Wilderness Outback Australia Landscape Photography

The website of Laurie McArthur, a dedicated adventurer, camper, traveler, photographer and story teller.

Join the ride or walk around isolated places reached by motorbike and on foot, camping on site for the best light. Digital images and photo stories of the coast and coastal fringe, the Monaro and Snowy Mountains and the Australian outback.

Perception of the Wilderness Landscape

Taking many forms including urban, coastal, horticultural, industrial, rural, wilderness and pristine, landscape photography is a widely diverse pursuit.

My wilderness landscape website contains a fairly limited photographic style centering around digital images as well as medium format film images.

Most of my work could broadly be called rural and wilderness landscape photography.

The Australian outback figures highly among the images.

Rural Landscape

My rural landscapes have a touch of wilderness photography about them in that there is seldom any sign of human involvement, while my view of the wilderness is of an environment that is uninhabitable, alienating, hostile, unforgiving, remote.

Remote Landscape

Photographing the wilderness landscape generally involves walking with a heavy pack in inhospitable terrain.

Many is the time when I've sat on a log for a spell and asked myself what I would do if something went wrong. The best answer seems to be to ignore the question.

That's how this wilderness landscape photographer finds it out there in the wilderness landscape.

Travel in the Wilderness Landscape

There's usually a fair bit of walking involved in wilderness landscape photography.

In the South Australian outback, the country gets far too rough for the car and the distance is too vast for walking so I have an ATV (four wheel motorbike) set up to carry my photography gear and camp.

On the site there is information about the bike, outback travel and camping and photo stories of my various photography trips.

Traveling on foot along the coastal inlets can be arduous with the lake edges often lined with impenetrable teatree and other scrub. The banks can be steep and rough and often meander among swamps and gullies.

Here, my eight foot boat with four horse power motor is invaluable.

The Rugged Wilderness Landscape

None of my wilderness landscape images are of nice places.

For most of my life I've been an outdoor worker and outdoor recreationalist. I've suffered considerable UV damage to my skin and carry the ongoing pain of numerous physical injuries; the result of a prolonged encounter with the natural environment.

I don't see beautiful scenes of tranquility out there; I see a harsh environment that will kill you just for being there if you don't look out. I see rough, hard, sharp, abrasive, crumbling, random, hot, cold, wet, dry, soggy, windy, steep, loose, slippery, rotten, smelly, biting, burning, glaring, stark, ugly, barren ...... and so it goes on.

That's the landscape that demands my attention and which I fondle in my imagination. It's in my heart; it's how the wilderness is for me.

So a strange anomaly pervades: I derive great pleasure from photographing an environment that grates on me so harshly.

Wilderness Outback Australia Landscape Photography

It's in the context of the diverse landscape of natural coast, mountain and outback country that I photograph the wilderness landscape.