Sea, Sand and Birds

After spending years photographing wildlife and snowy landscapes, followed by being forever on the move getting to Australia’s far flung lighthouses, John Ibbottson author of the Lighthouses of Australia books was looking for an easy-going project. Brooms Head Beach, which is close to his home looked like it met the criteria. He decided to photograph the sand and where the sea and sand intermingled. and then added the local birds, preferably when they were flying to provide variety. Bird wings are wonderful subjects. He divided the location into four shooting zones: Brooms Head Beach north of the Cakora Lagoon which he called Dogs Beach, because his doggy assistants Tessie and Bella were welcome there. The southern part of the beach and Cakora Rocks were called the People’s Beach. The third was the headland and the north end of South (Sandon) Beach. The “studio” in his back yard was the fourth. The neat thing about Dogs beach was the outlet from Cakora Lagoon, which flows across the beach. This provided still water on the sand. It also meant that the beach had a convex surface, which resulted in various three dimensional patterns in the sand. The black rutile also highlighted the sand’s surface creating different images. The bird and location images were mostly straight forward, but the sand shots went through an “imaginasation” process to make them spring to life. HB 288 pages