Mt Emu Creek

A very early start to the morning on Thursday to get out to this spot for sunrise. This is the Mt Emu Creek at Pittong and though I've seen the amount of water much higher, it was still looking great. I'm glad I made the effort to come out as the conditions were great and without more rainfall this creek can slow down very quickly. Apart from the last one here, can you tell which are the aerials and which are from ground level? One is quite obvious....but the others?

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Cygnets Show

Whilst I captured some fantastic images in this mornings minus 2 degrees, first up I thought I'd post this set of images from this evening at Lake Wendouree. Another 2 new families of cygnets has arrived in the last few days...this set of 3 was on the east side of the lake putting on quite a show. Even the shadow was worth a shot!

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St George and the Lake

On Wednesday morning I made a visit to St Georges Lake out at Creswick. With low lying fog around, I had to stay quite low to capture these images. The spillway at the end of the lake is flowing quite well with plenty of small cascades to play around with. Though these look fairly straightforward, they are only possible from these vantage points when you can get you camera airborne!

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Lake Light

Another early morning visit to Lake Wendouree on Tuesday morning, this time around the View Point area on the east side of the lake. A real blue feel to the early morning light in the first one here that gradually shifted to the more greyish tones of a foggy morning. It wasn't until I got up high that I realised there was so much fog around not too far off the lake.
And a correction for Monday's post....it should have been called Ibis Island! Once again I've got my birds mixed up...ibis, egret, crane, stork...they all look the same to me.....one thing I can get right is a sparrow!

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Egret Island

Monday morning dawned overcast and very still. If you know the west side of Lake Wendouree here in Ballarat, you have probably looked out to the small islands just offshore that are usually packed with egrets. At this time of the year without any leaves, the bushes bare branches have this lovely orange colouring that adds some nice warmth to the scene. Whilst from ground level the islands look long and narrow, once you get up above them you realise how little you see from ground level.....like this...... 
The clouds had started to break up a bit and the reflected light on the water matched perfectly the colouring of the island itself.

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Sensational Sunday Scenics

On Sunday afternoon around 4pm it started to rain....and the sun was out at the same time. We all know what that means....rainbows! So I hit the road to see what I could find, initially driving around Lake Wendouree with no success. However I could see some potential north of Ballarat and headed that way. And this is the result!
First one here is looking across to Spring Hill just out of Creswick. Next as I headed north was this beauty over Green Hill, west of Allendale before looping back down to this one sitting, appropriately enough, above the South Berry old gold mine mullock heap. I was heading back into Creswick when another bank of clouds moved in and by heading out the Broomfield Rd I was rewarded with the finale...the full rainbow!
There was some other great atmospherics from this trip that I'll post a bit later.

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A Trip to Daylesford

On Saturday I had a trip out to Daylesford around lunchtime. Conditions were generally overcast, however I did catch a couple of nice patches of light on the way out, first looking across to the lower reaches of Mt Kooroocheang where this row of trees always catches my eye, and then just a few minutes later the sun broke through on the side of the Kangaroo Hills. 
Out at Daylesford, totally unexpected, I was able to add to my collection of local waterfalls. Last winter I added 6 or 7 new ones to my local collection...this year this is the first. This quite substantial falls, which I've taken the liberty of calling Jubilee Falls (creative huh?!) is where the Wombat Creek flows out of Lake Daylesford and was flowing really well. I did some research on this when I got home and I couldn't find mention of it anywhere. The walking path around the lake goes right over the top of it so I'm surprised there is no mention of it anywhere. Mind you, there was quite a bit of scrambling to get down to the base of it!

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Windermere and Learmonth

A fantastic morning on Friday with some amazing conditions, firstly at Windermere where I captured a view above the Burrumbeet Creek before sunrise, before heading north to catch this farm buried in the mist. You can see Lake Learmonth in the top of the image.......
From there a few miles north to Lake Learmonth for these 2 views. The first one is looking west across the lake where the tendrils of fog were slowly drifting across the water surface, heading west. Then turning around for a view looking east...really love those shadows across the water, especially the thin one cast by the thin tree.
Plenty of others from ground level will have to wait to another post.......

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Lawrence

I'm running late today after a very big Friday morning.....
Who knows where Lawrence is? This is the sunset I captured there on Thursday morning after chasing the sky to a spot that I thought might work if the colour arrived! Lawrence is north of Ballarat, sandwiched between Smeaton and Clunes, and the hill in the background is Mt Moorookyle. So now you know!

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Lake Wendouree Delivers Yet Again

Once again Lake Wendouree comes up with a fantastic selection of images from Wednesday. Starting with the sunrise, the first indication of some colour was this view looking across to one of the boat sheds from St Pats Point...this is well before sunrise when the colour is at its darkest. From there I moved around to the west side of the Lake where the conditions changed dramatically in the time I was there.
Later in the day I had been asked to open an Exhibition of one of the Biennale shows at the Conservatory in the Ballarat Botanical Gardens. When I left home around 4pm it had been raining heavily, however as is quite often the case, these conditions can move through and give you something really nice. So around 5.45 on the way home the clouds opened up nicely for a great sunset from the south east corner of the lake.

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The Reeds

On Tuesday morning as I was heading west out of Ballarat, scouring the landscape for conditions that would work the best.....and once again it was the west side of Lake Burrumbeet that seemed to offer the most possibilities with some low lying mists around Sawyers Bay. I come out here a lot and it always sends me home with some nice images. The first 3 here are from up high and gives you a good lay of the land. The reeds in the waters edge always look good, and they had some lovely wisps of mists drifting through them. 
Once the sun came out the whole scene changed dramatically, and once again it was the reeds that feature.

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Black Creek Cascades

I'm taking advantage of the water flowing in the Ballarat district at the moment after all the rain we've been getting, so on Monday I made a visit to the Black Creek that is out east of Ballarat towards Mt Egerton. There is a lovely set of cascades buried deep within the bush and with just the right amount of flow I came home with a nice set of images. This spot can dry up very quickly without continual rain so I was glad I got to it at a least this one time this year.

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