Run quick or hold your breath!

Ever feel like you are under water holding your nose? The travails of everyday life and work tossing up challenges, making it hard to breathe? Feel like you are sitting on the bottom of a pool, or under the ocean, while the world and life just swims past, then away?

Is there an answer, I don’t know, and I’m not sure if even having one helps. I still try to be idealistically hopeful, but age, experience and reality temper my vision of the world.

I often resort to staying away from people, trying to find stillness in the contemplation of quite places.

Feeling this way, and knowing my partner Melody is experiencing similar frustrations, we drive to Red Point in Jervis Bay National Park, and I immerse myself in the landscape taking photographs.

Under Red Point

At high tide, waves lapping the base of the cliff under Red Point have eroded a funnel. At low tide wading birds feed idyllically in the shallow waters of the rock shelf.

At Red Point

The beach is often empty, and when there is a gentle breeze from the northwest, a stillness comes over the waters lapping on the white sands curving around the bay to the point.

Run off

Lapping wave

When the tide turns, a few waves begin to break on the rock platorms. Now the waders, a bit like us, avoid the waves and getting wet.

Distant waders at low tide

I can imagine the birds thinking or saying, “Run quick or hold your breath!” Perhaps there is an answer after all.

Run quick or hold your breath!

The top two photos were taken with my Brownie No.2 F, on TMax 400 and stand developed in Adonal(1.100). The remainder of the photos were taken using my Chamonix 045F1 view camera, Rodenstock Apo-Sironar-S 150mm lens, on Fomapan 100 film, and developed in a mix of Xtol(1.2)+Adonal(1.200).