I’ve been up to the Blue Mountains here in New South Wales countless times. My mother lived there for almost fifteen years, but I had never, until now, been there while it was snowing. When I heard a rare cold blast was due that almost guaranteed snow, I had to check it out.
Snow is a rare thing in the Blue Mountains, but this particular day it didn’t seem to want to stop.
As I was driving up from my home in Sydney’s west I kept an eye on outside temp. It was five degrees, then four, three… rain turned to sleet and finally snow. To say I was excited was an understatement. I arrived in Katoomba in such a frenzied state I almost didn’t know what to shoot first. Having a new camera didn’t help.
It was snowing heavily when I arrived, casting what’s usually a very familiar landscape into something foreign and magical.
I have long dreamed to get a shot of the Three Sisters while it’s snowing, but such were the conditions the valley was a complete whiteout. I thought I’d wander the streets instead looking for interesting and abstract compositions of the mundane and banal, something which has become a focus of mine these last few years.
Yes, I sold all my gear, including my Sigma SD-H and Fuji X-Pro2, to buy the Fuji GFX50R, a camera I’ve been eyeing off for a while. While I am excited to see what Sigma comes up with next, I don’t see it arriving anytime soon, and the GFX50R suits all my needs. I like the idea of ‘one camera to rule them all’. I’m a minimalist at heart.
I’ll write up a more comprehensive review of the GFX50R soon, but I have found it a real joy to use. I had it out all day here and it never missed a beat. It was wet, caked in snow and still soldiered on. I shot with my sole lens at the moment, the GF 80mm f1.7, which I’ll also get around to reviewing, suffice to say it’s very, very sharp.
I love retro signs like this. Originally I did this whole set in colour, but found it was more suited to black and white in the end.
Having never really shot in snow, I worked out two things fast: You need a fairly high shutter speed to capture the falling snow, and two, a bit of exposure comp does wonders. Mostly I shot somewhere between 250th-500th of a second, which I found was enough to ‘freeze’ the snowflakes in most shots.
This reminds me of something out of a Wes Anderson film, more so in colour.
It was a fun day. I swung by Eight Things in Katoomba for some excellent nasi goreng, grabbed some specialty chocolate from the Carrington deli and checked out the exhibition at the art center. Finally, after around six hours, the snow started to abate and return to sleet. I was also very excited by the GFX50R. I’ve had a month or two with it now and look forward to showing you what it can do. Check out the full set of images below.
