D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/13 and Shutter Speed: 37.8
out front – Lee Graduated Filter (0.9x) and Hoya CPL.

So here in lovely oz we have some great wildlife/fauna and flora, all of which I love and enjoy seeing and photographing, but there are some days though when I wish we had New Zealand’s dangerous species..which amount to about none 🙂

Let me paint a picture for ya 🙂 its summer over here, its hot and the sun rises damn early, so to capture sunrise means I need to be at the location at least 45 minutes or 1 hour before the sun is scheduled to peak its nose over the horizon. This means if you have a bit of a hike to get to the place, its a dainty walk in the dark.. anyway, back to that picture…its 4:30am in the morning and I have about a 20 minute walk to get to the rocks on the headland (this ones called Goanna Head, should be called something else i reckon 😉 ) so I set off, tripod in one hand with one leg (the tripod not mine) extended in the air to do a fine battle with the local spider colony and in the other hand a nice bright torch…cause damn its dark and there’s no moon.

This particular headland is much like many others dotted up and down the NSW coastline, low heath and brush, overgrown tracks, often quite sandy in spots and perfect environment for sneaky spiders to drop a face plant on the gerry when the tripod sword has wearied 🙂 i digress.. I am a few minutes into the walk and already have felled many spidery enemy, I take to the turn to the right, cause the other way takes you off the cliff.. bad place that 🙂 and by chance, rather than looking straight head I glance down and in the torchlight.. thank goodness for the big berther torch (600 lumens of night piercing goodness) there is a sneaky … ok lets be honest nothing sneaky about this one… there is shakey snakey curled up on the sand on the edge of the path, another step and I would have planted my great hoof right on him…

Now, after suffering a minor coronary I took the appropriate steps… backwards away from said shakey snakey, at a safe distance (well i reckon its safe) of about 4 metres, i beamed him proper with the torch..nothing, not a flinch. Whats got me concerned is why this shakey snakey did not do what normal snakes do.. be invisible and slither off into the bushes at the sound of me coming? now I know what ya thinking.. its dead… nope, rest assured he alive and well 🙁 so a bit of stamping and tripod waving (at a distance) and he was still not moving his lazy ass..much. Probably because its early in the morning and he’s lost all the heat in his body thus reactions and response are slow and muted, this is probably the most dangerous for people since they don’t get out of the way soon enough and the snakes simply strike at the last minute.

Anyway, there was no way I was doing battle with this snake, I about faced and headed back, luckily there is a couple of paths on which I could circumnavigate shakey snakey. The remaining of the trip in was slow since i was pretty cautious and overly aware of how little protection my comfy sneakers would provide from a snake bite. Strangely enough I also saw a bundle of kangroos and two echidas, fauna’s day out or something i think :-/

Goanna head.. which i think should be renamed snakey head 🙂 is actually quite renown for the number of brown and red belly black snakes (both which will kill you in a very short time), it was not that long ago a bloke was spraying bitou bush in the dunes not far from here and was bitten by a brown snake and was found a day later… 🙁

In this case there was a happy ending, I made it to the spot I wanted to be at, just as the colour in the sunrise was coming on and very appropriately the first image resembles that of snake, reaching up into the gulleys of the rocks, didn’t get me this time 🙂

Enjoy your New Years… without the shakey snakes 🙂

Techie love:
Single shot
D750 coupled with 16-35mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f/13 and Shutter Speed: 37.8
out front – Lee Graduated Filter (0.9x) and Hoya CPL.