Exploring Country Victoria: Mansfield and Abroad

It has been a pretty full on couple of weeks for me. A few weekends ago I spent a solid 4 days fulfilling a promise to a friend, Jon Sander, with a much over due small trip around parts of Tasmania. It was a great and full on trip of photography where we were photographing the sunset one minute then shooting the stars under the moon lit skies until well into the early morning before rising without much sleep to shoot the sunrise. I’m looking forward to sharing the photos with you but I thought I might start with a trip I took with a family friend to country Victoria, in particular, Mansfield and the Howqua Valley over the weekend that has just been.

I must admit, seeing 800~ or so photos sitting on my hard drive from 9 days of taking photos creates a feeling of anxiety for me. Holy shit! Where do you begin?!  Slightly different to my normal style of taking sunset photos with 30-40 images to flick through. I’ve no idea how Drew Hopper did it with his beautiful photos from a recent Asia trip. Either way, I decided to bite the bullet and wanted to share with you images from Mansfield and abroad.

Mansfield

Mansfield is situated in country Victoria which is close to one of Victoria’s more popular ski mountains, Mount Buller and also near Lake Eildon National Park, a stunning area for landscape photography. The area wasn’t on my radar of somewhere I’d like to photograph until receiving a call from a family friend a few months ago who was coming to Victoria to spend a fortnight taking photos and one area on his list was Mansfield.

Slightly intrigued by his tales of hiking the mountains and explaining how beautiful a place it is the offer of tagging along even if I was half expecting from my limited Google research that it would be awful for photography (Sorry Jamie!) but how wrong I was.

Mansfield and its surrounding areas are a beautiful part of Victoria and I’d like to share (perhaps a little too many) photos from my recent trip.

Delatite Station

We decided to stay outside Mansfield in an old converted farm house called Delatite Station. It was beautiful staying on an active farm and also made a great place for photos of the sunset and stars of an evening. We arrived late on Thursday night, around 10:30 or so and met the owner, Simon who escorted us along the farm to our little cottage for the next few nights.

I’ve stayed in a fair few rural properties through exploring Tasmania and you really appreciate good accommodation when you come across it. Upon our arrival, Simon had lit the fire earlier in the afternoon so the cottage was the perfect temperature.  If you’re ever photographing the area and looking for a great base to keep yourself warm and experience the area, I’d highly recommend Delatite Station for reasons I’ll show soon.

A change of plans

The plan for the trip  was to photograph Mt Sterling, Mt Timbertop and the popular Craig’s Hut, all situated along the circuit trail. Unfortunately for us, the circuit trail was closed due to the snow season which still hadn’t started. Slightly ruining our initial plans we scrambled and did some exploring in other parts of the area and I’m glad we did. Coming across some beautiful streams, huts and Australian country.

Fading light

After spending a day photographing the area under nicely diffused skies, we made our trip home in the hope of capturing a sunset.

Fortunate for us, we were in luck and had some great skies over the course of the trip. Here’s some of my favourite sunsets and sunrises from the weekend which all (embarrassingly) center around a tree that was on the property. There was something about the rolling green hills surrounding it that had me perhaps over photographing it.

Paradise Falls & Snob Creek Falls

Pretty keen to explore the area further we decided to head to some less photographed waterfalls the following days with Snob Creek Falls and Paradise Falls. They were interesting and not necessarily great for photography but it’s always nice getting out and exploring new locations and discovering different landscape that you would not normally come across. I said to Jamie, I can’t think of anywhere in Tasmania where we would see the landscape of Paradise Falls. Before we go any further, let’s just acknowledge that calling a waterfall Paradise Falls is quite the big call.  Either way, we didn’t have a whole deal of luck photographing it with the sky being quite patchy and not much water flowing. Nevertheless it’s always nice to get out and explore new locations.

Luckily Snobs Creek Falls had a bit more water flowing but once again was quite difficult to photograph with the patchy light on the day.

One rule of thumb for me when photographing waterfalls is to make sure it’s on an overcast or dimly lit day. I’ve written about this in a small article on how to photograph waterfalls which might be of interest but for the most part, I find generally the best conditions for photographing waterfalls is when the light is diffused (so an overcast day) as this is generally around when it has rained so there will be a good amount of water flowing and the dimly lit sky will also allow you to capture longer exposures without requiring a neutral density filter.

One last visit through the Howqua Valley

Before we left though we couldn’t resist one last trip down to the Howqua region for some more photographs. One thing I was rather eager to photo was Patterson’s Hut, a beautiful old hut that runs along the river. Missing out on not being able to photograph Craig’s Hut on Mt Stirling due to the road closures, I was rather keen to take a photo or two of the hut.

While making our way along the Howqua Valley we came across the intriguing remains of what I assume were the remains of an old structure situated along the river. It made for an interesting composition piece in photos that’s for sure.

Return to Melbourne without one last stop

Once we finished photographing the Howqua Valley we eventually decided to make our way back to Melbourne with a quick stop by the Black Spur along the Yarra Ranges.

I’ve shot fog in the Yarra Ranges in the past but couldn’t resist revisiting as it’s always spectacular even albeit noisy from all the muscle cars and bikes cruising through (fully sick bro?).

If you are ever in Melbourne during winter, I’d highly recommend a trip out to Healesville and make your way through the Yarra Ranges for some photographs of the trees lined with fog. It’s truly a beautiful place during winter and also quite close to some great waterfalls like Steavenson Falls just out from Marysville.

Thanks for reading and apologies for the image overload ;). It was a great trip and I’ve got to thank Jamie for his hospitality and showing me around an area that as I mentioned at the start of the post, an area that I had no intention of visiting and how I was proved wrong. It was a great area to explore for photography which I’d highly recommend. Just be sure to pack a warm jacket 😉

Thanks,

– Alex