For the last couple of weeks I've been having a combined case of writer's block and photographer's block. I just haven't felt the muses moving me to create images, to write commentary, or even to make comments. Neither the images nor the words were coming easily. This is in fact the closest I've come to missing my self-specified requirement of taking at least one shot per week since this is the only shot that I've taken this week. I definitely want to avoid that for the rest of the year. It's one thing to give up a PAD, another to do a bare minimum of shooting. Especially given that with my pending overseas trip I'm going to have a lot less time and a lot less opportunity to get shots, so I need to hone my skills by regular practice.

And that includes not shooting buckets of photos but rather trying to hit the spot on the first attempt.

The surf has been deceptively powerful of late due to the remnants of a tropical cyclone still sitting off the coast of Queensland. The weather bureau has urged people to stay out of the water. Of course, it's entirely possible that there would still be surfers out there for me to get shots of (and, indeed, I did see a couple this morning) though the clouds had rolled in and so they would have yet again been shots of surfers under grey skies rather than brilliantly lit ones. Oh goody, ISO 800 again.

Accordingly I abandoned any thought of getting another surfer shot. Instead I went to take a look at some of the other beaches along the coast. At Thirroul I found a very impressive mist hanging over the sea, probably resulting from some showers that we had this morning which did very little to cool down the annoyingly hot temperatures that we've had of late. Still, it was pretty enough to look at.

However I decided to push it a bit further by using my awesome little variable neutral density filter. By getting the exposure time out to 8 seconds I also picked up a nice soft, white band from some breaking waves.

I wouldn't say that my muses are back so my comments may still be a little bit on the sporadic side, but at least I was interested enough to pick up a camera today and I figure that's a good sign.