Blayney Moonrise

The rising moon sits strong at the horizon, low through a sky that grades from deep purple-blue overhead to orange at the tree line near Blayney. Two dense-canopied eucalypts stand in full silhouette at centre, with a bare, gnarled trunk to their left catching the last of the afterglow. A faint point of light holds in the upper left of the frame. The light is thin and cold, just after dusk.

Brett photographed this on the evening of 8 May 2020, on the Nikon D850 with a 70-200mm lens, in the grazing country of the New South Wales Central West. The Landscapes collection covers his wider travel photography across Australia and Japan rather than the abandoned-places work the Lost Collective is built on, and there is no documented history attached to this particular stretch of paddock. The frame does not need one. The whole picture sits at the tree line: the moon low and strong, the two eucalypts reduced to shape, and the sky doing the work a built subject would do somewhere else. He was back at the same coordinates the following day, photographing a full rainbow over the same paddocks.