Poodlewalks is a blog and associated galleries that have emerged from the snaps or pictures that I have been making since early 2011, whilst I’ve been on the daily walks with our standard poodles. Initially it was Ari and Agtet, currently it is Maleko and Kayla. When we lived in Adelaide’s CBD prior to 2015 Suzanne did the morning walk (5am) and I did the afternoon one.
There is a routine to these afternoon walks in terms of walking the same routes. Whilst on them I started to photograph the humble things that other people may not look at; things that I would not normally see if I was walking on my own. The idea is to publish some of this vernacular photography that I have been taking whilst walking with the dogs each afternoon; or on a photowalk when we are away from Victor Harbor.
The general idea is that the poodlewalks becomes a digital visual diary or journal that shows what I am seeing and visually exploring whilst walking with the poodles. This process is an attempt to understand my work by observing and representing the very humble everyday surroundings of my everyday life. Though the aesthetic is that of a snapshot it does not pretend to be photojournalism, that is a document that says this is the way things are.
Though it is kind of intimate, like a diary, it is constructed as a digital publication and so is a part of the conversational world that is Web 2.O. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut with digital photography – always photographing the same subjects, from the same angles, in the same mood, in the same style etc. Hence the idea of a digital a scrapbook with images and text. It is not filled with with images that others had taken–which is one version of visual scrap book—because Flickr provides that source of visual inspiration.
It is lo-fi because that is the style of photography that has come from using a Sony prosumer point and shoot digital camera to make these pictures. The aesthetic is that of a snapshot without the usual off-centre framing. The editing that I do in Lightroom or Silver Efex Pro is minimal, and it is mostly corrective in nature, or to enhance the mood of the moment. I dodge and burn mainly to control how I want people to look at my photograph; to give it a sense of depth, and to bring the picture to life as an image.
This post processing has is akin to jotting down an idea, thought, picture that can be worked on with my film cameras and is then connected to text. The image -text relationship is crucial to poodlewalks.
What unfolds from this process is that I’m increasingly using the digital camera as a way to make a photographic sketch, both to see how the subject looks photographed, and whether it is suitable to reshoot with a large format camera. So the blog becomes part of my workflow as a photographer based at Encounter Studio in Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor, since 2015
Thoughtfactory is my current main website