For some time now I had been planning to return to Wollongong to do a dawn beach shoot, basing myself in a hotel which is relatively close to the sea. (When I do shoots around Bondi / Bronte, it's a half hour drive easily which means getting up at some ungodly hour of the a.m.) This weekend provided a double excuse given that I knew that the surf lifeboat championships were on, though in fact I got fewer shots of that than I would have liked. (But enough to let me know that I need to work on my "action shots" technique and give me a few ideas about that, so it was still valuable in that context.) The third excuse was that it got me out of Sydney's shocking sodding 7 day heatwave (27.6 degrees last night, the highest overnight temperature on record) and into a nice, air conditioned hotel room for a couple of nights.

I think that there may have been another attraction but I can't recall what it was now. Possibly the Chocolate Fondant for dessert in the suu-poib hotel restaurant? No, something else... it'll come to me.

In any case, that's why I'm a couple of days behind in posting my PADs, since I don't like processing the shots on my uncalibrated notebook.

This is the view from the room. You may think that I ended up in some nightmarish futuristic landscape, but in fact what you can't see (in this shot, though it'll be in Sunday's) is that there's a "green belt" buffer of a golf course between the hotel and the steelworks, and a beach just off to the left. And you have to admit, it makes for a rather exciting and unusual night time vision. The buildings in the foreground aren't really exploding in fireballs; that's just the steelworks well beyond.

Wollongong often refers to itself as "steel city" as a consequence of the steel works, and the local football team were known as the Steelers before their merger with the St George Dragons. The football club just down the road from here is still called Steelers.

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