Being on a gap year from school, I tend to have a fair few days where nothing’s really planned and I just see what happens. This day was one of those.
I woke up and tried to get a few mates keen on a mission up to the Organ Pipes. My plan was to get one of them to stand on the cliff face and look out towards Hobart – a simple photo but enough of an adventure to get me amped.
We wove down a fairly unmarked walking track. It was the first time doing the walk for all of us and we didn’t really know where we were going. We were getting close to the edge when I started hearing voices ahead.
Picking up the pace a bit, I walked around the last turn before the edge and saw three guys setting up a slack line from one end of the Organ Pipes to the other. I quickly made my way towards them and we had a brief chat about what they were doing – turns out they had been travelling around Australia doing a series of different high lines in some pretty amazing locations (they showed me a few shots of them in the Blue Mountains). I asked if they cared if I took a few photos and they were happy for me to do so.
After shooting a couple of frames from different angles around the cliff face, I went back to the little base camp where they were hanging out between walks along the high line, and spent a bit of time chatting about their travels.
They offered to abseil me down the cliff to get a unique angle. At first I was hesitant as I had no experience abseiling, especially over a 30-metre drop-off, but then I figured that this type of opportunity doesn’t come around often so I grabbed the rope and they helped me get down into a little crack in the side of the cliff.
What had started as a pretty mellow, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary adventure with a few friends turned into an experience I might never repeat. It really put faith back in the world for me, the fact that amazing things are always out there if put a little effort into finding them.
Nick Green first fell into photography as a way of documenting his small adventures surfing and camping around his home state of Tasmania. Now with the prestigious Follow the Light award under his belt, Green continues to be credited for his raw depiction of Australia’s landscape, elements and people while talking openly about his own struggles with mental illness. More of Green’s work can be found at nickgreenphoto.com and on social media @nickgreenphoto.
