Over the weekend my boyfriend and I spent the day in one of our favourite locations for hiking and taking photos, Warburton Victoria. Warburton is a small town about an hour and 20 minute drive out of the city of Melbourne and is located right on the Yarra River. It's surrounded by beautiful mountains, farm land and rainforests.
We had only explored a small area in the past so this time we decided to try and find new places we hadn't heard of or seen. The first place we checked out was La La falls, a cute little water fall where the hike along the way felt like you were walking through a fairy tale, with stone bridges and little creeks of water running from every direction.
The second place we went to was a Red Wood forest plantation, unfortunately we don't have these kind of trees grow naturally here in Australia but we are lucky enough to have a few plantations and national parks which do grow them. I was super excited to visit the forest because I had seen pictures and it looked so magical and creepy. We spent the rest of our afternoon exploring within the trees, filming and taking some photos which I'll be sharing both within the next couple of days. We came across a river that flowed just behind the forest which was hidden away in over grown rainforest. We wrapped up the day by having a picnic in a meadow and watching the clouds roll over the sky.
The Grampians
Over the weekend Luke and I went on a trip out to The Grampains, a three hour drive from Melbourne. The place was absolutely beautiful, open fields, huge rock covered mountains and stunning waterfalls.
Just before arriving and going into the mountains to climb down the waterfalls and explore we stopped off in a place called Halls Gap to visit a zoo we found on the Internet, we weren't expecting much giving it was in the middle of no where but saying that it was super busy and was definitely one of the best zoos I've visited in terms of their animal habitats and enclosures. They had huge open paddocks which you were able to wander around and feed wallabies, kangaroos, goats and deer :) (most of these photos are of us feeding the deer because we were so excited when we found out we could)
RAW Artists Exhibition
On Saturday, 29th August I was lucky enough to be part of RAW Artists, an event which is for emerging artists to be able to showcase their work to the public in a fun and energetic setting.
This was my first ever exhibition so as you can imagine I was extremely nervous mainly by the face to face interaction with people who were viewing my work, it's an extremely different feel than sitting at a computer screen and reading comments about your work.
Nerves aside it was a great experience, being able to have such a better connection with people who are interested in your work and you to be able to explain in more of a personal manner why you created each image and your processes from concept building to post processing and seeing their interest was definitely the most enjoyable part of the night.
There was also another reason why I was so nervous for the night, stage fright. In an event meeting a couple of months before the night all the artists were told that the host of the event will be speaking to each of us on stage (in front of about 800 people) about ourselves and our work. This was a choice and if we didn't choose so we weren't obligated to speak. I had thought long and hard about whether or not I wanted to, coming to the conclusion that no matter how terrified I was of somehow embarrassing myself, stuttering my words or any other reason it was something I actually wanted to be thrown into without too much thought. I had already made an extremely large jump by participating in an exhibition for the first time, I had to go all out and make the most of it and not stop half way because of some fears.
It was such a pleasure being able to meet the other artists properly who I was showcasing with, everyone was so talented and lovely!
I was overwhelmed by the amount of people who came along to support me, people who I hadn't even met it was great to finally meet everyone.
I can not thank every single person for being there enough and for making it such a brilliant and crazy fun night :)
You can check out RAW Artists website here and also their Facebook!
Photos by Janaka