organic abstract

The weather is warming up again. It was a gentle meandering walk amongst the eucalypts in the parklands looking at the tree trunks this evening. The trunks of the eucalypts are to loose their bark and to change colour.I started looking for possible abstracts:

Adelaidetreetrunk-2

I was interested to see if I could take abstractions with the Sony NEX-7 with a Leica Summicron 35m asph lens. This functions as a 50mm lens on the NEX-7, due to the crop factor of the smaller than full frame sensor and it doesn’t allow you to get very close to the object.

tree lines

On a poodlewalk last night I noticed that the Adelaide City Council staff had cut down some of the dead elm trees in the parklands near Veale Gardens. The trees had died a couple of years ago from lack of water caused by the ten year long drought.

The sawn branches and trunks were still lying on the ground last night. I presumed that the logs and branches will taken away today, so I photographed them early this morning between 6.30 and 7.30 am.

tree lines
tree lines

Normally I am at the gym between 6 and 7am each morning, but I have decided to take Wednesday’s off so that I can take some early morning photos in Adelaide. It was overcast so I didn’t have to contend with the sunlight.

summer has arrived

Summer has arrived in Adelaide. The Morton Bay Figs in the Adelaide Parklands are starting to drop their leaves from heat stress. Many of them died during the long drought and those that survived have only just recovered their canopy.

leaves, Morton Bay Fig

Our poodlewalks have changed now that the temperatures are in the mid to high thirties. We walk after 6pm and we remain in the shade. We avoid the sun as much as possible. THe experience of the drought indicated that the future of many cities and towns, including Perth and Adelaide, was, and is, threatened through lack of drinking water.

searching

Suzanne is currently in Brisbane for a conference whilst Ari and I are down at Victor Habor. We return to Adelaide today.

The days are still coolish, overcast, and with south easterly winds. The tide has been very low at this time and so we can venture further out on the reef.The evening walks now happen between 6pm and 8pm because, with daylight saving, that is when the afternoon light along the coast softens.

The afternoon walks have been spent looking for material for the gallery and, in particular, this rock form which I’d snapped on a walk the last time we were at Victor Harbor. It looked suitable for the Victor Harbor book, and I wanted to see whether it was possible to reshoot it with a large format camera.

white rock form

It was a small shape and I couldn’t remember where it was on the rock foreshore between Petrel Cove and Kings Beach. It took two evening walks and 4 hours to find it. I finally found it last night, around 7.30 pm, just as the sun was disappearing behind the hill.

cloud study

On our early morning along the beach at Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor at 6am there was a hot and strong north wind, heavy cloud cover, and spots of rain. It was around 22-28 degrees. Ari walked in the sea to keep cool.

clouds, Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor

A cool change was on the way. It looked to be a storm coming in from the south west. Maybe even thunderstorms. Despite the wind gusts of 50 kph people were launching boats to go fishing on the southern ocean. Crazy.

snap your city

I’ve been looking at my archives for pictures of the Adelaide CBD that would be suitable for the Adelaide City Council’s photography competition entitled Snap your city. It has to be a quality 8 x 12 inch print in a landscape format. Most of my urban work is in a square format or a vertical one.

Topham Mall, Adelaide

I have little urban work in the horizontal format. There are the odd 5×7 image. I have yet to scan some of these. I’ll scan some more on the weekend and see what I’ve got. I’ve scanned them because I have trouble with the colour of the picture using Lightroom, and so I’ve been converting them to black and white.

Cannon St

After returning to Adelaide from painting the weekender at Victor Harbor Ari and I walked the streets of the CBD around the Central Market Precinct. It was the late afternoon walk and I was looking for some ideas to continue working on the Adelaide book.

Cannon St, abstract

Daylight saving had just started and there is now light in the city until after 7pm. Summer is just around the corner. The urban light has changed and become more hard edged. I stay in the shadows more.

rock pools

Before we returned to to Adelaide from Victor Harbor Ari and I walked amongst the rocks just east of the road to Kings Beach. I was wanting to do more sea abstracts. I recalled that there was an area of the coast with a small stream from the hills flowing through the rock to the sea and that the rock pools had some strange colours.

The pools looked weird and strange. Were they were conducive to being photographed in the late afternoon?

pool abstract

How would the rock pools photograph as abstractions from nature? What kind of abstractions would emerge? I’d been glancing through Lyle Rexer’s The Edge of Vision:The Rise of Abstraction in Photography–it’s the first book in English to document and contextualize this canon.

Though some of the pictures are formal rather than abstract, and are concerned withe the medium of photograpahy I’ve been impressed by the diversity of the work.

salt abstract

The weather has been very stormy at Victor Harbor these last couple of days–cold, wet and very windy. I didn’t bother to do much photography on the morning and evening walks as it was mostly raining on these occasions.

salt abstract, Victor Harbor

The pictures that I did take before the wild weather came in have been deleted. They were mostly sea abstracts that I took for the book I’m working on and they were terrible.

beyond Kings Head

We are down at Victor Harbor for a couple of days–the last few days of Suzanne’s holidays. We return to Adelaide on Sunday.The days down here are being spent painting the living room of the weekender and gardening.

The autumn weather is still, overcast and temperate–it’s good coastal landscape photography weather. So yesterday afternoon and early this morning I walked along the Heysen Trail past Kings Head on to the rocky outcrop foot of the Newland cliffs. This is where I’d been photographing before the Queenstown trip.

Victor Harbor, near Kings Head, digital, Olympus, Newland cliffs

Though my Sony NEX-7 has finally arrived, I cannot get it to work with a Leica 35mm lens. I’m finding the user interface to be very complicated indeed. So I took the 5×4 Linhof this morning plus Suzanne’s Olympus XZ-1 digital camera for further scoping.