This shot shows the central section of Bondi Beach, shot from the cliffs leading toward Tamarama to the south. However that's not what the shot was about.

As part of the photo course the instructors decided to illustrate the difference between a standard shot and one which uses a circular polarising filter. This one is the pre-filter shot, the next one is the filtered shot.

I didn't so much get it at the time; certainly I could see the difference but I wasn't sure why you'd want to use the filter.

For shots like these it probably didn't make much difference; the sky was colourful enough and there wasn't a lot of detail or colour lost though admittedly this one looks a little more "washed out" than 0052 does.

I really learnt my lesson with the exterior shots at the Australian War Memorial several years later. If you look at the earlier shots in that gallery and see the horrendously blown out skies and compare them to the later ones (which used a filter), the difference is... substantial.