In my mind there are three types of travel, the first type is to travel with tourist group, visiting routine places and stay at each place for enough time to take photos (mostly selfies); The second type is more casual and relax, you have your own plan of where to visit and stay, how much time to be spent at each place; The last type isn’t just physically going to somewhere, it’s more about how one’s spirit evolve, like reading a book. Fortunately 2017 Christmas we had enough time to plan our own trip to Adelaide.

I brought with me two mirrorless cameras, the Panasonic GX85 with 12-35mm f2.8 lens (equiv. 24-70mm) and Fujifilm X-Pro2 with 23mm f2 and 35mm f2. I usually shoot only 50mm equiv. focal length, the zoom lens on GX85 is planned to be used for landscape and family when it’s hard to composite with foot using prime - many people say that with prime lenses you zoom with your feet, I’d rather say you compose with your feet. Based on this, the problem with zoom lens is that, although it gives you more freedom and choices of focal lengths which sounds nice, actually it may not be a good thing, in practice I often found that what I need isn’t the flexibility of a range of focal length, but the constraint of single focal length.

（1）Lighthouse

You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved. - Ansel Adams

We left Melbourne and drove southwest, on the way, there’s Otway Lighthouse, it’s “the oldest surviving lighthouse on mainland Australia and considered the most significant”. Generally speaking, if a lonely scenery becomes a ticket selling tourist attraction, it would lose some of its spirits. I often walk on streets in Melbourne city and take random photos, which is considered as street photography, and it’s obviously different from visiting scenery; However, no matter if it’s walking on the street or scenery viewing, there will always be different kinds of people, thus there’s street photography.

The sky was sometimes vastly clear, sometimes with dark clouds scudding across, the moment just between the two extremes, there was often some elusive clouds.

There are some private residential houses here, previously they got a stunning scene when they look outside of their windows, now there’s even more scenery: people mountain people sea.

This might be the year when the lighthouse was first built, the clouds should have witnessed the history of the lighthouse, and the lighthouse also witnessed the changing clouds.

Seeing the sea on top of the lighthouse, there were poets in ancient China who wrote poetry about the sea, and those poetry are mostly exclamation of life’s shortness compared to the eternity of nature.

Not far away from the lighthouse, there’s some leftover of wood fire, I could still smell the smoke from cooking. I guess when ancient poet saw the sea and expressed their exclamation of life’s shortness, they didn’t see the lighthouse, nor smelled the cooking smoke, otherwise they wouldn’t be so pessimistic; Because for the sailors who were sailing home, whenever they saw the lighthouse, they saw hope.

Part 2: If life is always like first seeing - Adelaide (2) Island Street