Category: architecture

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…it rained and rained in Melbourne

I was in Melbourne for four days for the photo shoot and it rained three out of the four days. Sunday was the only fine day. On Friday the temperature was 17 degrees, Sunday it was 33 degrees and on Monday it was back down to 18 degrees. On Monday it only stopped raining as I was leaving in the bus at 8.30pm.

I found the 5×4 gear (pack and tripod) heavy to lug around the CBD. I was mainly shooting large format between the showers, or before the rain started, and the bad weather meant that I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked. I pretty much walked to a pre-selected location, set up the Linhof, take the pictures, then move onto the next one pre-selected location.

taxi hut, King's Way, Melbourne, digital, Sony

I did a 5×4 version of this on Monday, before the wind came up and the rains swept in. It rained the rest of the day–just like Friday, the day I arrived. A large part of the time on Friday and Monday was spent on urban explorations with handheld (digital and film) cameras.

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Melbourne photo shoot

I’m preparing to return to Melbourne for four days for a photo shoot in large format urban photography.

I’ll be with Suzanne but I will squeeze in some photography whilst she is conferencing. I’m taking the 5×4 Linhof Technika and tripod to reshoot some of the skylines that I took on the earlier trip.

Melbourne, rooftop, skyline, digital, Sony
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I’ll be travelling overnight to Melbourne by Greyhound bus. It’s years since I’ve travelled on a bus–I normally fly– but the bus is the most practical way to get the large format photography gear over to Melbourne. It’s excess baggage on the plane and that is very expensive these days. So I’m basically accompanying the camera gear on the bus. I arrive in Melbourne at 6am.

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8 x 10 photography: scouting and scoping

It is extremely windy on the south coast this weekend. It rained on Saturday morning and then a south westerly has being blowing hard. It is gale force strength along the clifftops. Though it is sunny,the windy conditions make it impossible to do any large format photography. I had planned to do an architectural shoot on Sunday morning.

This morning, whilst Suzanne was walking the poodles, I took the digital camera and went on a scouting and scoping trip for future work with an 8×10. There are two possibilities: this and this:

Franklin Parade

I’d been eyeing this building ever since they’d started building it a few months ago.It’s big and expensive, and it is turning out to be one of the better architectural examples of modern Victor Harbor. So I went and made a number of photographic studies of it to see what it would look like as a photograph on the computer screen.

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8 x 10 shoot

It was overcast with little wind at Victor Harbor early this morning. It looks as if a cool change is on the way with rain forecast.

So I was able to take the Cambo 8×10 out to take some black and white pictures of the local seaside architecture in my neighbourhood. It was something that I’d been planning to do for ages.

seaside architecture, Victor Harbor

I have become interested in the old architecture of this seaside town in South Australia for heritage reasons and because they are a graceful form of regional architecture. The seaside residencies along the foreshore are rapidly being pulled down to make way for the McMansion reworking of the modernist style. So I’m documenting them before they are pulled down to make way for the new.

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photography + surveillance

When I was in Melbourne I used to board the train at Frankston and travel daily up the city to do my photography. Since it I took around an hour I used to take photos through the windows. I took the photo below whilst the train was at Frankston station. It was just before it was due to leave for Flinders Street station, stopping at all stations.

Frankston

It is a pretty ordinary photo of a banal shopping strip in Melbourne’s suburbia. Within seconds I was surrounded by 3 Victorian police wanting to know what I was doing. Taking photos in public is now a suspicious activity even when there is no obvious security buildings close by. I was placed in the position of having to defend what I was doing.

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returning to Ballarat

I plan to return to Melbourne for several days in October (21st-24th) with Suzanne who is attending a conference. In looking over the digital work I did on the last trip I’ve decided to take the 5×4 Linhof Technika to shoot the urban skylines in Melbourne around Chinatown from the rooftop of the car parks.

I’ve also decided to use the time in Melbourne to make a quick trip up to Ballarat in the train:

University of Ballarat

Some of the studies that I did with the digital camera when I was in Ballarat are suitable for reshooting with a large format camera.

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Melbourne’s rooftops

I’ve always found it hard to get under the surface of Melbourne when I’m there photographing. I’m more like a tourist exploring the alleyways, the street art, the beach huts along the Mornington Peninsula, or the shop windows–along with everybody else. I was getting nowhere.

Melbourne is being redeveloped at high speed–as if there is no tomorrow. This time I was more focused—I wanted to explore the old and new architecture before the old 19th century disappeared. It just didn’t happen on the first couple of days because I was on the street when I needed to be up higher.

from Curtin House

However, Andrew Wurster kindly took me on a photowalk on Wednesday afternoon in and around Little Burke Street and Chinatown on Wednesday afternoon. Andrew runs the fascinating Urban Photo Mag group on Flickr, and he has an intimate photographic knowledge of Melbourne’s CBD.

We decided to check out the urban views from the various rooftops of the old carparks before going on to Curtin House to have a drink at the rooftop bar in the late afternoon light.

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Ballarat

I enjoyed my couple of days in Ballarat. It is a very compact city and it is easy to get around on foot. I managed to do some photo walks early in the morning and late in the afternoon on both the Saturday and Sunday.

I found it to be a very visual city, a treat for large format architectural style work.

railway shed, Ballarat

Of course, I had no large format equipment with me–I was travelling light with three handheld cameras. Many of the images that were taken were little sketches to show the possibilities.

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preparing for Melbourne

As I am due to return to Ballarat and Melbourne at the end of this week, I’ve come down to Victor Harbor for break to allow the poodles to get into hunting mode and to look at the street style and architectural photos that I took when I was there couple of weeks ago.

I don’t have that many images on the computer’s hard disc, as I only took a few, and most of the ones that I did take were quickly eliminated. That is digital photography: edit, edit, edit.

Lydiard St Nth Ballarat

After spending the weekend in Ballarat for the International Foto Biennale I will stay in Melbourne for several days to take photos in the central business district. I plan to concentrate on skyline photos, as most of the photos that I took through the train windows didn’t really work.

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AAMI

How do you order the chaotic flow of the city? How do you arrange the different elements in the picture plane so that relate to one another in some coherent fashion?

I avoid “street photography”–that is, representing the everyday flow of the city — because I cannot satisfactorily resolve the above problems. I started working by sitting in a tram and taking shots but I found that very limited.

Sturt St, 5.30pm

The next step was to stand in front of a building and wait for someone to walk past. That didn’t work that well for me as I wanted to cram more urban stuff into the picture plane. The city is full of flowing stuff–eg., ever changing and moving events and situations.

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