Hi there,

This blog is to highlight my photos of Sawtell Beach on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales in Australia.

I started doing walks along the beach on the 1st of January 2012, for health reasons, & realised that I would not continue unless I had an ulterior motive for walking. So I decided to try & document a year in the life of Sawtell Beach with photographs. This has snowballed & I have added other types of photos that I have taken due to my interest in nature & my love of taking photos.

I've been an avid photographer most of my life, learning from black & white photos as a child on the family farm in Casino where my father, 2 brothers & I had a dedicated photographic darkroom with everything needed to develop, process & print our own black & white photos. This progressed to colour negative processing, as well as dabbling in doing prints from slides using the Cibachrome system.

When I started work in the Riverina area at Henty, Holbrook & Culcairn I began semi-professional part time work doing weddings, debutante balls, portrait sittings & any other assignments I could get.
My equipment in those days was all film based & mainly an Olympus OM-2n with a Metz 60 flash plus various lenses & copious filters etc.

I got transferred to Sawtell in 1980 & became active in the Coffs Harbour Camera Club for several years while living in a caravan at the Boambee Waters Caravan Park with my wife & 4 kids. In late 1981 I began building my own home, & combined with working full time with up to 3 part time jobs there was no time for photography.

Life & family blossomed from there, our 5th child was born, & we continued the building process while working. Many years later the 5 kids went off to university, we're still building & I began lecturing part time at Southern Cross Uni, while still doing my full time job; health reasons caused a medical retirement officially in January 2006.

It took until 2012 for me to realise that nothing was going to get better until I started exercising & thinning down a bit so the walking evolved out of this realisation.

I decided that my old film based photographic gear was not going to cut it as a medium for taking copious photos under all conditions on the beach. Firstly I would not be able to afford the processing costs, & let's face it, while being state of the art when I initially purchased them in the mid 1970's they were getting as long in the tooth as I was & showing their age almost as much.

My current digital equipment is a lot less grand than my old film based gear but is much more suited to the task at hand. I am currently using a Panasonic Lumix FZ8 - 7 megapixel super-zoom camera. It has a 12x Leica zoom lens which goes from 36mm to 432mm in the old 35mm film format jargon, will macro focus to 1cm at the wide angle setting & will macro focus to 1m when zoomed in fully.

I expect this camera to die by the end of this year as I will probably end up taking more than 120,000 photos & I don't think the shutter will handle that many. I have already started looking for a replacement & the mind boggles at the alternatives. I will keep you posted as to my decisions.


Edit - added 12th August 2012.
As you can see from the July addition, my camera & I went for an unprepared swim on the 11th July; while I can handle salt water, sadly my trusty camera cannot.

So the replacement came a lot earlier than I had anticipated; after much research here are the specs for the replacement.

Panasonic Lumix FZ150 - a bridge camera / super-zoom.
12.1 megapixel.
24x Leica zoom lens - 25mm to 600mm in the old 35mm film format jargon; macro focus to 1cm at 25mm wide angle & 1m at 600mm telephoto.
The best advantage is the speed, it will start up in about 1.2 seconds & will auto-focus in about 0.9 seconds; I have no excuses now for missing photos of anything fleeting, eg the iridescent blue kingfisher I've been trying to get all year.
It also takes HD video at 1080p 60 f/s; might try & add one to the blog someday.


 Edit - added 25th January 2017.
Well I have finally got back to my walking & also uploading my photos.

My camera has changed again as I managed to wear out the shutter in the FZ150, it's not completely dead, but it intermittently fails to work & usually at the worst time. Can't see why, as even without the walking I've managed to clock up 173,000 photos on it.

I finally bit the bullet on 25th November 2015 & bought my replacement camera. I missed the FZ200, which replaced the FZ150, & went straight to the then newly released FZ300.

To say its a great camera is an understatement, here are the specs.

Panasonic Lumix FZ300 - a bridge camera / super-zoom.
Still 12.1 megapixel.
Still 24x Leica zoom lens - 25mm to 600mm in the old 35mm film format jargon; macro focus to 1cm at 25mm wide angle & 1m at 600mm telephoto.
The big change in the lens is that it is a constant f2.8 across the entire zoom range; in addition I've discovered "iZoom" mode which will extend the focal length out to 1200mm without any discernible drop in quality & it still maintains f2.8 at that distance. (NO it is not a digital zoom which simply crops the sensor to make it look closer).
It now starts up a lot quicker, 0.88 seconds, & will auto-focus in about 0.09 seconds.
It also takes 4k video, will shoot at up to 12 frames per second full resolution, does 30 frame per second photo shoot at 8.3 megapixel & does 30 frame photo-stitched panorama shots in camera.

Like they say, I'm not really taking the photo, I just happen to be holding the camera when it takes them.

I should also state that I've taken over 85,000 photos on the FZ300 so far, hope Panasonic bring out a replacement soon.

I will try to get some more of my other types of photos up this year & will have to put up at least one 4k video.