Just after Christmas 2025, my wife and I hiked up to Aries Tor, a granite outcrop near the summit of Mount Kosciuszko in Australia. It has always been a bucket list adventure and photography location for us after a failed attempt to reach it about seven years ago.
The Tor is a difficult spot to reach, and that has maintained its uniqueness. To get it in great light, you really need to camp there overnight, and that’s exactly what we had planned.
There was a weather window for only one night that suited the subtle lighting and reflections that I had planned, and we were off!
I had always wished to take some beautiful night reflections with a starry background and had planned the scene with my astro lenses so many times while waiting for my annual leave to start. I used four small, subtle orange lights and positioned them in various locations until the light was diffuse but still visible without overpowering the scene.
Oranges and blues are my favorite colors in images, and I was so glad that this location provided the opportunity to create this image.
Aries Tor, you took our breath away with your beauty.
The scale of the boulders is lost in the photograph, but they are really quite large, at about 17 meters tall!
