Night

Seven pictures, and each one cost me a night's sleep, which is about the going rate. The coast empties out after dark, and it's honestly my favourite thing about living here. Not completely, there's always somebody down on the sand, but the pools and the beaches go quiet in a way they never manage in daylight, and you can hear the water hitting the shelf from two hundred metres off.

These are all long exposures, anywhere from thirty seconds to several minutes (the moon decides that, not me). At that length the swell stops behaving like waves and turns into smoke pouring over the rock, while anything solid stays perfectly sharp. The pools are the best of it, because a few of them keep their lights on into the evening, so you get a lit green rectangle sitting in the middle of a black sea. Bilgola runs its lights until ten in summer, and I've had some very happy nights up there.

So the moon is what I plan around. We face east on this coast, which means a rising moon comes straight up out of the water and lays a track down the sea towards you, and a full one rises near sunset, which gives you roughly twenty minutes while there's still colour in the sky. Miss that, and you're photographing a white disc against black, which nobody wants above a sofa.

Winter's the season for stars, oddly. From about April through September the bright part of the Milky Way sits high in the southern sky, and if you can get clear of the streetlights, and point the camera out over the ocean, there's nothing but water in front of you for a very long way. It's cold, it's dark, there's nobody about, and I'd rather be there than almost anywhere. Not that it always works. I've driven home at two in the morning with a card full of cloud.