on for me during a photography expedition.

This was the first sunrise on my recent winter Great Ocean Road trip.

I’m always a little apprehensive heading out on the first morning of a photography expedition, particularly in the dark, a long way from home, on my own etc etc, but at the same time I’d set some new goals for this particular trip, which were about upping my game again….against myself of course and in order to do that I needed to challenge the comfort zone.

So that meant heading out earlier than I normally would, an espresso in the tank, arriving at least an hour before sunrise.

With the head torch on, I got to looking for a composition to capture some long exposure images before the sun came up.

Standing atop the seaside cliffs of the Great Ocean Road, with only a head torch and first light on its way, listening to the constant roar of the ocean “down there somewhere” is daunting and humbling all at the same time.

I found a spot I liked for the long exposure shot, framing up the Bakers Oven with a nice green plant in the foreground, there was a bit of breeze about as the light increased so I had to manage this from the long exposure perspective but it conveniently came and went in waves (no pun intended) and so I was able to play with exposure times from a couple of seconds through to a minute and half without getting a lot of movement in the foreground but plenty of movement within the clouds and the water.

You can check out the long exposure image 'Wonder (2024)' here.

I couldn’t have asked for a better morning to kick off the week in terms of the conditions that continued to come with the sunrise.

The beautiful golden light and some streaky cloud spread the warm light across the sky and then across the scene nicely.

The breeze stayed fairly consistent and so the sea spray did wonders with the golden light as well.

Still with the focus on finding a foreground but keeping it subtle so as to not take away from the main subject, which of course is the Bakers Oven itself.

The next part of this shot was really about keeping the shutter speed up, to reduce the movement of the plants in the foreground but importantly to freeze the water movement to emphasise its power and the aperture high for the depth of field throughout the image.

The water flow through the oven itself is really the icing on the cake with this shot.

I probably took about 100 photos here on this particular morning, many of them look the same, or have different water movement or different foregrounds, I’ll continue to work through them, but I’m not sure I’ll find one that captures it like this one does!

Importantly, once I felt like I’d captured what I wanted too photographically, I took the time (probably another 30mins) just to take a seat on the ground, take a few deep breaths and soak it all in. After all, the photos are one thing, but recharging the personal batteries is key!