I recently spent a pleasant couple of hours photographing the rocks and waves at Moffat Head, Caloundra. This is an easy spot to get to - follow the signs to Moffat Beach car park and it's a short walk around the rocks at the southern end of the beach to my favourite spot. Low tide is the best time to visit so the rock platforms are exposed - it's easier to get about, and there are plenty of interesting shapes and textures in the rocks to photograph.

I arrived at 5am and made my away around the slippery rocks by torchlight, thinking I'd be the only one silly enough to be out in the drizzling rain! But no......a couple of minutes after I arrived, a lone figure with a surfboard emerged out of the dark and launched himself into the water off the platform in front of me. He quickly disappeared from sight among the waves and darkness and it was another 15 minutes before I spotted him again in the dim pre-dawn light, about 80 metres off the rocks with a sizeable right-hand break all to himself. I'm sure he was having a ball, but all I could think was that if I was out there, I'd be putting all my concentration into keeping my feet out of the dark, foamy water and away from whatever might be lurking below. A few other surfers joined him by the time the sun started to rise.

Meanwhile, I spent my time trying to concoct interesting images using the rocks, water and early morning light. There was no grand sunrise light display, and the showers came and went, but the combination of soft morning lighting, cool looking (and wet) rocks and moving water provided plenty of subject matter. Regular readers of photography magazines might have noticed that there are mixed feelings about the use of long shutter speeds to give moving water a soft, milky look - some people hate it with a passion! I don't mind it, up to a point, but there really isn't much choice when you're photographing in low light conditions before sunrise. To use a shutter speed fast enough to freeze wave motion a this time, you have to bump the ISO (light sensitivity) way up, and/or choose a very large aperture (f-stop), neither of which are really conducive to creating good quality, sharp landscape images. So you either wait until the light levels increase as the sun comes up (and risk missing the best light of the day), or you go ahead and use long shutter speeds. Like I said, I quite like the look it creates and it goes so well with the soft tones and colours of early morning light.

Enough babbling.....here are some of my favourite images from the morning.