This summer has been a hot one.
My partner, Ali, and I have been living on her parent's bush block at Clear Range, not far from Tharwa. We share 100 hectares of grassy woodland with lots of kangaroos, some deer, a few very destructive pigs, brown and tiger snakes, a plague of locusts, the odd echidna and many beautiful birds. And, of course, the plants.
There is a much more visceral connection to nature when living in the bush. The feel of the bush changes so much from spring to summer. All the small delicate little herbs and forbs set seed and die off, the common everlastings appear and carpet the ground, the grass turns yellow, the locusts appear in droves (in some years).
Ali encouraged me to photograph the common everlasting daisies. In some patches they completely cover the ground in beautiful little yellow dots. They start flowering after many of the spring flowers have disappeared for the year.
I searched for an angle to capture the character of the summer heat. Getting down on my knees, I opened the aperture of my macro lens wide open to blur the background, reducing it to two main colours - the yellow of the summer grassland and the light blue of the sky. In the foreground, I focused on the common everlastings, using a natural break in the grassland (a sloping boulder) to show an uninterrupted view of the plants from the bottom up.
These images were taken in late November. Now, in February, most of the everlastings have finished flowering and the grass is an even duller yellow. But for me this is the image of summer. Hot, yellow, and full of everlasting daisies.