Jacaranda trees in Sydney

One of the most beautiful times of the year in Sydney is when the jacaranda trees start blooming in October and November. The flowers appear long before the leaves start growing and at the right time the trees look completely covered in purple color painting the city with purple spots.

This year I decided to visit a couple of popular spots. One of them is a street in Kirribilli that’s beautifully lined with jacaranda trees that form sort of a tunnel. Either early morning or around sunset the light that shines through these trees creates a pleasant purple glow. Many tourists come to this street so it’s better to arrive early in the morning.

Here I tried both wide angle and telephoto frames. Luckily there was this cool looking car parked on the street that worked well for foreground.

Besides the tourists, this place can be challenging because of the traffic. It’s not heavy but there are ocassional cards passing by and the best views are from the middle of the road.

Another well known spot is above the Circular Quay, where you can see the most iconic constructions of Sydney: the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. This location is not as busy but it’s also not as easy to photograph. The viewpoint is from a highway where there can be a lot of traffic, which makes it not a very pleasant place to be for a long time and also creates all sorts of vibrations making the tripod useless.

Blue hour vs sunrise

I tried to photograph jacarandas around the blue hour and early morning just after sunrise. During the blue hour the purple is closer to a cold blue color but if combined with warm city lights there is a chance of creating nice color contrast. When the sun is shining on the flowers, the light takes a warm purple color which can give a completely different look to the same scene.

Challenges with the weather

One of the major problems at this time of the year can be the weather. It’s usually very windy and rainy and as you can see on the next photo the wind can be challenging for long exposures but also it’s possible to work with it by intentionally including some motion blur in the photos.

All photos taken with Fujifilm X-T3.