Heading down from Lake Mungo, I arrived at Torquay and the start of the Great Ocean Road. I didn't stop there as I wanted to push on to get to the 12 Apostles.

As keen as I was to get the the 12 Apostles, I made a stop at the Cape Otway Lighthouse. It is said to be Australia's most significant lighthouse. It's Australia's oldest surviving lighthouse and has been in continuous operation since 1848. More of its history can be read here.

The time of day and the light conditions were not what I would normally use for this subject so I was a bit limited in what I could do with it. I chose to do a Black & White and let the contrasts and tones do the talking.

So then off to the 12 Apostles.

When you first arrive at the 12 Apostles, you cannot see the towers of rock from the road or the car park. It's only as you walk along the tourist boardwalk that they reveal themselves, almost at once.

It's the kind of scene that causes a small sharp intake of breath. Truly magnificent.

The place was crawling with tourists, falling all over each other and somehow not noticing each other as tourists seem to do. And the wind. That incredibly persistent wind.

I had two kinds of shots already in mind for 12 Apostles. I was after the standard sunset shots with colour in the sky and all that. Such shots of the 12 Apostles are everywhere, but I felt I had to have one. One that I created.

The other idea I had in mind was to get some high contrast black and white images with solid shadows. This means shooting in the early afternoon when the light is strong but on a slight angle. But I also wanted to capture movement in the water. To do this I had to use some dark filters to enable a slower shutter speed. Tough in such light. Ideally I would have used a couple of neutral density filters, say 2 three-stop filters to darken the camera's view. But I didn't have these filters. I had to improvise.

I attached everything dark I had in my bag to my lens that would fit. Two screw-on polarising filters and a graduated neutral density filter. Each polarising filter is about 2 stops so I was down about 4 stops under what I would normally be working with. Coupled with the ND grad filter and the smallest aperture on my 70-200mm f/2.8 lens - f/22 - I was able to get shutter speeds long enough to capture some motion in the water.

Now the problem was how to keep the camera still enough whilst shooting at 200mm with shutter speeds measured in seconds in a howling wind that didn't care a bit about sharp 30 inch prints. This proved almost impossible. The only way I was able to get around it was to hold all my weight on the camera and tripod and take enough shots to get just a couple that were reasonably sharp.