About

The Poodlewalks  website (a blog and associated galleries) 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, when we lived in Adelaide’s CBD prior to 2015   it was Ari and Agtet, and  Suzanne did the morning walk (5am) and I did the afternoon one. The Walking Adelaide website emerged from this  walking in the city of Adelaide.

After moving to Victor Harbor on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in 2015 the poodles were  Maleko and Kayla after Ari died,  then Maleko and Maya when Kayla died.

There is a routine to these afternoon walks in terms of walking the same routes and photographing 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 initial idea was to publish some of this vernacular  photography  that I have been making whilst walking with the dogs each afternoon and afternoon;  or on a photowalk when we are away from Victor Harbor.

Halls Creek Rd, Waitpinga

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 it is kind of intimate, like a diary, poodlewalks is constructed as a digital publication and so it  is a digital  scrapbook with images and text. The image -text relationship is crucial to the poodlewalks project.  It is both lo-fi because that is the style of photography that has come from using a Sony  digital camera to make the pictures and  the aesthetic is that of a snapshot without the  usual off-centre framing.

The editing that I do in Lightroom is minimal, and it is mostly corrective in nature, or to enhance the mood of the moment. 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.

What  initially  unfolded from this process is an increasing use of  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.  Side blogs such as the Littoral Zone and Rhizomes where I worked out various ideas  then emerged. The final step was to start thinking of the poodlewalks project in terms of a walking art project.

Thoughtfactory is my  main website