Club outing – Hallett Cove – 13-Mar-2011

Sunday – the Adelaide Cup long weekend – a dreary, cloudy afternoon had many of us in fear of poor photographic opportunities for our outing to Hallett Cove. Only 6 hardy souls met at a windy and cloudy Hallett Cove Conservation Park around 6:45pm – Adrian (our man on the ground who gave weather updates by SMS over the afternoon), Yvonne, Eric, James,  Matt and myself.

	As we trekked along the board walk and up the hill to Sugarloaf, the clouds merging into the horizon split enough to suggest our evening would not be in vain!
Eric, James & I stayed on Sugarloaf and were rewarded with not only the golden glow on the hillside and a frying pan beetle I found but also a rainbow!

Meanwhile, Yvonne and Matt had headed down to the cliffs and were catching the low sun (and salt spray) over the waves whilst Adrian wandered the hillside in search of inspiration. The rest of us slowly caught up and managed to get the setting sun – exactly on time!

	As dusk settled, Matt’s earlier email suggestion of painting with light became a reality. We used Eric’s torch on a string whilst Eric, Matt and Adrian took turns in spinning the light and themselves to create what my wife described as a “ball of wool”. James tried another trick of lighting up the rocks around the spinning light with another torch – with limited success.
Then James came up with another great idea – shining the torches we’d brought inside coloured water bottles to create colours which we could photograph by wildly swinging them around.  “Darth Vader” (aka Matt) and  “Luke Skywalker” (Chris) had a mock light sabre battle declaring that neither of them was their father 🙂 whilst James painted the rocks around them. A bit of running around made some interesting patterns too. And then Matt finished with BPC painted with a torch.
	Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to try James’ suggestion of spinning burning steel wool on a string to make a spark show – as sadly, during our frolicking with light, James had a bit of a disaster with his camera/tripod falling into the sand – hopefully the repair guys will be able to salvage the camera quickly and give us more of James inspiring images.

Despite that unfortunate incident, a good night of photography was had by all. Hope you enjoy the images! There are a few more on the Flickr group too.
Chris 😉