urban grunge

This architectural urban decay is locked behind a fence that protects a private carpark for those working in the lawyer precinct. It is difficult to gain access to the car park because the gate is always closed and operated by a card. I was allowed in because Ari did his cute act.

Adelaide
Adelaide

The site is earmarked for development–glass tower office blocks, judging from the advertising. Nothing much is happening, even though this site is in the heart of the CBD in the central market precinct.

in the studio

My time since Xmas Day has been spent cleaning up, and reorganizing, in Encounter Studio and doing some photography around Victor Harbor early in the morning.The cleanup has also involved me starting to go through the archive of the black and negatives from the days when I used to have a darkroom and I processed my own film. I’m beginning to scan them.

I stumbled across this negative of Bowden in a box of old black and white 5×7 contact sheets. I would have tray developed the film. It was a pleasant surprise to see that the negative was in good condition and was properly exposed. I would have had other 8×10 negatives but I cannot locate them.

The picture below of the boatsheds at Second Valley, near Yankalilla in the Fleurieu Peninsula is in keeping with history, memories and archive as these no longer exist. They were pulled down around 2009.

boatsheds, Second Valley, Fleurieu Peninsula

They were a favourite subject of local photographers and much photographed:—I even think that there was some kind of photographic wake or meet just before they were pulled down.There is an in memoriam Flickr group.

Andamooka

The picture below is from the archives. It was taken on a trip that Suzanne and I did to Andamooka circa 2001. Agtet was just a pup then and Ari had yet to join the family. We stayed in the shanty mining town for a few days at a friends place. It was a very dusty and hot place from memory.

I used to wander around the area with a Rolleiflex 3.5F TLR in the early morning and in the late afternoon light. Then I’d explore the shanty town with the old Leica during the day. These were the days way before I owned a digital camera, or even knew about them.

Andamooka

The negatives (the 6×6 and 35m) plus the contact sheets have sat in a brief case beside the desk all this time. Now that I have acquired an Epson V700 scanner I can finally do something with them.

at Kings Beach

Dusk on Saturday was the ideal time to take photos with the 5×7 Cambo monorail of the coastline of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. It was very still, very warm, and there were amazing colours. It was magic time. For some reason I was exploring the rocks around Kings Beach with the poodles with my point and shoot Sony. I returned home around 7pm–just when I should have been using the large format camera.

The weather on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula changed the next morning:–the strong south westerly winds made impossible to photograph along the coast with a large format camera.

rocks, Kings Beach

As I mentioned in my earlier post on Kangaroo Island my shift back to large format was a result of the poor quality of the pictures I achieved with digital on the Kaangaroo Island shoot.

Over the next couple of years I shot only in raw, shifted to Apple computers, acquired Lightroom, started using medium format cameras more extensively–I bought a Rolleiflex 6006 system. I then picked up my old large format cameras rather than spend $15,000 to $30,000 on a medium format digital camera.