Sydney Harbour

Fifty two harbour pictures, and I'd love to tell you that was a plan. The harbour isn't really a bay at all, it's a river valley that drowned, and once the sea came up those old sandstone gorges, it never went back out again. Which is why the shoreline keeps folding back on itself, and why you can stand on one headland at Vaucluse, without moving your feet, and count four separate bodies of water.

I'm usually down there before five, which sounds heroic until you realise the alternative is fighting a nor'easter for the same patch of rock. In summer the water goes flat and oily for about an hour before that breeze arrives, and the first light lands on the sandstone rather than the towers, and that hour is the whole reason I get up. By seven the wind's in, the surface has gone to chop, and you may as well go and have breakfast.

What I love, and I don't think visitors ever quite see this, is the working part of it. There are tugs shoving things about, the pilot boat heading out past South Head in the dark, Navy ships tied up at Garden Island, and the Manly ferry doing its seven nautical miles from Circular Quay, putting its bow through real swell at the Heads on a rough morning.

So vantage matters here more than anywhere else I work, because the harbour reads flat from every obvious lookout. If you want the actual shape of a bay, you've got to get low and close to the water, or high enough to see how the land folds. I've given up on Mrs Macquarie's Chair entirely (that view's been taken several million times, and I've nothing to add to it), so I shoot back at the city instead, from Cremorne, from Bradleys Head, from the north side of the Heads, where the afternoon light comes over your shoulder rather than into your lens.