A lo fi visual diary
We have had what seems like weeks of blue sky and bright sunshine with only the odd puffy cloud here and there. Finally, the clouds returned to the coast late yesterday afternoon when we were on the Kings Beach walk:
It was a welcome sight. Summer, with its heat waves, is finally over. The patterns the wispy clouds were forming around 7pm yesterday were intriguing.
This is a landscape picture taken whilst standing on top of Rosetta Head or The Bluff in the early morning, just after the sun has risen. It is looking west and it shows the cliff top walk and the beaches that we enjoy when we are at Victor Harbor. Petrel Cove is in the foreground, then Dog Beach and in the distance Kings Beach and Kings Head. The ocean is the Southern Ocean.
It has become a very popular spot as it is the beginning of the Heysen Trail. There are lots of locals walking their dogs, people fishing, as well as the usual bevy of day tourists.
We–Ari, Raffi and myself— walked around The Bluff before sunrise this morning before we returned to Adelaide via Mt Barker.
The days and nights are cooler now and there is a touch of autumn in the air along the coast at Victor Harbour. The sun is still hot but a strong south westerly was blowing on last evening’s cliff top walk to Kings Beach.
I was on the look out for pictures of shadows for the 1picaday project, but the cloud cover came in whilst we were walking.
I ended up driving to a spot near the cliff tops after the walk; a location I was considering for a large format shoot.
There is a 3 day holiday in Adelaide this weekend. It’s Adelaide Cup day on Monday.
We left the heat in city of Adelaide for the coast at Victor Harbor. Though it is still muggy, the air is cooler, there is a bit of a sea breeze, and the outside temperature is lower than that inside the house. It’s a pleasant change.
It seems that everybody else has the same idea, as the coast is full of people. The beaches are packed. The cafes are overflowing. The holiday houses are occupied.
During the high temperatures this summer weekend we have been hanging out at Petrel Cove in the late afternoon. Its western end provides some shade from the heat of the sun, the cove has a sandy beach and it is possible to swim if you are careful of the rips.
It was very busy early this morning. There were families swimming, people fishing, people walking their dogs or walking and DSLR photographers in action taking advantage of the temperate conditions before the hot northerly wind sprang up mid-morning.
Now that Posterous is definitely closing on April 30th my Encounter Studio blog will be incorporated into poodlewalks. I will upgrade it so the image quality is improved and then shift to hosting the bog myself. I am not sure at this stage where I will migrate the draft of my Victor Harbor book. I still need a platform that I can continue to work on, and to add additional material (text and photos) to old posts. Tumblr is out.
Yesterday evening we–myself, Suzanne, Ari and Raffi— all went to Kings Head. It was a still, soft evening and it incorporated a poodlewalk for Ari and Raffi, a swim for Suzanne, and some photography for me on the point:
I’d returned to make a photo of this picture with a medium format camera in colour and black and white. I was continuing to pick up from where I’d left off before we went for our holiday at American river on Kangaroo Island.
On our early morning walk along the beach at Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor this morning, I started noticing the colour of the seaweed amongst the rocky foreshore:
The sand had gone exposing the reef (Black’s reef that lies between the Bluff and Wright Island) at low tide, and the seaweed was scattered amongst the rocks.
I am very constrained with respect to my photography at the moment, as we have an 8 week old silver standard poodle pup that requires a lot of attention to burn off the energy. We have taken a weeks holiday to adjust and are down to Victor Harbor to help ease him into our routines. Despite the high energy the places that we can go to are limited.
I’ve pretty much lost the early morning photography as I am walking Raffi along the foreshore to get him used to the life of the seashore whilst Suzanne walks Ari. Then I am walking Ari and Raffi in the early evening.
Ari and I wandered around the Victor Harbor rubbish dump this evening whist we were out looking for material for the pink gum + Xanthorrhoea book. The dump has gone. The whole space was empty.
That ends my photographic exploration of the dump within a coastal landscape.
I was left with dead foxes on a fence and nothing much else.
So we ended up walking down a bush section of the Heysen trail that ran along the edge of grazing land looking for interesting pink gum + Xanthorrhoea combinations.
We are at Victor Harbor for the Australia Day weekend. Most of the afternoon was spent in the digital suite of Encounter Studio getting the iMac up and running after its hard disc was replaced through Apple’s Seagate call back programme.
The late afternoon poodlewalk along the cliff tops to what we call Dog Beach was a quick one. The rock studies that I took basically picked up from where I’d left off before we went to American River on Kangaroo Island.