The image is one of the features in my gallery that is located at 76 Mundoo Channel Drive, Hindmarsh Island, South Australia. Open this weekend Saturday and Sunday 11am-3pm.

Along the Parachilna Gorge Road, Flinders Ranges. ©Copyright Peter MacDonald. All Rights Reserved.

It’s been a while since a new image was posted here.
Not from want of trying.
Too much time on the road, three projects that have taken up a lot of time, have produced only a small number of images and are not finished yet are the reasons.
However there have been some small changes to the Sentimental Bloke website.
I have finally made an effort to update the gallery section with image, that while familiar to some, have been buried in the day to day posts.
I have also had several really worthwhile workshops in the last couple of months.
Based on those events, I have made changes to how workshops can be conducted in the future, giving more options for those who want to improve their photographic skills.
It has been really rewarding hearing how students, who have been to my workshops, have been reporting back about improvements in their work. Maybe one of the options is worth considering.
You can access both the Gallery and the Workshops sections on the top line of the Sentimental Bloke home page.

Country Road south of Jamestown in South Australia’s Mid North.
©Copyright 2014 Peter MacDonald Photography

They say shooting landscapes in the heat of the day is not a good idea. However this road caught my eye for two reasons. 1 , a simple and  interesting composition and 2, it illustrates summer in the country.

It was well over 40C when I took this shot. I think the glare of the road and the sun dried fields illustrate summer pretty well.

It is a fallacy the Australian Outback is a vast, flat featureless plain.

Granted, at times the gems may seem far apart but in reality it is an ever-changing landscape of colour…almost chameleon like.

Take for instance the Margaret Range, about 70 kilometres south of Oodnadatta on the Oodnadatta Track not long after a brief shower of rain and a cloudy sky.

It is not often the Sentimental Bloke gets to see the ocean. Salt water yes, but not the sea.

This is the coastline close to a tiny community called Port Gibbon near Cowell on the west coast of Eyre Peninsula.

I was there for just one full day so photography was pretty limited.

Cowell is the centre of wheat and sheep grazing country, oyster farming and mining.

I liked it because it is pretty, quiet, not too touristy and I’d be back very quickly for another feed of delicious blue swimmer crabs.

There’s some other attractions which can wait for another post.

Here’s a bit of a reality check following on from the previous post…… an ocean of mud, something to get your feet firmly back on the ground.

Luckily a short climb up a hill managed to get some mobile phone coverage to call the cavalry….otherwise this could have been a time consuming, very dirty problem.

These photos need no explanation……same part of the world…different journeys.

I found this photo after a request for an image depicting the the Ridgetop Track at Arkaroola in the northern Flinders Ranges.

I wanted something that wasn’t just the usual shot of a Ridgetop tour vehicle going up Sillers lookout and I came across this,.

The Ridgetop tour has been running for over 40 years and many who follow the Sentimental Bloke will probably have been along this spectacular journey.

For those who haven’t, it’s almost a “bucket list” thing to do.

This photograph was taken in harsher times, in fact five years ago and I know there’s been an enormous burst of regrowth since the breaking of the drought.

I will be back here next week for a workshop and to shoot some new material.

The question is…what’s over the hill?

It all depends on which way you are travelling, but what ever is ahead, it will be a welcome sight.

If you can take your eyes of the road, there’s a vast ocean of green out there and it goes on for kilometre after kilometre.

Travelling down the Oodnadatta Track and through Anna Creek Station, the world’s largest cattle station.

It takes a bit of imagination to comprehend its size of Anna Creek but you could multiply this scene by 50 or 60 times and you’d be in the ball-park

A big contrast to the summer photos of the last few posts. For the the last 48 hours or more a vast area of the outback has been inundated with heavy rains and there’s more to come.

I think it is safe to say that every road in the Flinders north of Hawker and Outback of South Australia is either closed, cut or in some way affected by the rain at the moment.

This is the Warrioota Creek near Beltana which is one of the streams that has isolated the town of Leigh Creek.

It was flowing a metre high and very fast for several hours yesterday then dropped so I could get home late in the afternoon.

However with more rain falling overnight and again today it cut the road once again.

Some very heavy falls have been recorded…perhaps the biggest at Depot Springs east of Leigh Creek where 270 millimetres (10.5 inches) have fallen in the last three days. That’s all of the station’s rainfall last year.

There always seems to be a good consolation though when caught at flooded creek crossing, and for me it’s an occupation hazard. Often there are interesting people to talk to who are also in the same boat (bad pun) as you are.

There are probably ten big creeks along this road but yesterday afternoon just two were flooded.

A not unfamiliar occurrence around the Flinders Ranges and the Outback which can catch out the unwary traveller or camper foolish enough to camp in a creek bed.

The actual downpour can be many kilometres away in the mountains, but a flash flood will have millions of gallons of water heading down from the mountains to nearby Lake Torrens.

It is all over though in a couple of hours.
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The machine is an old Indian motorbike, Second World War vintage.

A beautiful old bike, unfortunately a little banged up.

Not half as bad as the rider though. The pair came a cropper on a dirt road in the central Flinders.

The rider got a broken collarbone in the spill.

And with the rest of the journey with his mates still to go, the prospect is a little daunting.

First they are heading up the Birdsville Track to Birdsville…no mean feat on a heavy bike like this over hundreds of kilometres of dirt and sand.

From there the group is before heading East and home to Sydney….a journey of many hundreds of kilometres.

That’s keen. But he did say he had plenty of pain killers.

Hematite Hill, Arkaroola.

Hematite is the mineral form of iron.

The rock in this case is black and, as can be imagined, is quite heavy.

It’s the main ore of iron which is mined when in large quantities. That’s not the case here.

Mulga trees (acacia anuera) are in the foreground.

Mulga is an interesting arid land tree and a bloke I met years ago, Horst Weber has got a very good description of how it survives and its many uses by aborigines. Click here to read more.

A moment when it was never going to look quite like this again.

Northern Flinders Ranges

The Mt Hopeless Road on Wooltana Station which connects up with the Strzelecki Track to the north.

It probably doesn’t look too much like this at the moment. The road is closed.

Gone AWOL again for a few days.

Around Christmas/New Year I signalled a drop off in the number of pictures that would be posted here in January.

There will be a gap of about 10 days from now when it will not be possible for me to upload new images.

However I should return with some new material for the Sentimental Bloke a few days before the end of January.