Photography Trip - Thurra Dunes - Croajingolong NP Victoria

Well, we’re off on a photography and camping trip next week, to Thurra Dunes in Croajingolong National Park, situated in East Gipsland, Victoria.

It’s a coastal park and boasts the second highest sand dunes in the Southern Hemisphere at 140 metres. The higher sand dunes are in Namibia and they’re not all that much higher, so I reckon we are pretty fortunate to have such a unique and grand landscape feature so handy and relatively accessible.

Companions for the trip will be Tony, Robert and David, all capable and experienced photographers with a good understanding of the effort and dedication required to deliver the goods on such a venture.

Wandering around the files on the computer today, these monochrome images turned up. They’d be scans of negatives made using the Seagul two and a quarter square twin lens reflex camera. The film would likely have been Agfa 400.

The photos go back several years to my earlier trips to the Thurra Dunes, back before I had degraded to digital photography and still enjoyed long nights in the darkroom.

So here are some black and white sand dune images which could just as well have come from the Sahara Desert.

It’s quite an effort getting to the best sand dunes. The route takes the hiker from sea level up to about 90 meters elevation, then down to around 50 metres, followed by the big climb up to 140 metres above sea level.

Much of this is steep going. Some is quite loose sand and for considerable parts of the climb it’s both steep and loose.

For considerable distances it’s a matter of one step upward and three quarters of a step back again. Very taxing!

But on reaching the flat top of the Thurra Dunes the landscape is enough to blow your mind. The exciting rush that overwhelms a keen photographer is just something again! The creative juices run rampant as the ever changing landscape unfolds before your path.