poodleadmin, Author at Poodle Walks

October 3, 2015

staying or going?

Suzanne and I are currently in the process deciding whether we will stay in Victor Harbor or move back into the south-east corner of the city of Adelaide. The latter is the more capital expensive option (an architecturally designed extension to a cottage) whilst living on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula coast at Victor Harbor means that we are much more isolated. We are currently swinging between staying and going at the moment. There are advantages and disadvantages to both options.

One disadvantage for me in living at Victor Harbor is the limited opportunities that it offers for urban photography–ie., the flâneur, the casual wanderer, observer and reporter of street-life in the modern city. This kind of work now requires either day trips to Adelaide, major trips to Melbourne or road trips. Consequently, my daily photographs made on the morning and afternoon poodlewalks are nature orientated. I do feel constrained by this.

Hence the idea of quickly constructing the image as a still life whilst on the walks, since it is not really possible to bring the seaweed and rocks back to the studio to photograph.
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September 28, 2015

walking Keen Road

The weekend just passed was very springlike with warm temperatures, sunshine and blue skies. Suzanne wanted take us for a poodlewalk along Keen Rd last night, but we left it a bit late to start our and so we didn’t get all that far along the road. It runs over a hill between two valleys–Back Valley and Inman Valley. Unlike some of the country roads in the area Keen Rd has roadside vegetation.

Keen Rd is a section of the Heysen Trail in Waitpinga that she had walked with her group a month or so ago. Most of the Heyesen Trail in the Fleurieu Peninsula region is through conservation parks or farmland and these are off-limits for walking the poodles. We are basically left with country roads to walk along and when we do, we cross our fingers and hope that there there is little traffic in the late afternoon.

Unlike some of the country roads in the area Keen Rd has roadside vegetation. There was little car traffic last night apart from a truck carrying bales of hay from one paddock to the next. It left trails of dust that hung in the air for some time because the air was still— the coastal wind had died.
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September 20, 2015

after the storms

Spring means turbulent weather on the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula rain, cold, sun, gusty wind, clouds. There can be 4 seasons in one day, or a couple of days of big storms followed hot weather where the day temperature changes by 10-15 degrees i.e., going from 15 degrees to 29, then back to 15 again.

The winter storms have stripped the beaches west of Rosetta Head of sand and it is not clear that the sand will return for the summer holiday season.

The above carcass was washed up on what we call Dog Beach (it’s proper name is Debbs Beach, but unlike Kings Beach it doesn’t have its own Facebook page). I found it hard to identify what the carcass is. It’s definitely not a dolphin or a seal. My guess is that it is a sea lion.

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September 13, 2015

Spring

Winter has passed and spring has arrived in South Australia.

It is becoming warmer and the light is changing very quickly: sunrise is an hour earlier, sunset is an hour latter and the light is more intense and brighter early in the morning and in the late afternoon. The change in the seasons was very sudden.

The warmer weather means that there are more people on the coast, such as joggers, fishermen, dog walkers, walkers, surfies, day trippers, children swimming and playing on the beaches etc, which in turn makes our poodlewalks more complicated. People say that winter on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula coast is to be avoided, as they find it too cold.I enjoy the winter on the coast.
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September 4, 2015

revisiting Port Adelaide

After sitting the final day of my Australian Abstractions exhibition at the Light Gallery I drove down to Port Adelaide to see some of the local SALA exhibitions before they finished. They cafe’s were closed, so Ari and I wandered around the place. It had been a while since we’d done that.

I took a few snaps in, and around, some of my favourite haunts:

Photographing the Port was going to be a central project for me several years ago, but it kinda faded away for some reason. It was where I started my large format work in black and white in the 1980s when I had a studio at Bowden, and I returned to when I picked up my large format photography again 30 years latter. But the momentum died as I slowly lost interest.
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August 29, 2015

walking Creswick

I was in Ballarat to see the 2015 Ballarat International Foto Biennale and for the opening of the Time exhibition, which was in the basement of the Lost Ones Gallery in Camp Street. I had a couple of photos in the exhibition.

Whilst in Ballarat I stayed in a cottage in Creswick. Even though none of the poodles were with me on this phototrip, I did the equivalent of an early morning poodlewalk around the town. I initially wandered along a small creek behind the town centre where people were walking their dogs:

Then I walked around the town looking at the old architecture in the soft, early morning light. Many of the public buildings are heritage.
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August 19, 2015

on the road to Ballarat

I was due to go on a photo trip that was to be tacked onto driving to Ballarat for the Atkins Artist’s ‘Time’ exhibition at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale 2015 early this Thursday morning. But the thermometer in the Mazda 626 stopped working yesterday thereby causing the engine to overheat, just as I started driving to Adelaide to take the film from the Canberra road trip to Atkins Photo Lab to be processed.

The car is now in the local garage waiting to be checked out, the road trip has been postponed and, at this stage. It looks as if I will be driving the Subaru to Ballarat on Friday. Suzanne can then pick up the Mazda when it is ready, as she will have finished the Victor Harbor camp section of her 3 year Heysen Trail walk.

With some luck I will be able to take photos on the way back to Adelaide. It was to be a similar scenario to the Canberra trip—a photo trip centred around large format photography focused on silos, architecture around Creswick in Victoria and old garages in small country towns.

August 15, 2015

road trips

Now that we are living Victor Harbor we have had to own two cars in order to do things. That means I have a photography car–a Mazda 606– which I can use for my photographic road trips.

This picture of Southern Cross Station in Melbourne was made on an earlier holiday trip with Suzanne and the poodles. We were staying with my sister at Safety Beach on the Mornington Peninsula, and I had gone into the city to do some photography.

This trip gave me the idea of returning to the photo road trip once we had got the two cars that would allow me to be able to do it. Now we have these I can get away. I recently did a trial run to Canberra via Hay last week and I was able to shoot some river gum roots for the Edgeland project that I’d seen whilst walking the poodles on an earlier trip to Canberra.
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August 2, 2015

off to Canberra

The Australian Abstractions exhibition at The Light Gallery has opened, the artist talk has been given, and work on the abstraction book with Moon Arrow Press has started. The artist talk addressed why the black and white part of the exhibition is a stand-in for the absent modernist black and white works of the 1950s and 1960s. It also addressed the claim by photographic historians that Australian photography does not have a tradition of abstractions and that Australian photographers are not interested in abstraction.

The preparatory work for my image in the ‘Time’ exhibition at the Lost Ones Gallery for the Ballarat International Foto Biennale 2015 will be done early this week. Then I’m off on a photo trip to Canberra on Thursday to continue working on the Edgelands project.

Meanwhile we continue to walk around the coast if the winter weather permits. It has been very stormy during July, and we have often walked around the town centre or the Heysen Trail to seek protection from the strong off shore winds. Continue reading “off to Canberra”

July 25, 2015

Australian abstractions exhibition

The Australian Abstractions exhibition at the Light Gallery in Adelaide opens at 3pm Sunday 25th July, and all are welcome to attend. Avril Thomas, the portrait painter and owner of the Magpie Springs gallery, will open the exhibition.

Most of the work in the exhibition has emerged out of poodle walk in that these are the representation of the forms and textures that I’m seeing on the walks and in the different lighting conditions.

The abstractions are linked to the 2012 photographic abstractions exhibition that was curated by the Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne. Many of the images in this exhibition can be seen here.

All of my black and white images in Australian Abstractions are abstractions from nature. Unlike the abstractions of landscape from the air by Richard Woldendorp, my abstractions of both the bark of gum trees and the coastal granite cliffs are done with my feet firmly on the ground.It offers another way of thinking about ‘landscape’.
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