My move down south to the Illawarra has resulted in a distinct difference in my photographic hunting grounds (at least, of a weekend) compared to my PAD galleries of two or three years ago. These days, it's difficult to resist the allure of a beach shot in the morning light. In fact, so commonly am I doing those these days that I'm concerned they may verge toward becoming a cliche.

However I've largely put that thought from my mind. I regret now that I didn't spend more time documenting the areas that I used to live in and had done for so many years. Yes, there may have been a certain similarity to some of the shots had I done so but part of our role as photographers is to document what is in fact around us. Whether we live by a coastal beach in New South Wales, in an Irish countryside, in a rustbelt city of the US, the rural and rustic South of the US, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, Switzerland, South Australia, Queensland… you all know who you are and where you are. It's your story to tell, it's your place to record. Some of the pages may be similar, but there are always different aspects, different parts of the story to tell.

In this case, I didn't even intend to return to this beach today. While I've lived here for a bit over a year now, there is still a lot of coastline and I'm not familiar with all of it. The place that I intended to go was one that I couldn't find so I just returned to City Beach (which I know well) while I still had some early morning light. Aside from which, the conditions that the Bureau of Meteorology had forecast had not eventuated anyway so the shot that I wanted to get simply wasn't going to happen even if I had found the right place to take it.

I set up my camera to see if there might be something that I hadn't previously shot, or some new take on something that I had. I noticed this woman doing Tai Chi (or something similar) directly into the rising sun and felt that was a sufficiently different page to my chapter of the global PAD book to be worthy of an entry.