A lo fi visual diary
Developers have had numerous attempts since 2006 to develop this building at 379 King William St south. The area is known as the Law Courts precinct and the Royal Caledonian Society building had been bad state of disrepair for a decade or more. Only the facade now remains today.
The most recent proposed development now looks something like this. It is in a strip which has typically got 2-3 storey buildings even though King William St is the city’s major boulevard
It has been far too hot, bright and sunny to do any photography or extensive poodlewalks in the CBD of Adelaide. We’ve stayed indoors during the day, thankful for the air-conditioning. In the later afternoon we walk in the shade in the Adelaide parklands and try to avoid the afternoon sun as much as possible. High summer in Adelaide is living with rolling heat waves.
This architectural picture of the Catherine Helen Spence Building at the University of South Australia is from an afternoon walk taken before the current heatwave began:
Adelaide’s modernist commercial architecture is second rate. They look cliched and dull containers for office workers.The best that can be said for them is that they have been build economically.It is only with postmodernism that the building become interesting as buildings. Most of the buildings in the city west campus of the University of South Australia were designed by John Wardle Architects.
Whilst Suzanne was walking the dogs along the cliff tops this morning I did a quick photoshoot with the 8×10 Cambo of the pier or causeway to Granite Island near Victor Harbor. As there was cloud cover with little wind it was an opportunity not to be missed.
I had an old and very basic Kodak Easyshare point and shoot digital camera with me to take a few digital snaps. It is 5 megapixels has a tendency to fire the flash at any opportunity and runs on a couple of AA batteries. A digital version of Kodak’s old box brownie?
I went photographing yesterday afternoon with Stuart Murdoch. The rain and heavy cloud cover cleared whilst I was travelling on the Frankston train into the CBD, and the bright sunshine put paid to the 5×4 car park rooftops scenario I had planned.
So we decided to explore around North Melbourne and Sunshine. We initially explored the areas along Railway Canal or the Moonee Ponds Creek in North Melbourne that I’d started to explore on an earlier trip.
Luckily for me Stuart knew the area quite well as he had photographed in and around there about a decade ago. There is a bike path under the City Link overpass that provides walking access to the area under the Bolt Bridge over pass. The area has everything—nature, concrete architecture, industry, rubbish–and it is fertile ground for an Australian topographics style of photography.
I’ve been photo-walking the streets of Adelaide these last couple of days. Ostensibly it was to hunt down and photograph the various pasteups down by Peter Drews for his street art project entitled ‘Adelaide’s Forgotten Outlaws! I wanted to do it before the temperatures reached the high 30’s–which they are today.
Then I realized that I was really using this urban wandering to basically look for new locations for the Adelaide book I’m slowly putting together.
I was looking for locations from car parks that would give me a skyline perspective for large format photography. I wasn’t very successful in my last exploration as I was looking for car parks with open roofs, but these are few and far between in Adelaide. This time I was happy enough to check out the car parks with open grills to see what kind of perspective they offered.
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 plan to return to Melbourne for several days in October (21st-24th) with Suzanne who is attending a conference. In looking over the digital work I did on the last trip I’ve decided to take the 5×4 Linhof Technika to shoot the urban skylines in Melbourne around Chinatown from the rooftop of the car parks.
I’ve also decided to use the time in Melbourne to make a quick trip up to Ballarat in the train:
Some of the studies that I did with the digital camera when I was in Ballarat are suitable for reshooting with a large format camera.
I continued my search for suitable high locations to use the 5×7 Cambo in the Adelaide CBD today. This was mostly spent checking out the highest floor of the car parks in my neighbourhood for their perspective on the city.
I also wanted to see whether I could get a lens through the grilled barriers around the car parks that have been erected to prevent people from jumping off the roof.
Most of the perspectives that I came across were far too scenic—the snaps looked like picture post cards. I have no interest in pretty or pleasant representations of this provincial city as I am not doing a portrait of Adelaide; a tourist image; or a celebration of Adelaide as a liveable place.
I realize that the changes that are slowly taking in the part of the inner city of Adelaide in which I live are an example of the new urbanism. The changes are slow, but there are signs of a reaction to the spreading out of cities, a mixture of work and home emerging, a mixture of classes and a sense of decreasing the dependence on the car.
New Urbanist town planners, developers, architects, and designers try to reduce traffic, eliminate suburban sprawl, and create inner city neighborhoods that resemble an old European village with homes and businesses clustered together.
The Blue Tiers is in the north east of Tasmania and we passed through it on our way to St.Helens.
The early settlers mined tin in much of the George River catchment area between about 1880 and 1930. The clearfelling of native forests by Forestry Tasmania continues supported by the forestry union, the CFMEU and the Tasmanian government, which provides every incentive to destroy the old growth forest.
Within it is a remnant of an ancient Myrtle Beech (Nothofagus cunninghamii) temperate rain forest:
This was in an area of regenerated rain forest full of ferns and mosses.