The Moon was close to setting in the western sky when I shot this photo at Seven Mile Beach, NSW, Australia, on Sunday night. Our planet's rocky neighbour in space was only shining at 18 per cent of its maximum illumination. That was enough light to let me photograph the sky's colour, the waves at the western edge of the Tasman Sea, and the driftwood temple that had been erected on the sand.

The white arc encircling the person standing on the beach, mobile phone in hand, provides a record of their movements during the mere 15 seconds that my camera's shutter was open. Although the eastern sky is relatively featureless at this time of night through these winter months in our Southern Hemisphere, the sprinkling of stars in the heavens still adds atmosphere to the scene.

This photo is a single-frame image, shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

This weekend I’m having a short solo break at Tuross Head, on the southeast coast of New South Wales, Australia. After a 4.5 hour drive on Friday afternoon, with the sky covered in cloud for the whole trip, I arrived at the house to a surprisingly unobscured view of the stars.

After unpacking, a quick meal break and a nature stop or two, I set off to shoot the night sky, stopping on the way at this little beach on the lake’s edge. Straightaway I could see blue sparkles in the water, meaning that I had won a round of bioluminescent bingo. As things turned out, the clouds you see on the right-hand side of my photo moved in and covered the whole sky within twenty minutes of my arrival. That would usually leave me grumpy and disappointed for the rest of the night but the beauty of the blue bio more than made up for the lack of stars.

This photo is a single-frame image that I shot with Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.

After over six weeks of being covered in smoke from multiple bushfires around our state, Sydney’s stained skies have brought us reddened sunsets, yellowed light and an almost apocalyptic gloominess almost daily now. Don’t the fires know it’s Christmas?

Photographed at Kirrawee, New South Wales, Australia, using a Canon EOS 7D camera, a Sigma 50-500mm f/5.6 lens @ 500mm @ f/16, using an exposure time of 1/320 second @ ISO 800.

Did Marty and Doc Brown flash into, or back from, the future in an aquatic version of the DeLorean? That’s what these streaks of light reminded me of when I first looked at the photo on my iMac. The picture is one frame from a 440-photo time-lapse sequence that I photographed on Friday, August 23rd, near Nowra, Australia. For most of the time that I visited, the river and far shore were too dark for me to make out any details. The river’s surface was very calm and, as you can see, very reflective, giving me the chance to capture the stars shining in the sky and the water.

A little over an hour into the shoot, I heard the sound of an outboard motor coming from further up the river. I could also see a beam of light shining intermittently onto the distant tree-covered banks. Not long afterwards the engine’s noise quickly grew from a whine to a mild roar as the boat rounded a bend in the river, heading towards me. As the boat shot along the calm, flat river top, the driver flashed on his hand-held spotlight to see where he was going. He powered it on for about two seconds, swept it from bank to bank, then turned it back off again after taking in the scene. Then, after around ten seconds of darkness, the rapidly-moving mariner would repeat the cycle. My lovely and still mirror-surfaced river took nearly ten minutes to settle down after the boat passed.

The photo is a single-frame image, shot by me with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.