hanging out at Kings Head

We are at Victor Harbor for the Easter to Anzac Day break. As it’s also school holidays we have been trying to avoid the crowds by going to Kings Beach and Kings Head for our poodle walks.

at Kings Head
at Kings Head

These locations have had fewer people than Petrel Cove, Dog Beach or the mouth of the Hindmarsh River. We have had to be careful walking around the rocks in this area because it has been a high tide in the late afternoon, and the waves have been very big because of the full moon.

taking a break

I spent a couple of days at Encounter Studio in Victor Harbor scanning a variety of negatives that had been taken earlier this year. Rolls of 35mm colour, 6×6, colour, black and white, and tranny and 5×4 colour sheet film needed to be done.

Scanning film is a slow, tedious task. I do not enjoy it. So I welcomed the break in the late afternoon to walk the poodles around the mouth of the Hindmarsh River in Encounter Bay, along the beach and through the estuary.

mouth of the Hindmarsh River
mouth of the Hindmarsh River

I’d initially checked the Hindmarsh estuary out because I wanted to do some large format studies of the melaleucas in the estuary that I’d scooped last year. But they were still flooded. There hadn’t been enough rain for the river flow cut through the sand bar and open the mouth of the river. So the water was backing up.

Rosetta Head

The poodles and I are at Victor Harbor for a couple of days. The weather has returned to summer conditions: it is dry, hot and strong northerly winds. People were out walking before dawn this morning to escape the heat.People have been swimming and surfing at Petrel Cove since Sunday.

It’s autumn but it really feels like summer with families hanging out on the beach in the late afternoon. It was actually too hot to have breakfast on the balcony this morning.

on Rosetta Head
on Rosetta Head

Raffi burned off his energy by chasing rabbits and kangaroos whilst Ari and I scrambled around Rosetta Head. I took the odd snap but I was thinking about how to take a photo of the Petrel Cove landscape through the car window for the April ‘windows’ theme in the 1picaday2014 project.

coastal architecture

I’ve started re-engaging with the local beachside architecture on the early morning poodle walks with Ari given my inability to represent ‘summer on the coast’ this year.

21 Investigator Cresent
21 Investigator Cresent

Some of the older coastal architecture is not going to last. A lot of the weekenders built in the 1940s -70s period are shoddier pseudo crap boxes on large blocks of land. The land is more important than the buildings and the latter will be no loss when they are eventually pulled down.

the clouds have returned

We have had what seems like weeks of blue sky and bright sunshine with only the odd puffy cloud here and there. Finally, the clouds returned to the coast late yesterday afternoon when we were on the Kings Beach walk:

clouds, King Beach walk
clouds, King Beach walk

It was a welcome sight. Summer, with its heat waves, is finally over. The patterns the wispy clouds were forming around 7pm yesterday were intriguing.

views from The Bluff

This is a landscape picture taken whilst standing on top of Rosetta Head or The Bluff in the early morning, just after the sun has risen. It is looking west and it shows the cliff top walk and the beaches that we enjoy when we are at Victor Harbor. Petrel Cove is in the foreground, then Dog Beach and in the distance Kings Beach and Kings Head. The ocean is the Southern Ocean.

Petrel Cove landscape
Petrel Cove landscape

It has become a very popular spot as it is the beginning of the Heysen Trail. There are lots of locals walking their dogs, people fishing, as well as the usual bevy of day tourists.

We–Ari, Raffi and myself— walked around The Bluff before sunrise this morning before we returned to Adelaide via Mt Barker.

cliff top walk

The days and nights are cooler now and there is a touch of autumn in the air along the coast at Victor Harbour. The sun is still hot but a strong south westerly was blowing on last evening’s cliff top walk to Kings Beach.

I was on the look out for pictures of shadows for the 1picaday project, but the cloud cover came in whilst we were walking.

cliff top walk
cliff top walk

I ended up driving to a spot near the cliff tops after the walk; a location I was considering for a large format shoot.

at Encounter Bay

There is a 3 day holiday in Adelaide this weekend. It’s Adelaide Cup day on Monday.

We left the heat in city of Adelaide for the coast at Victor Harbor. Though it is still muggy, the air is cooler, there is a bit of a sea breeze, and the outside temperature is lower than that inside the house. It’s a pleasant change.

foreshore, Encounter Bay
foreshore, Encounter Bay

It seems that everybody else has the same idea, as the coast is full of people. The beaches are packed. The cafes are overflowing. The holiday houses are occupied.

at Petrel Cove

During the high temperatures this summer weekend we have been hanging out at Petrel Cove in the late afternoon. Its western end provides some shade from the heat of the sun, the cove has a sandy beach and it is possible to swim if you are careful of the rips.

Petrel Cove, Victor Harbor
Petrel Cove, Victor Harbor

It was very busy early this morning. There were families swimming, people fishing, people walking their dogs or walking and DSLR photographers in action taking advantage of the temperate conditions before the hot northerly wind sprang up mid-morning.

at Kings Head point

Now that Posterous is definitely closing on April 30th my Encounter Studio blog will be incorporated into poodlewalks. I will upgrade it so the image quality is improved and then shift to hosting the bog myself. I am not sure at this stage where I will migrate the draft of my Victor Harbor book. I still need a platform that I can continue to work on, and to add additional material (text and photos) to old posts. Tumblr is out.

Yesterday evening we–myself, Suzanne, Ari and Raffi— all went to Kings Head. It was a still, soft evening and it incorporated a poodlewalk for Ari and Raffi, a swim for Suzanne, and some photography for me on the point:

Kings Head point
Kings Head point

I’d returned to make a photo of this picture with a medium format camera in colour and black and white. I was continuing to pick up from where I’d left off before we went for our holiday at American river on Kangaroo Island.