Waking up – Sunrise on the NSW South Coast

Sonia and I have been making a special effort to get into the habit of getting up early for at least one dawn photo shoot per week for the past few weeks. Spending quite a lot of time using Flickr and seeing what other photographers in Sydney are doing had left me yearning to be closer to the northern beaches that are very popular (and for good reason) places to make photos, but living on the southern edge of the city makes it such a mission to get up to and photograph these places. That was until we started exploring our own back yard – the South Coast. There are countless coves, beaches, rock shelves, pools and scenic viewpoints – easy pickings for landscape photographers – within a short drive of our home. What is making it that much more exciting for me is the unknown – I’m not heading to these places with any pre-concieved ideas of what I’m hoping to find because unlike the eastern and northern beaches, I haven’t seen a myriad of amazing images from other photographers that I am using as a benchmark or as compositional “inspiration”.

So here is a set I took this very morning (half an hour either side of sun-up) at Coledale, somewhere between Sydney and Wollongong. I can definitely admit to being very close to falling deeply in love with this whole area!

But before you head off and enjoy the photos below, you can get Sonia’s blog loading in another window so that when you’ve finished here you can carry on enjoying some South Coast shots: http://soniamasarova.wordpress.com

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