It's not clear to me why we needed to leave at 5 am, but my rule of thumb is that if I am not waking up early for an amazing sunrise over a landscape painted by the hand of some sort of deity of pure beauty, I am waking up in vain.
So, I slept in our bus for the first few hours of the day, and then awoke for our first bleary stop, which at the marker denoting the Tropic of Capricorn. We had left the colder and sandier desert to the south, but we still had many hundreds of miles of wasteland ahead of us.
When we got back in our vehicle, I found I could never fully sleep. I would try to read, or mull about some problem, but my mind would constantly veer off from the chain of thought into wild and counterfactual contingencies. Time was liquid as I faded into and out of this state for hours on the road. I realized we had traveled for hours, but the scenery outside remained unchanged.
I mentioned this to the tour guide, and he cheerfully pointed out that the termite mounds were ever so slightly higher -- that was how we knew we were heading north.
I'll be honest: The land here was barren and dotted with scrub brush. The only breaks in the road were the occasionally ruined and burned-out car (these could be a photo study in themselves), and periodic pubs and small towns. These towns were often incredibly small -- a pub, a petrol station, and maybe a few scattered residents. The total population was sometimes in the double digits, and the towns would be full of stuff left behind there by visitors, which breaks us to today's photo:
"Wasted"I found these crushed metal barrels out near a little petrol station and tourist destination known as the Red Sands art gallery. It was a little touristy for my tastes, so I stepped outside to wander around a bit, and found lots of abandonaria. These two metal barrels immediately caught my eye. Something about them rising out of the metal sand, so scorched, textured, and rusted really caught my imagination.
I went sort of wide with this shot, shooting around 24mm (wide, but not so wide I have perspective distortion to seriously worry about -- though imho, probably might have made another interesting angle here). I set it at f/4, because I wanted some separation between it and the background -- though again, the framing I ended up choosing here is really all barrel and sky, so I needed it less than I expected.
Most importantly, I used a polarizer. A polarizer can do two things for you when you slap it on your lens:
(1) Knock the reflected glare off water or some other reflecting surface (so great for shots 'looking into the water', but also reflecting glass, or even tree leaves)
(2) Bring out rich, deep blues in the sky.
(2) was what I wanted here. Since your polarizer is really just a filter that cuts out all the light vibrating in a particular direction, you get your deepest and richest blues about ninety degrees off from the sun.
One additional issue though: If you're shooting a big blue sky at a wide(ish) angle, you'll begin to see an uneven patterns. That's because the polarizer is going to vary continuously across the whole sky -- so you'll get parts of the sky that are ninety degrees away from the sun, and some parts that aren't. The above photo is a great example of this, since we have what is almost an ink spill of blue in the upper left hand corner and then a reduction in this as you get away from it. Here, the effect was intentional: The complicated pattern in the sky was meant to mirror the light and darker reds on the barrel.
Here's a complete list of the places we stopped on my fourth day in the outback:
Red Sands Art Gallery
Barrow Creek Station - Australia's first telegraph station
The Devil's Marbles
More from the Road
Campground at Banka Banka
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