Last weekend I went bird banding at one of our regular sites near
Grenfell in central NSW. Normally I’d head out there on the Friday evening and
return on the Sunday afternoon, but this time I only had a day available so
left Canberra in the darkness of early Saturday morning and returned that
evening.
As I headed north on the Lachlan Valley Way towards Boorowa, I hit a
patch of thick fog, coinciding with the sun rising off to my right. It made for
some stunning visual effects and I stopped to take some photos.
Just a little further on, having turned onto the Harden Road, the
paddocks were instead bathed in sunshine with the fog restricted to the lower
swales by the Boorowa River. The imagery created was more of placid shallow
water, from which eucalypts emerged and to which a couple of kangaroos came to
drink.
Along Henry Lawson Way on the way home again, as the sun sank below the Weddin Range, the long
low rays of a late winter sunset competed with the pale orb of a rising full
moon, creating more impressionistic photo opportunities that I couldn’t ignore.
The western slopes can be beguilingly beautiful in their rustic pastoral
scenery, but the added dimensions of early morning sunshine and fog, sunset
over golden fields of canola, and long shadows across spring green paddocks
dotted with ewes and their lambs against a rising full moon made this trip
quite special.
