I'd been watching towers build between Robinvale and Mildura and made the call to push towards them. By the time I reached Nyah West the storm had organised into something I wasn't quite prepared for. A shelf cloud that stretched the full width of the sky, structured and slow-moving, rolling in over the flat Victorian farmland like it owned the place. Well worth the chase.

Aurora Australis over a salt lake in the Mallee. The Milky Way sits to the left, aurora beams fan out to the right, and a lone tree splits the frame right down the middle in perfect balance. The colours reflecting off the salt crust made it look like the sky was coming up from the ground as much as it was coming down from above.

The name Bay of Fires has nothing to do with the colour of the rocks. It comes from the fires the local Palawa people lit along the shore when the first European ships passed through. But once you've seen these boulders in a winter sunset, it's hard to think of them any other way. That orange is lichen, centuries of it, and it catches the low afternoon light in a way that makes the whole coastline look like it's been set alight.

Lake Bonney in the Riverland is known for its flooded red gums, trees that were drowned when the lake levels changed decades ago. What it's less known for is being one of the better dark sky sites in South Australia. The orange tree is light painted, which takes some patience to get right with the shutter open in the dark. The Milky Way did the rest.

Shot mid-season at Lake Tyrrell when the water had pulled back far enough to expose the salt crust. Up close it looks almost biological, like something living. The pink tint in the flat comes from algae in the brine and changes depending on the time of year.

The colours here are real, no filters. The shoreline at Lake Tyrrell exposes layers of mineral sediment that have been building up for thousands of years. I keep coming back to this spot because it looks different every single visit depending on the water level and the season.

The boundary between the white salt crust and the red brine beneath it is where everything gets interesting. The salt doesn't just sit on top — it bleeds through in these fine, branching lines, red creeping up into white. I got down low and close to isolate just this edge. The pattern it made was unlike anything I'd seen in dozens of visits to this lake.

The brine algae blooms in patches when conditions are right, and this is one of those patches — rust reds and deep ochres breaking through the white crust in a pattern that looks almost like a satellite view of a wildfire. It changes week to week. I've photographed this same stretch of shoreline a dozen times and it's never looked the same twice.

There's a layer beneath the salt crust at Tyrrell that most people don't see. Peel back the white and there's a band of grey-green mineral sediment sitting beneath, then the red brine below that. This frame caught all three in the same light — the undertow that's been sitting under this lake for thousands of years.

Lightning and good light rarely arrive together. This was one of those rare evenings where they did. The storm was already electric but it was the warm remnants of sunset still clinging to the horizon that made the shot.

August on the plateau brings a kind of light I've rarely seen anywhere else. The cold air holds the atmosphere in a way that turns mid-afternoon into something almost cinematic. Warm tones building slowly through the day, the haze thickening as the temperature drops, then that last stretch before sunset where everything goes gold and the fire just fades out of the sky.

There's a particular kind of quiet right before a storm cell gets organised. The light goes green-yellow and everything just stops. This was that moment. A few minutes after I took this the rain hit and I was back in the car.

Coles Bay just before the light disappeared entirely. The kind of evening where the whole sky goes soft and nothing moves. Flat water, no wind, the hills just sitting there. The pinks and lavenders lasted maybe ten minutes, then the stars came out under full moonlight.