Why Tasmania?

Because of the release date for the public beta of Photoshop Lightroom 2.0, we knew we needed to look south, below the equator for the location of our second Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Adventure. Several people suggested southern Patagonia, at the tip of South America, and it seemed like a good choice for its light and scenery. However, there aren’t many people living down there and that limited our shooting options to mostly landscapes. Russell Brown, from Adobe, suggested we go to Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean, until I pointed out to him that it would be cyclone season, and none of us wanted to risk that.

(Ironic Update: April 3, 2008. Headline in Tasmania's Mercury newspaper: "Hurricane Clean-up, The morning after Tassie's 176 k/n blast." It was an amazing storm, but don't worry, we are all ok and the weather is fine today.)

I’ve long had a fascination with Tasmania. It’s part of my family folklore that my father, then a Norwegian sailor, docked in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, and wrote home to his parents in Norway that he was going to immigrate to this island tucked neatly away at the end of the world. The year was 1949, and my father, like so many Europeans was weary of war. He had worked in the Norwegian underground and lived with the daily fear of death. I’m sure he was happy with the thought of getting as far away from devastated Europe as possible. Subsequently, I’ve learned he wasn’t alone. Two of Tasmania’s most famous photographers, Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis, also ended up in Tasmania from war-torn Europe. (I’ll talk more about these two legends in another post.)

For some reason, and it’s not clear why, my father didn’t immigrate to Tasmania. Instead, soon afterwards, he end up in California--some say, illegally via Tijuana, Mexico--where he met my mom, got married and enrolled as a student at UC Berkeley.

When I looked at a world map I started with the location of our first adventure, Iceland, and quickly saw perfect symmetry between the tiny island in the north Atlantic, and the island of my curiosity situated in the Great Southern Ocean. Last May I met with Daryl Hudson of Tourism Tasmania and he quickly convinced us that Tasmania was the perfect location for the next adventure. Everyone I talked to who has visited Tasmania confirmed what Daryl said. In fact, everyone wanted to go back!

Well, we are going and I suspect a lot of you will want to go after you see the images we come up with. Be sure to enter the sweepstakes! You may get a chance to go sooner than you think.