Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
In June 2023 my beloved and I visited the Flinders Ranges, (plus other outback South Australian places) and the Northern Territory’s “Red Centre”.
Nearly half a century had passed since our most recent trip to Wilpena Pound and nearby places.
It was more than forty years since we had last been in the NT, together.
Both regions proved as singular and beautiful in 2023 reality as they had been in our memories of the 1970s.
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You may be surprised to know that this post’s featured image involved a considerably shorter lens than did the “5A” photo, taken 38 minutes earlier, when we were still offshore.
When I took the above photo, we had for some minutes been strolling along the rather young beach which had formed/emerged as the glacier retreated – and lost its former status as a “tidewater” glacier.
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First, please have a close look at this post’s image.
It offers a much closer view than that presented in “4A” of this series.
When I took the “5A” & “5B” images we really were much closer to the same glacier’s snout, but for the “5A” image I also deployed a telephoto rather than a wide angle lens.
Now, have another look at the “4A”image, which shows all of this glacier’s snout, rather than a small portion thereof.
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This series’ “4A” image was dominated by several square kilometres of a glacier, but also included what appeared to be a very small boat.
The very same boat is the obviously-substantial star of “4B”.
For eight nights and almost nine days my beloved and I were among the 16 people (12 passengers) who were comfortably accommodated and very well fed on MV Catalyst.
The boat also carried kayaks for us all, and towed the tender that speedily transported us to and from many of Glacier Bay’s glorious shores.
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In some places and circumstances a human’s eyes and brain find it nigh-impossible to gauge just how close – or how far away – is whatever you are looking at, intensely.
The absolute (and relative) sizes of things – things-natural and things-manufactured by humans – can likewise remain an almost total mystery, until one is actually in or on the man-made thing, and/or within not very many metres of a landscape feature’s “face”.
One such place and circumstance: Alaska’s Glacier Bay, when “exploring” it by boat.
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The taking of this chapter’s “A” and “B” images saw my feet move hardly at all, between shots.
(in this series, each numbered chapter has an “A”/ “landscape” post and a “B”/“much closer” post)
For this post’s “much closer” image a much longer (more than 8X longer) focal length did the walking, metaphorically – my telephoto lens greatly narrowed the field of view, and brought the waterfall’s “centre” very much “closer”.
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Present in all four featured images from “2A” through “3B” in this series: the most forceful/active of Epupa Falls’ many waterfalls.
In “2A” it accounted for a minute portion of a very big landscape.
This post’s image was taken from directly in front of that fall – within its spray zone.
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The vantage point was much the same as in the “2A” image, which I’d shot nine minutes earlier.
At 6.20 pm I deployed a 400 mm lens, yielding a very much closer view of the liveliest part of Epupa Falls.
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Our vantage point was in northernmost Namibia, as was the southern side of the Kunene River.
The other, northern side – on the photo’s left side is in Angola, where the river is called Cunene.
We were spending day’s end on a hilltop, overlooking Epupa Falls; a few hours earlier we had walked along/among parts of the falls’ Namibian side.
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#1A’s “landscape view” image was taken at 11. 56 am on 22 November 2022, when I was standing close to the rim of Sesriem Canyon.
#1B’s “much closer view” was taken four minutes later, when I was inside the canyon, heading down to the then mostly-dry bed of its “creator”, the Tsauchab – a river that last managed to reach the Atlantic Ocean many thousands of years ago.
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