Chasing Light: From Sydney Drones to Dolomite Sunsets
The common thread in our photography, from after-work drone flights over Bronte to sunsets in the Italian Dolomites. A story about chasing the same light.
It’s funny how you can look back through years of photos, taken thousands of kilometres apart, and find a common thread. For us, it’s almost always the light. Specifically, that last hour of daylight, the so-called golden hour, which is a bit of a cliché until you’re actually in it, and then it makes perfect sense.
It’s a thread that connects a quick, after-work drone flight with a trip we’d planned for months. The circumstances couldn't be more different, but the feeling is exactly the same.
The Tuesday Evening Ritual
For a while, our routine was simple. Knock off work, check the weather, and if the sky looked halfway decent, we’d grab the drone and head for the coast. It wasn’t about some grand photographic expedition; it was just about getting out of the house and putting something in the air for twenty minutes. More often than not, we'd end up somewhere like Bronte, watching the last of the swimmers doing their laps as the light started to fade.
There's a certain quality to the light then. It gets low and warm, and suddenly everything has a ten-metre-long shadow. People walking along the shoreline at Bondi would become these long, stretched-out figures on the wet sand. You’re not really planning these shots; you’re just there, flying around, and these little moments present themselves. It’s low-stakes, opportunistic, and some of our favourite images in our gallery have come from it.
The Once-in-a-Lifetime Sunset
Then you have the other end of the spectrum. The big trip. The one you plan for months. For us, that was a road trip through Italy. We’d booked a hotel near Cortina in the Dolomites, mostly for the hiking, but the view from the terrace was something else entirely. We got back from a long walk one afternoon, tired and ready for a beer, and the sky just completely lit up.
All the exhaustion vanished. We scrambled for the cameras and just stood there on the terrace as clouds and mist rolled through the peaks. It felt like the landscape was changing every thirty seconds.
That evening in the Dolomites felt a world away from a Tuesday at Bronte. One was a huge, dramatic mountain landscape we’d travelled halfway across the world to see; the other was a familiar patch of coastline just down the road. But the impulse was identical. The light started doing something interesting, and we just had to stop and watch.
That’s the golden thread. It doesn't matter if you're in your backyard or on the other side of the planet. The process is the same: you show up, you wait, and you hope the light gives you something to work with.