Pirates Bay in Mornington Peninsula for Water H2O Thursday

 

I had all four wisdom teeth taken out simultaneously last Friday, and the days since have been something of a small ordeal. Antibiotics, opioids and NSAIDs have become my rather uninvited companions. They are all short-acting, which means the nights have been particularly unforgiving, with sleep arriving only in brief and restless fragments.

For several days, I could do very little. Even blogging, usually such a small pleasure, felt beyond reach. My hobbies were abandoned too, and even watching television became strangely difficult; I simply could not concentrate for long enough to follow a story.

Sigh.

So, instead, I am posting these two images from one of my previous obsessions: exploring the sea caves around their entrances.

There is something irresistible about standing at the threshold of a cave, where the darkness of the rock meets the vast brightness of the sea. The textures inside the cave, the roughness of the stone, and the sudden explosion of high contrast beyond the entrance have always made these places a difficult photographic challenge. Every frame becomes a negotiation between shadow and light, between what the cave conceals and what the sea reveals.

The infrared conversion adds another layer of difficulty. It leaves behind a persistent blue cast and strange artefacts that can be extraordinarily stubborn to remove in software. Yet sometimes those imperfections become part of the memory of the photograph.

Pirates Bay, on the Mornington Peninsula, is full of these sea caves, tucked along the coast like little chambers waiting to be discovered. I used to find the temptation difficult to resist—to climb, crawl and venture ever closer to their entrances in search of another image.

I doubt I will ever return to that sort of practice now. Some adventures belong to a particular time in life, and eventually we learn to leave them where they were.

Perhaps that is why these two images feel especially precious to me. They are not merely photographs of sea caves; they are little remnants of an earlier obsession, preserved from a time when curiosity was enough reason to venture into the darkness.

Sony A7RV + Laowa 9mm f5.6 

Linking Water H2O Thursday