Adam Monk Photo Tours & Images Gallery

It’s that time of year again, it came so fast, seems only a few weeks ago it was Christmas last year… if that makes any sense.  I’ve decided i’m taking a holiday this Christmas, I have closed the doors of the gallery til next year.  Thats right, i’m shutting until January 4th next year, so if you come down between now and then you can look in the windows…

I wish everyone a safe and happy Christmas, with a great start to the new year to follow!  I’ll leave you with my dog Fiasco imitating a reindeer…

Fiasco as Rudolf...

without the red nose...

Well i’ve been a bit slack lately, its been over a week since my last post,  Christmas is always a busy time though, everything seems to happen at once.  I managed to get away camping for a couple of days again, this time to a magic little spot on the Murray River just out of Dwellingup, a small town South East of Perth in the middle of the Jarrah Forest.

As a young kid we used to go camping on the Murray river at Dwellingup, its really the place where i first developed a love of the Australian bush and nature.  The forest around Dwellingup and the Murray River have a particular smell, one i have not smelled in quite a few years, yet as we drove through the town and out into the bush the smell of the forest brought back a host of childhood memories, good memories of what this place represents for me.  Its amazing how a smell can connect with so many other things in our lives, it is the key to many memories and experiences and all we have to do is catch a faint sniff to be brought back to other times past…

Wandered off the point a bit there for a while, back now.  Had a great weekend, wandering through the bush, canoeing up the river, swimming and reading books.  I gave the new F Stop camera bag a thorough field test, filling it full of camera gear tripod and water and went for a nice long walk, it passed with flying colours, great bag, highly recommend it.  I only took one photo all weekend, and this is it…

Ah... beautiful. Explain to me again why i can't just stay here?

It is an 8 shot pano stitch shot on the 5D Mk II (of course) with the 16-35mm f2.8L  lens at 16mm, of the Murray River at Sunset.  actually its a 24 shot, cause it was bracketed and then manually HDR blended.

The Redgate beach pano is still coming, i’ve been a little distracted… there is also several hundred shots from Greece, Chile, Brasil, Argentina and Central America still to come, Stay Tuned!

This time last year i was in Southern Chilé for the wedding of a couple of good friends, one of whom is Chiléan, hence the location.  I had never been to Chilé before, so it was a new adventure for me,  I’ve seen plenty of images from there, so i had a bit of an idea, but they was nothing compared to the reality.

The view down the street... any street... of Pucón.

What an amazingly beautiful place, totally different to anywhere i have been before.  The South of Chilé is all mountains forests, fast flowing crystal clear rivers… and volcanoes…

Awe inspiring!  Nothing quite like waking up in the morning and looking out the window  to find an enormous smoking volcano taking up most of the horizon, especially when the day before – the day of arrival – had been so overcast and rainy there was no horizon and the presence of the volcano was hidden. Something i never really got used to, i think the locals were wondering what i was staring at all the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Kimberley Photographic Tour

Have you ever wanted to visit the Kimberley?  Do you love taking Landscape Images of breathtaking wild places?  How about if you could combine both of these things, with a small group of like minded people and two professional landscape photographers to get you to the best locations at the best times?

The Gibb River Rd crossing the Pentecost River.

In May next year i will be running specialised 7 day photographic tour to the Kimberley,  and  7 day photographic tours to the Bungle Bungles,  in conjunction with Greg Hocking.  Each tour will have a maximum of 8 people, so if it sounds good to you, you can read more about the Photographic tour to the Kimberley Here> and the Photographic tour to the Bungle Bungles Here> .

The Cottesloe rally for the Kimberley was yesterday, and considering the heat (35 degrees…) it was a pretty good turn out, i’m not good at estimating numbers, but i would have said 300-400 people were there.

Most people opted for the shade around the edges

All the wilderness groups worked together to put on a well organised show of unity, it was just a shame the heat was so intense so early, i think that stopped a lot of people from showing up.  I know they were expecting much bigger numbers from the responses they had from facebook and other social network news, so if you were there, well done, if you were going to come but didn’t…  What happened?  Don’t you think saving the Kimberley from going the way of the Pilbara Coast is worth sweating a bit for?

A sweltering day… 35degrees at 11am

I really can’t stress this enough, unless they are forcibly stopped by overwhelming public opinion, the Barnett Government will ruin the Kimberley forever.  This is not what Colin Barnett claims is, “a pinprick on the landscape”  this is a giant, polluting, ecology destroying industrial zone that is going to cover more than 20 square kilometres and stretch 7km out to sea, right smack bang in the middle of one of the last pristine wilderness areas left on earth. That is just the beginning, there are at least 5 other projects in the pipeline that will piggy back off this one, moving right into the heart of the Kimberley.

We shouldn’t have to fight our own Government to get them to do the right thing, and raping the Kimberley is not the right thing for anybody except a few multinational corporations who will simply disappear when the minerals run out, leaving desolation and destruction in their wake.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we were remembered as the generation who saved the Kimberley from corporate greed rather than the one who let it be destroyed?