This photo of an ephemeral salt pond was made whilst on a poodle walk in the littoral zone during the summer of 2025. The location was just west of Petrel Cove.
It is ephemeral because the salt water between the tides can only dry out with the heat of the summer sun. The salt pond is washed away with the next high tide.
This study of sandstone cliffs is from a recent visit in March 2024 with friends to the Great Otway National Park in Victoria. We were able to stay at the Cape Otway Light Station and they walked sections of the great ocean walk.
I walked along the coast east of Point Franklin towards Parker Inlet at low tide scoping with a digital camera for a 5x4 photo session. Sadly, I didn't do a 5x4 version of this picture. Access to this coastal area could only be at low tide The picture that I did make with e 5x4 have yet to be processed by the professional photo lab.
The close-up photo below is from a recent early morning poodlewalk with Maya amongst the coastal rocks between Petrel Cove and Kings Beach lookout in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula:
We usually walk along the coastal path from Kings Beach Lookout towards Petrel Cove 40 minutes or so before sunrise. Then we make our way back along the rocks after sunrise with the sun behind us. There is only the odd dog walker on the coastal path or a solitary fisherman on the rocks at that time of the morning. So it is easy to be in the moment whilst amongst the rocks.
This is rare event at Petrel Cove near Encounter Bay on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula:
A 2.7 metre wide bump-head sunfish (Mola alexandrini). It hasn't been attacked.
I initially thought that the waters of the Southern Ocean would have been too cold as they mostly live in temperate and tropical oceans and interpreted this an indication of increasing marine temperatures. However, I was informed that the waters along Australia's southern coast are temperate and these waters in the southern hemisphere are its habitat.
I returned a few days latter and it had gone. The tides had swept it back to the sea.
As I briefly mentioned in my previous post in September 2023 this low key littoral zone project, with its grounding in Japanese aesthetics, went into a hiatus in 2023. The basic understanding that I had been working with up to that point was that a central tenet of Japanese aesthetics is the transience or impermanence of life with its sorrow for the loss of transient things. The relevant concept is mono no aware.
The close-up or macro picture of seaweed is from the 2022 archives. It was made before we got Maya, our standard poodle pup, who arrived in February, 2023.
After Maya came the hiatus in the littoral zone project took the form of the project grounding to a halt. I only walked along the coastal rocks between Petrel Cove and Kings Beach infrequently for most of 2023. What I lost in this period was the ritual of daily walking the path across the rocks with its mediative processes that focuses on the presence of things, the moment of now.
There were multiple reasons for staying away from the rocks along the coast. It was probably a mixture of reasons --- such as Maya when she was a puppy, the rugged weather conditions (the frequent rain and strong coastal winds), and my concentrating on seascapes. I realized that I wasn't open to what was around me when I was walking -- I wasn't aware of of the light of the sun and the forms and patterns of the shadows that soften everything --- as I was too busy keeping an eye on Maya I missed the nuances of perception in the shadows which are not permanent.