A lo fi visual diary
I’ve been working on an image in Photoshop for the Melbourne Silver Mine Inc’s forthcoming Unsensored11 show at the Collingwood Gallery 292 Smith Street, Collingwood, Melbourne in late November.
I’m going to use the exhibition to return to Melbourne for several days to continue with the large photography from car park rooftops that I had begun on the previous trip. I’m only scratching the surface.
One of the pleasures of my recent phototrip in Melbourne was walking around Brunswick Street in Fitzroy with a digital camera. It was liberating after the discipline of large format photography.
I was returning to old haunts, as I used to live in nearby Gore Street whilst studying at the Photographic Studies College in Southbank, and working on the Melbourne trams. I started learning how to do photography (then 35mm black and white) on the grungy streets in, and around, Fitzroy.
This time I was discovering Brunswick Street afresh as a photographer— exploring a world I knew, yet didn’t know, because so much had changed since I’d lived in Fitzroy.
I’m down at Victor Harbor this weekend going through some of my photos of the region. I reckon that I have enough images on the computer’s hard disc to begin to do something with them. I’m thinking about publishing them as an organized body of work.
I’ve finally taken the plunge and decided to begin work on a DIY book of photos and text of the Fleurieu Peninsula. I’ve started by using the Posterous Spaces publishing platform to kick things off.
When I arrived in Melbourne last Friday around 6am it was raining, and it rained most of the day. I did some urban exploration with an umbrella and inbetween the rain showers I took some photos. In the early afternoon I stumbled upon this scene from the open roof of a car park.
I took a number of scoping pictures before the showers sweeping across the car park became too heavy. I thought that I could return here on the Sunday with the 5×4 Linhof, when Suzanne was at her conference. It wasn’t that far from the Oaks on Market hotel where we were staying.
I was in Melbourne for four days for the photo shoot and it rained three out of the four days. Sunday was the only fine day. On Friday the temperature was 17 degrees, Sunday it was 33 degrees and on Monday it was back down to 18 degrees. On Monday it only stopped raining as I was leaving in the bus at 8.30pm.
I found the 5×4 gear (pack and tripod) heavy to lug around the CBD. I was mainly shooting large format between the showers, or before the rain started, and the bad weather meant that I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked. I pretty much walked to a pre-selected location, set up the Linhof, take the pictures, then move onto the next one pre-selected location.
I did a 5×4 version of this on Monday, before the wind came up and the rains swept in. It rained the rest of the day–just like Friday, the day I arrived. A large part of the time on Friday and Monday was spent on urban explorations with handheld (digital and film) cameras.
I’m preparing to return to Melbourne for four days for a photo shoot in large format urban photography.
I’ll be with Suzanne but I will squeeze in some photography whilst she is conferencing. I’m taking the 5×4 Linhof Technika and tripod to reshoot some of the skylines that I took on the earlier trip.
I’ll be travelling overnight to Melbourne by Greyhound bus. It’s years since I’ve travelled on a bus–I normally fly– but the bus is the most practical way to get the large format photography gear over to Melbourne. It’s excess baggage on the plane and that is very expensive these days. So I’m basically accompanying the camera gear on the bus. I arrive in Melbourne at 6am.
It is extremely windy on the south coast this weekend. It rained on Saturday morning and then a south westerly has being blowing hard. It is gale force strength along the clifftops. Though it is sunny,the windy conditions make it impossible to do any large format photography. I had planned to do an architectural shoot on Sunday morning.
This morning, whilst Suzanne was walking the poodles, I took the digital camera and went on a scouting and scoping trip for future work with an 8×10. There are two possibilities: this and this:
I’d been eyeing this building ever since they’d started building it a few months ago.It’s big and expensive, and it is turning out to be one of the better architectural examples of modern Victor Harbor. So I went and made a number of photographic studies of it to see what it would look like as a photograph on the computer screen.
The beaches at the foot of the cliffs west of Victor Harbor are mostly deserted outside of school holidays and public holidays so we can wander along them. When we are on a daily poodlewalk along the beaches around the cliffs west of Victor Harbor I’m usually looking out for interesting objects lying scattered on the beach. These are mostly seaweed, dead birds and shells.
Often I wonder what would these objects look like as a photograph.Sometimes I bring them back to Encounter Studio to do close ups. Other times I just photograph them on the beach and move on:
This particular one was constructed. I’d seen the crab on the walk up the beach in the late afternoon, then on the return, I wondered what it would look like sitting atop a cuttlefish bone.
My days of late have been taken up learning to scan 8×10 negatives into the computer with the Epson V700 and then working on refining the image in Photoshop. The aim is to make a 16×20 print for the Melbourne Silver Mine Inc’s forthcoming Unsensored11 exhibition at the Collingwood Gallery in Melbourne.
I’ve chosen to work on a rock abstraction that kinda links back to modernism and, more particularly, to the stone walls of Aaron Siskind at Martha’s Vineyard. Siskind’s abstractions emphasized the formal qualities of the image’s lines, colors, and textures.
I finally started scanning the 8×10 b+w pictures this afternoon, even though I have still to figure out how to use the Silverfast scanning software; or how to process the pictures in Photoshop.
The results are disappointing. Most of the negatives are way overexposed; some have light leaks; the old Schneider Symmar 210mm lens that I’m using cannot cover the extreme movements for architecture; whilst the Silver Efex Pro + Lightroom combination that I’ve been using is too crude for the subtle tones of an 8×10.