What a treat! Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending an all-day portrait photography workshop in Woolwich, Sydney. A wonderful birthday treat from my partner, the workshop was run by Angela Baxter, a talented family portrait photographer from Melbourne. Unfortunately for me, I was full of cold that weekend, but nothing was going to stop me! I had been looking forward to this for weeks!! Armed with tissues and flu medicine, I drove over to Woolwich on a fine Saturday morning while the rest of Sydney must have still been in bed nursing their hangovers.
The workshop was primarily focused on photographing people in ‘manual’-mode on a DSLR camera. I found it both extremely enlightening and really good fun! What really made my day that little bit more special was the setting. Our classroom was across a narrow laneway from a large harbour-side reserve. Full of inspiring settings; wonderfully old tree’s, dramatic rock faces, luscious green grass, and weathered timber sleepers, there were plenty of places for us to nestle in and photograph our muses – and yes, our ‘muses’ were little yellow rubber ducks!! With the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Cockatoo Island as the backdrop, I couldn’t help but snap a few landscape shots throughout the day as well, even though I was supposed to be focusing on portraits and ‘close-ups’. It was such a beautiful place and, for a ‘pom’ like me, a pretty surreal place to attend school for the day!!
On the drive home I couldn’t help but admire the beautiful wide tree-lined streets of Woolwich. The branches from the tree’s on both sides of the road stretched right across the asphalt expanse to create a solid canopy of greenery overhead. It felt like all the trees were giants holding their hands in an arch over my head as I skipped through underneath them, like the game played in the nursery rhyme from my childhood, “London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady”. The crisp breeze from their enormous shadows tickled at my face as I drove beneath them with the roof down on my convertible. The grandiose houses that peeked through between the tree trunks were almost Colonial, and I thought about how lucky any child would be to grow up here. I crossed the numerous bridges over Sydney Harbour back towards the concrete-jungle of the City, and bared south towards Home.
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