Blue Mountains

To capture something of the scale of this place, my fancy camera with its assortment of lenses stays in the bag, and I set the camera on my phone to panorama mode. Its as near as I can get.

It's easy enough to make an impressive photograph of the landscape in New Zealand. We pack a lot into a little space, and we major on height. There's usually something pretty to make a nice foreground and if you want a bit of scale, there's always a convenient line of snow capped peaks somewhere, and possibly, an obligingly still lake in which to reflect them. The archetypical New Zealand shot is this one, which is not mine:

It's of Lake Matheson, on the West Coast. It shows Mt. Cook and Mt. Tasman, both around 12,000 feet high reflected in the little lake which is at about sea level. So, with the reflection, 24,000 feet of vertical reach and a few trees to give a sense of scale. Lovely. And this is actually what it looks like, so capturing a pretty accurate picture of the land is achievable by most people with a good camera (and every phone now has one) and enough luck to strike a windless day. There's no need to do a Peter Jackson and resort to CG to jazz it up a bit to get across the feel, the ambience of the landscape.

It's not quite so simple with Australian landscapes. The trees and the animals and the birds are interesting to the point of being bizarre, and the colours are distinctive, so you can get your souvenir Aussi shot, like this one of mine, without too much trouble.

But try and capture the essence of this place and it's not quite so easy. The Australian landscape is as impressive and as grand and as intimidating as ours but the grandeur is horizontal, not vertical.

Yesterday I stood on a bluff in the blue mountains. By New Zealand standards the hill on which I stood and the surrounding mountains were pretty ho hum: the drop to the valley floor was a couple of hundred feet at most, and the highest point in view was perhaps 2,000 feet. But the view was as impressive and as inspiring as any I've seen back home. What was flabbergasting was the scale of it. There is a vastness here which is overwhelming in its sheer scope. The Blue Mountains National Park extends over 10,000 square kilometres. In every direction the forest stretches to the horizon with the flat low table lands offering no exclamation mark end point as New Zealand mountains do. The blue haze of vapour from the gums adds to a sense of vast distance and intimidating mystery. Walk down amongst the trees and they tower straight up for 200 ft, and I really mean straight. The undergrowth here has to contend with fire and browsers so the openness of the forest is unlike the closed, thick, ferny greenness I am used to, and adds to the sense of distance and challenge. How do I photograph that? I can't. I simply can't

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