Hey its raininig

Yep its raining on the outback photographers world and I’m so happy about that. This isn’t heavy rain but its rain and thats great. No big deal for most people but when your in the midst of a seemingly never ending "dry spell’, rain is the best medicine you could possibly imagine.

You see for those of you who are not from the south eastern parts of Australia, we are going through the "worst drought in a thousand years", something that I doubt myself but its a good line for governments trying to escape criticism for years of failing to develop infrastructure to cater for growing populations and subsequent increases in demand for water. Our current rain fall for this year is under 25% of normal and that follows years of below average falls. Farmers drawing irrigation water from the Murray River near Mildura were this year restricted to using just 48% of there water allocation, but next irrigation season face far greater restrictions on the amounts of water they will be allocated. Less water, obviously means less production and in many cases they will be forced from the land and in many cases their land may be retired from production permanently.

One of the things about being a photographer based in the Australian outback or the "Bush" as locals often refer to it, is our dependence on rural families for much of our client base. When the rural economy suffers, rural photographers feel the heat in a big way. That requires looking further afield for jobs, which is not all that bad of a deal, because photographers should always be pushing themselves to get outside their comfort zone and events such as drought, fire and even some times flood all help to make us think outside the box.