A lo fi visual diary
Our holiday at Victor Harbor started today with Suzanne and Ari walking around Petrel Cove and Rosetta Head whilst I did an early morning walk in the township with a camera. I was waiting for the Farmers Market to open at 7.30am so that I could buy some fresh vegetables and fruit.
This style of beachside house–from the 1940s or earlier?— will soon be history. It will eventually be pulled down to make way for a beachside style McMansion that will probably be rented out.
My 8×10 black and white negatives arrived today from Sydney, just before I was to leave Adelaide for Victor Harbor for the weekend. Several negatives have light leaks (damaged dark slides) or are fogged (dunno why) but most look okay. I’ll scan them tomorrow.
It was very still and muggy along the coast around Kings Head which is where we went for our evening walk. The rain had passed, the sticky flies were everywhere, and there was no cooling wind amongst the rocks. But the tide was low, lower than I’d ever seen it. So I was able to get amongst rocks that would normally be surrounded by surging water:
Ari and I were quite distressed by the heat so we returned to Kings Beach where we were able to cool off by paddling in the sea. Low tide means that I can take the 5×4 Linhof and the heavy duty tripod to this spot over the weekend.
Ari and I have come down to Victor Harbor to escape the Adelaide heat and to scan a 5×7 negative for a print that has been selected for the Adelaide City Council’s Snap Your City competition. It is refreshingly cool and pleasant on the coast. Summer has arrived in South Australia.
This seascape work is topographical in that represents the surface of a landscape and a place–topographical in the sense of place (topos) and modes of perception (tropos). These are small gestures in a specific place.
Gestures in the way of a map that is not ‘mimetic’ – ie., will not straightforwardly represent the actual space, but one that reflects or expresses the distortions and omissions of the individual’s personal experience of living in this place now being affected by climate change.
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.
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.
On Tuesday I made a quick visit to Victor Harbor to install a new modem for Encounter Studio.
Ari and I managed to do an evening walk along the coastline west of Petrel Cove and east of Kings Beach; one that involved scrambling amongst the granite rocks on the foreshore and walking along a bit of a goat track on the cliff face that Ari had found. I was looking for a location at low tide to do some sea abstractions.
I’d seen this rusty gas bottle a year or more earlier and I noticed that the rust had become more intense. I was going to walk by because the digital photo I took then was pretty ordinary and bland.
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.
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.
I’ve recovered enough from my illness to start photographing again using more than a small hand held digital camera. I feel that I’ve lost most of this year and I’ve a deep sense of being wasted. There was so much that could have been done (especially with large format) and wasn’t. The momentum has been lost. It’s like starting all over again.
This was a picture of roadside vegetation I took just before things disintegrated around me:
It’s the road to the old Victor Harbor rubbish dump and one that the poodles and I would walk along if it was too windy along the coast. I kinda liked the view towards the southern ocean through the fields as we walked down the road through farmland towards Rosetta Head.
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.
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.
Southerly storms have been hitting the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula since Thursday night. The south westerly winds have been very strong whilst the showers of the last day have been frequent and intense. So it is a matter of trying to walk between the showers and staying away from the cliff tops.
We had one such moment yesterday on the late afternoon walk:
We strolled around the Victor Harbor rubbish dump trying to avoid all the mud, and keeping an a eye on the clouds rolling in. We only had 20 minutes or so between the showers. So there wasn’t much chance to experiment with a digital camera.
Ari and I came down to Victor Harbor today so that QuikFix Computers could install new digital backup technology for Encounter Studio. I’d been putting it off for ages. Silly me.
In the late afternoon Ari and I walked along Jagger Rd that runs parallel to the coastline.
I’ve photographed this tree along the roadside a number of times with different cameras from different perspectives and lighting conditions. I’ve never really taken a picture that I find satisfactory. I find tree studies are hard. You can get obsessional.