"desperate times" - Melbourne 2020

Melbourne - September 2019

A lot has happened since February. What started out with me taking a one month break from photography, to get my 4WD ready for an autumn trip to Tasmania, led to a chain of events that could not have been predicted. The 4WD was one week from being good enough for the Tassie trip when COVID lockdown kicked in and the border with Tasmania was shut. Remaining optimistic I decided to complete the 4WD build, all the time assuming I’d be able to reschedule to winter instead. Long story short, things got worse, we went into lockdown for a second time and there was not much light at the end of the tunnel for my Landscape Photography.

I shifted focus to landscaping projects around the home and cooking. The autumn and winter months produced a deck, retaining walls, gardens beds, way too many cakes and even more massive meals. All the time I was thinking that by late winter I’d be back behind my camera in the snow, in Tasmania. Unfortunately the real lockdown was about to happen, and when it was announced I was shattered. Being someone who embraces the silence and stillness of soft dawn light, the brilliance of a blazing sunset and that uneasy feeling you get when you're in the bush all alone in the deafening silence of a cold fog I was not in a good place. Having been confined for months already, to be told I had one hour, one walk within a five kilometres radius, one trip for food a day and I was confined to my home all night was depressing. I knew I had to do something to lift my spirits, I needed a project!

Desperate times led to desperate measures. I decided my project was to find the silver lining for the cloud I found myself in. There were a number of directions I could have taken but I’d decided that my project had to represent my lockdown experience, produce photography that I really enjoy and not just another photo that sat on my hard drive with the other eighty eight thousand unprocessed frames. After a few days contemplation, I realised that during the lockdown and curfew period, Melbourne would have the clearest skies for that time of the year, that I would probably never experience again. That was an opportunity too good to miss. So I built a plan to capture pre-dawn, dawn and sunset panoramas of Melbourne as a set of moody images over the period of the strictest lockdown. Luckily there is a good location within the five kilometre limit I was now subjected to. My first problem was timing, how I could walk there, take an image and be back home in one hour.

desperate times - Melbourne September 2020

I’d photographed sunset and practiced panoramas from this location in previous years. One of my early attempts from previous years is above. I have a good understand of the changing colour spectrum as day transitions to night at sunset at that location and focused on building my knowledge of the light and colour, relative to time, at sunrise. In the first week I built a run sheet of what I needed to do to get my images. Waking at least an hour before sunrise each morning, at staggered intervals, I'd walk to the location and witness the transition of light and colour through dawn over an hour, over a week. Based on what I’d now learned, and what I knew of sunset, I decided I needed two panoramas for sunrise, one fifteen minutes before sunrise and one at sunrise. At sunset, I needed one image just after the sun went over the horizon. Being multi-frame panoramas, in low light, requiring long shutter speeds, it was going to be difficult to stay within the one hour time limit. I knew I had to get perfect conditions on at least two mornings to complete my project.

In the following week, I’d go through my apps daily researching cloud, wind, fog, pollution and rain data for Melbourne and to the east for sunrise and west for sunset. For my sunrise images I needed clear sky to the east and either clear sky or fifty percent high cloud over Melbourne. Even if the chances were slim I’d put my backpack on and head to the location hoping the photography gods would smile on me. For the first week the sky was grey either to the east, or over Melbourne, or both. I finished the week without a single frame but was encouraged by how clear the city was. About a week later I got a morning where I had at least a fifty percent chance of getting an image. I packed my backpack with my camera, lens and filters preset for what I thought I needed. I set off planning to be there twenty minutes before sunrise, giving me five minutes setup, and five minutes to capture my first image. On the walk there it looked like the sunrise was not going to produce again. A bank of low clouds to the east was blocking the sunlight from below the horizon. About five minutes from my location a lick of pink light on the bottom of the clouds lifted my spirits and my walking pace. The sky continued to improve and I captured my two sunrise images that morning. Two days later I captured the final image at sunset.

To have executed these three technical images, as the representation of my emotional ride through lockdown, is a moment I’ll saver for a long time. You can find my interpretation of the image via the click through on this image in the Victoria section. I hope you get something from this set of images, I certainly did; hope and clarity in the direction I want to take with photography. Enjoy “desperate times”.