LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY
SCenery & Skies

Thinking ‘Nature Photos’ few will think of cloud pictures. Most of us look straight ahead and rarely at the spectacular fantasies above.

Cloud images are possible because millions of tons of water evaporate every day from oceans, from our rivers and lakes. Some of that is made into clouds.
Wind plays them into fantasies, languid, puffy, monstrous, ever changing abstracts, galleries on the move.

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FIRESKY - shot during Australian bushfires
prints available at:
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-firesky-klaus-jaritz.html

Weather is made in the Troposphere, about 10 km above the poles and 15km above the equator (6-9 miles). At the bottom it’s roughly 17C (62F) and at the top -50C (-60F). This gradient creates turbulence. It mixes particles in suspension: tiny grains of volcanic eruptions or dust storms, combustion residue, microscopic salt crystals etc. They are the CCNs - the Cloud Condensation Nuclei around which moisture can condense to form clouds.
(read also Lyall Watson ‘Heaven’s Breath’).

Stacked cumuli rising into cumulonimbus out of shaded cumulus clouds below.

The Blue Mountains
just 100-odd kilometres west of the metropolis Sydney (appr. 60 miles) have retained stretches of true wilderness.
The danger of getting lost is acute. The Greater Blue Mountains Area is inscribed on the World Heritage Register http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/917
Parts of it went up in flames during the infernal 2019/20 bushfires.

Australia’s BLUE MOUNTAINS

FLYING WATER

ULURU - Ayers Rock.
Uluru - Kata Tjuta National Park
350m above ground (1150ft) the rock is an outcrop of a massif 5000 to 6000m deep.
Prints available at:
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/uluru-ayers-rock-klaus-jaritz.html

KATA TJUTA (The Olgas)
Uluru - Kata Tjuta National Park


Charles Darwin on his visit to the Blue Mountains in 1836: "...It is not easy to conceive a more magnificent spectacle than is presented to a person walking on the summit plains, when, without notice, he arrives at the brink of one of those cliffs … Certainly, the most stupendous cliffs I have ever seen…"

Subsidence, Darwin thought, must have caused those stupendous hollows in the ground.  But the great man was wrong. Erosion did it. 60 million
years of wind and weather removed three quarters of what had been,
and left today's skeletal landscape. 

The Blue of the Blue Mountains is caused by the Rayleigh Effect.
The leaves of gumtrees exude minute droplets of ethereal oil into the
atmosphere. Together with tiny dust particles and moisture they scatter the short waves of the spectrum, the blue ones. On warm hazy days the air around the mountains catches the blues.

12 Apostles 900.jpg

The 12 Apostles along Victoria's Great Ocean Road are the remnants of land in retreat. It's a high energy coast, and the breakers of the Southern Ocean demolish the limestone with brute force. Land is lost by up to 15cm (6 in) per year – that is 150 kilometres (93 miles) in the geologically short period of one million years.

PURNULULU - Bungle Bungles National Park

ULURU - Ayers Rock at sunset.
During sunset the long rays of the spectrum, the reds, dominate. Quartz crystals in the rock act as mirrors - so the Uluru can bathe in - and reflect - mainly reds.
Prints available at:
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/uluru-ayers-rock-sunset-klaus-jaritz.html

MESA COUNTRY 2 - Australia
prints available at:
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/mesa-country-2-klaus-jaritz.html

MESA COUNTRY 3 - Australia
prints available at:
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/mesa-country-3-klaus-jaritz.html

ELLERY CREEK BIG HOLE - Macdonnell Ranges
prints available at:
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/ellery-creek-big-hole-macdonnell-ranges-klaus-jaritz.html

BLUE MOUNTAINS sunrise

Erosion by wave power at High Energy Coast of Carnarvon and South Victoria 

PINNACLES DESERT - Numbung National Park in Western Australia.
The statuary was left behind by the last ice age around 13 000 years ago. Deposits rich in calcium hardened while the softer surroundings were eroded away - leaving these Pinnacles behind.
Prints available at:
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/pinnacles-desert-klaus-jaritz.html

CHAMBERS PILLAR - 50 metres above the featureless Simpson Desert was an important landmark for the early explorers trying to cross Australia south to north. Its sandstone was laid down 350 million years ago.

MESA COUNTRY - Australia
prints available at:
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/mesa-country-klaus-jaritz.html

Mesas are flat-topped leftovers from a former plain and made by a climate of distinct wet and dry seasons. The wet flushed soluble minerals out of the soil. The harder ones, like silica or iron, were drawn up by the sun of the dry and baked into hard 'duricrust' or caprock. It laid like an armour over the land. Later earth movements cracked the crust. The soft was weathered away, tougher bits remained as mesas – a measure of how much higher the land stood in the past. Down on the plain the present has arrived, but the top of a mesa is a time museum – a fragment of the past marooned into today.

MESA COUNTRY 4 - Australia
prints available at:
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/mesa-country-4-klaus-jaritz.html