Travelways

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Perfection a snapshot away

1. Car keys. 2. Wallet. 3. Mobile phone. The rundown this time is easily answered: 1. Don't need them. 2. Don't need it. 3. Don't need it. I'm at the Bay of Fires Lodge at Ansons Bay and the fact that my checklist is irrelevant tells me that the relaxing lodge life is taking hold. This is a Saturday, the second full day of a photographic weekend with landscape photographer Grenville Turner, who we are abandoning to go paddling Ansons River. One of the guests has stayed back to pick Turner's brains while the other four of us join guide Claire Tetley for a one-hour bushwalk. Another of the guests, Lucy, of Sydney, has been ribbed about her penchant for photographing dead wood. The rest of us have seen photos the night before and dead wood brings out her best work. We walk west through light forest and every gnarly log is drawn to Lucy's attention. "I'll have you on dead wood by the end of the weekend," she promises. We reach the Eddystone Point road where Ansons Bay resident Richard Douglass has brought the troop carrier to meet us. He's towing kayaks for the next leg of our journey, a paddle down the Ansons River. We start at a weir where landscape reflections are near perfect. Douglass says the river and bay have fished well this year, with bream, flathead, snapper and flounder finding their way into catch bags. We begin our paddle in two-man kayaks: Sydney architect Jacki and I in one and Adelaide friends Margaret and Lynn in another. Guide Claire Tetley leads the way in a single. The river gives a wonderful vista before broadening into the bay. All too soon we are packing away kayaks and starting a walk along Shark Bay, on the northern side of Ansons Bay. We make our way past brightly coloured, low-lying flora then through tea-tree forest on to sand dunes and the sea coast. When you see a single walker's tracks on these dunes they are usually your own. It's wonderfully isolated. That night we return to the same dunes for a sunset shoot. It's another opportunity to talk photography with Turner, a master of his craft. He says it has been a big two years for camera technology. Stills photography and video are moving closer together. So much so that the season finale of US TV drama House was shot entirely on a Canon 5D Mark II, which looks for all the world like a stills camera. I'm all ears when Turner talks travel photography. There are great hints and reminders. Morning and early evening light are great times to photograph city scenes as well as spectacular wilderness. You can patch up new gear with masking tape so it looks old and less attractive to thieves. But photography, he tells us, is not just about depth of field, it's about depth of feeling. A photograph is never of something, it's always about something. When the sun disappears I guess that the photo opportunities have gone with it but I'm wrong. We stay an hour after sundown and long-exposure photos pick up amazing light. On our final morning at the lodge we ask our hosts to pose for photos. I take shot after shot, flash on, flash off, trying to capture that Eureka photograph. We are all snapping away. Turner has helped position our subjects. He steps in, takes one photo and I can see from his digital display that it's a lot closer to perfection than any of the dozens on my camera. Perfection can be difficult to attain. Bay of Fires goes awfully close. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it