Adelaide: early morning

It was my day off from the gym this morning so I went out photographing in the early morning around the Central Market Precinct from about 6.30 am to 8am. It will be about 36 degrees today and tomorrow. By 8am it already was hot and the light was very bright. The city was very quiet between 6.30-7am. People were having their morning coffees and reading newspapers at the cafe’s in Gouger St.

I was interested to see this precinct of the city in the early morning summer light, as I generally only see it in the late afternoon light.

Rowlands,  Adelaide
Rowlands, Adelaide

I basically reworked familiar ground to see the difference that the early morning light made. I was pleasantly surprised. The light highlighted the modernist buildings that are emerging above the low rise nineteenth century ones.

The Adelaide CBD skyline is changing from being that of a small quaint village or just another suburb.

Adelaide architecture

The heat has returned to Adelaide. As the temperatures are going to be in the high 30’s for the rest of the week, so our poodlewalks include carparks and streets in the CBD that deep shadows in the early evening.

AdelaideTAFE
AdelaideTAFE

The carparks give me a ariel perspective on Adelaide’s architecture and I’m finding find a lot of it rather depressing. This TAFE building,for industry, reminds me of a prison—it is actually very similar to the Remand Centre just down the road.

tree abstract

Suzanne, Ari and I visited Michal Kluvanek’s Hindmarsh studio yesterday. He has made a living for 30 years photographing art works and artists as well as doing his own work–landscape and urban. Some of his work was on the walls of the studio, on a table in the studio and in a gallery-type print rack. He is an analogue photographer who has not established a web presence.

tree abstract,  River Torrens
tree abstract, River Torrens

Afterwards, we checked out parts of the Glendi Greek Festival, before going for a walk along the River Torrens down by the Port Rd Park Terrace corner. It was an area that I used to visit regularly to walk and photograph when I had a studio in Bowden. The area has been cleaned up since then.

Central Market precinct

I went for a quick a walk around the Central Market precinct this morning after breakfast. It was overcast, muggy and the light was soft. I had a coffee at The Marquis amongst the lawyers, and glanced through the AFR for possible material to bounce off for my public opinion blog.

I put some medium format film into Photoco to be developed, and then started exploring the central market area itself.

Adelaide Central Market

Would this picture work as a large format shoot I wondered? I was unsure. I’ll keep coming back to it to have a look.

The market is very dark without the artificial lights, and the neon lights in the various stalls makes the light that falls on the produce contrasty and really ugly. I was looking for an area with vegetables and natural light. I had in mind some sort of still life.

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.

urban grunge

This architectural urban decay is locked behind a fence that protects a private carpark for those working in the lawyer precinct. It is difficult to gain access to the car park because the gate is always closed and operated by a card. I was allowed in because Ari did his cute act.

Adelaide
Adelaide

The site is earmarked for development–glass tower office blocks, judging from the advertising. Nothing much is happening, even though this site is in the heart of the CBD in the central market precinct.

remembering a picture

It is hot and muggy in Adelaide at the moment. It is around 40 degrees and it is unpleasant to be outside away from the air conditioning. Ari and I stayed in the shadows in the parklands early yesterday evening and we didn’t walk that far. It was too hot. Rain is forecast to be on the way late Friday afternoon, but I’m sure that, in itself, will not reduce the temperature.

I wanted to use the poodlewalk to make some more studies of the Morton Bay Figs in the parklands. I wanted the late summer light on them and I was thinking about the inside and outside of the photographic frame:

I remembered a picture from a year ago, which I’d seen but never returned to photograph. It was in late summer and when I did return the sun had shifted and the last rays no longer fell on the tree. The time difference was only a matter of a week to ten days. I had made some other pictures then, but I felt that I could more.

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.

small gestures in specific places

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.

monolith, Victor Harbor

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.