Southern Coast Meetup

A first outing with the Not Only Black And White Meetup Group titled " Southern Exposure - day trip with pools". The aim was to visit the coastal pools between Coalcliff and Port Kembla.  I'm not an admirer of built pools, always preferring the natural rock variety. However the Meetup was an opportunity to connect with like minded people and I preceived it as a challenge to be able to capture a creative image so it was a great learning opportunity.  As the meeting time was 9 a.m I decided to have an earlier start and dropped in at Bald Hill where I spent some time photographing the paragliders.  

The group's first stop was Coalcliff.

 The time was later than optimum, the light was brighter than optimum and the pool was full of club sprinters so it was difficult to capture a satisfactory shot. 

The pebbled shore and rock formations provided other opportunities to experiment with compositions and light shards shimmered on the surface of the ocean and shore, always elusive to capture digitally.

 

Wombarra is always a rewarding location as there are large boulders, rock shelves, and the wave flow can be exciting on a large swell day. Tide was mid height and some interesting reflections were created in the many small rock pools on the shelves.  

The tall order for the group remained unfulfilled as there was much of interest to occupy us at each location and of course there was the distraction of a delicious lunch at the "The Black Duck Restaurant",  hosted within the Scarborough/Wombarra Bowling Club. Certainly an inauspicious looking location but we were impressed by the flavour and size of each item on the menu and the service was efficient and friendly.

Next stop was Austinmer where the pool looked like a bomb site as they are doing some sort of renovations to the swimming pools, so observing families amusing themselves in the natural rock pools was the name of the game.

Due to a small misadventure three of us detoured to Gloucester Boulevarde where we discovered a great little natural rock pool. Unfortunately we were called away to meet up with the rest of the group at Flinders St. to observe the smoke streaming out of the enormous funnels at the Steel Works so that exciting little location will have to wait for another day.

The Way South

I'm way behind with documenting my trips but there are a few locations I intend investigating again during my days off. I'd like to discover some fresh locations which haven't been 'over photographed'. Athough I am keen on exploring some of the Northern Beaches I realise I need to be in the right frame of mind in order to negotiate the traffic with as little angst as possible. So a little project I'd like to undertake is to create a video sequence of most of the beaches or interesting locations  from Wattamolla as far as Kiama. I generally dont find concrete pools particularly attractive, however there seem to be some hidden rock pools on the route which will make the experience more interesting for me. It is difficult to gauge the optimum time for photography at each of these locations because most of them are tide dependent.  High tide frequently blocks access to many of the rockshelves and unless you're careful it can be difficult to negotiate a way back to safety. I'd recommend visiting each of them at high tide and low tide which makes it quite a time consuming process.

Wannasurf - a great resource for surfing locations with maps .
A map of Wollongong beaches and rock pools 

Some of the locations yet to be explored or re-photographed:

 

 The beach is known as Jones Beach