The wide, open, majestic country of the Blue Mountains appears in contrast to the urban accoutrements of billboards, electric lights, roadways with street signs and power poles.

Bright daylight is in contrast to the pre-dawn darkness.

The camaraderie of friends contrasts with the isolation and emptiness of the wee small hours in the city.

The many and varied contrasts struck me when I saw this billboard one night.

This shot is a High Dynamic Range (HDR) merger of four others, done in an attempt to pull out both the highlights and shadows of the scene. It still looks a little more "cartoonish" than I'd like, but that's as much due to my limited knowledge of HDR as it is to the beast itself. I'm going to be signing up for Deke's monster CS5 course at Lynda.com in the morning. I'd do it tonight but... well, you can see the timestamp, there's an issue with me keeping my eyes open at present and there's no point burning a day's subscription for nothing.
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Edit July 2024: It's hard to remember now given that it was over 13 years ago, but as I recall I had been up most of the night on a teleconference call which is why the "keeping my eyes open" thing was a problem. Certainly being up at 05:20 in the a.m. is not in itself something that has ever been unusual for me. Lynda.com has long since been borged into Linked In Learning, which Deke McClelland left in 2022. And CS5 was... long, long ago in history, now.

As is CityRail. At the time CityRail covered the greater Sydney Metropolitan area from the Upper Hunter Valley in the north, Bathurst in the west (so Katoomba in the Blue Mountains was well within its orbit), to the Shoalhaven in the south. It had only two years to go at this time, since in 2013 it would be split into Sydney Trains (covering only metropolitan Sydney) and NSW TrainLink (which took over the inter-city and regional services). Of course at the time of writing NSW TrainLink intercity services were moving back to Sydney Trains making them cover... pretty much what CityRail used to, just under a different name and probably a couple of million in consulting and re-branding costs, if we're lucky. As we know, reshuffling the deckchairs every few years always works to the benefit of the taxpayer, most likely in some alternative universe, anyway.