Several years ago during my last visit Tasmania I captured Freycenet Dawn which I love for the momentary nature of the shot.

During my 2023 Tasmania trip I wanted to go back to the Cape Tourville lighthouse to see if there was another opportunity to capture an image of Wineglass Bay under different conditions. I did revisit the lighthouse and Agni(Fire) is one of the resultant shots taken a few minutes after the dawn. This shot has a bit more of a chequered story...

Feeling the effects of severe deja vu (from 7 years previous) I set up the tripod and camera and started practicing the panorama sweep for the shot while I waited for the dawn. I also took an overall, wide angle shot to provide a reference for stitching the panorama later. Unlike my previous experience at the cape this particular morning was presenting a fairly severe mist and haze out to sea but I persevered expecting the haze to lift in the warmth of the arriving sun.

I took 12 separate panoramas of this scene as the sun rose with 70 exposures in each but in post-production they were all useless as I had taken the panoramas with a gap in the image over the peninsula - user error, mistaking on peak for another and panning too far to allow stitching to occur.

As luck would have it my last act before giving up on the shot entirely was to revisit that reference shot I had taken about 10 minutes before the dawn and to my great delight it tuned out to be the shot you see here.

The long exposure times in the low light had picked up and enhanced the amazing color of the sky, smeared the mists on the water into ghostly trails and "foamed" the waves breaking on the shoreline in the foreground.

This shot is the fifth of a five shot series from my trip entitled "The Elements" and represents the fifth element, Aether, I love the ethereal nature of this shot, its chakral referencing color scheme, the subtly hidden helicopter and of course its fortuitous genesis.

This shot is an attempt to capture another (see Freycenet Dawn) shot of Wineglass Bay in the early morning and became Akasha (Aether).

I had spent the previous 2 days intermittently checking Cloud Free Night to determine the amounts and direction of travel of all the high, mid level and low cloud around Cape Tourville from about 4 hours before dawn to about 2 hours after it. For a shot like this, which is so dependent on lighting, having a large cloud bank on the horizon blocking the sun would have made the effort of setting up in the dark to wait for the shot moot. 

Of course, after all that planning, I had to rethink the shot on the day anyway. The clouds all did what was expected and delivered me these incredible mid and high level swathes of color. 

However, the shot (as I had envisaged it at least) was never going to work because of the sea mists which insisted on obscuring the detail on the cape until I realized that the mists were an integral part of a different but equally lovely composition.