On a searing summer day, with an orange haze hovering in the sky, I slowly prepared for the afternoon’s session. An early morning phone call had brought the news that a bushfire had passed within around 5km of our location, and our subject had been out all night fighting the fire.
Text messages back and forth, a constant eye on the RFS website, and by 2pm, we decided we would go ahead. I jumped in the car, and headed for Bingara. The haze from the smoke hung low and heavy over the mountains. The further I drove from Inverell, the heavier the smoke got. I drove past scorched earth, covered with nothing but ash and blackened trees. Reaching my destination, I realised it was merely the colour that changed – from scorched earth covered in nothing but dust and a few spindles of dried grass. Like many areas in rural NSW, the drought is clinging on tenaciously around the Northern New England region, sucking any and all moisture from the ground.
As the heat beat down upon as, we blitzed through the shoot, creating images destined to become stock images in a commercial photo library, before dashing back to the shelter of the farmhouse, and a very cold glass of water. Never have I been so glad for air-conditioning, as I packed my bags and turned the car towards home.
This is the outlook from the farm where we were shooting between Bingara and Warialda.
And this landscape is a more personal image, shot closer to Delungra. This is an image for me, and my mum, shot very near the property she grew up on. It is alot more heavily processed than most of my images, but isn’t that what personal shots are all about?
