Category: digital

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isolation

My exploratory wanderings in the CBD of Adelaide with a small digital camera are currently on hold, due to both the hot summer weather and not having replaced my stolen digital camera. This makes me uneasey in the sense of being disquiet—I should be walking the streets exploring, not stuck in front of a computer screen.

The picture below was snapped on a daily walk without the poodles at the beginning of summer in 2011:

Hyde St, Adelaide

I’m struck by how isolating the new apartments are. Each is contained within itself, so any contact or connecting with others comes digitally: with the mobile phone or email using mobile broadband. In this world of networked mobility people now walk the city streets looking at the pulsating screens of their smart phone, and they are only vaguely aware of what is around them. It appears that the virtual world is more important than the real world.

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give way

Urban renewal in Adelaide grounded to a halt with the global financial crisis in 2008. The money from the banks dried up and the commercial and apartment building boom just collapsed. In the language of the real estate industry the property market–residential and commercial– was subdued. This stasis lasted several years–apart from new car parks being built everywhere.

give way

The urban renewal situation has slowly improved. Most of the buildings currently being built in the CBD are primarily high rise apartments. This building is an exception –it is a specially designed building for the Australian Tax Office.

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Xmas holiday comes to a close

The Xmas holiday at Victor Harbor is now over. We return to Adelaide and the routines of work this afternoon. The two weeks have given me the space and the time to find my photographic stride, to explore some new ideas and to wait for the suitable weather conditions for photography.

sea shells, Kings Beach

We’ve never spent two weeks at a time in Victor Harbor—its always been either 2 days on the weekend or the 4 days over the Easterbreak. Those two weeks gave me time to find new photographic locations, namely roadside vegetation and the rocks and foreshore around from Kings Head.

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walking along a country road

It is too hot to take photos at the moment. It’s extremely bright, with full sun, no clouds, and the temperature is around 40 degrees. It’s summer beach weather for the crowds of holiday makers I guess. I’ve given up walking along the coast on the later afternoon or early evening walk –it’s just too hot.

The picture below was taken whilst the temperatures were a temperate 25 degrees and there was some cloud cover in the morning and afternoon:

Heysen Trail, near Kings Beach

During the high temperatures of the last few days we’ve been walking along the coastal backroads. They are dusty but the remnant bush vegetation provides some sort of shade for us from the heat of the late afternoon sun. I can put up with the dust for some shade.

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walking without a digital camera

I’m not posting many pictures from our poodlewalks since my digital camera was stolen in Melbourne. Although I’ve decided to go without one whilst I continue to just shoot film to see what happens, I do miss not having a digital camera with me.

Without one I don’t have any images from the daily walks, or from the photoshoots that I’ve been doing with the large format cameras. So I am relying on pictures –such as the one below—that have been taken on earlier walks.

lagoon, Hindmarsh River

I was exploring the lagoon near the mouth of the Hindmarsh River in Victor Harbor yesterday. I hadn’t been there for a while, and though it was around 6.30 pm, it was still hot and sunny. I recalled the above image and remembered that the bush was in the shade at this time of the day.So I went looking for the bush as part of the poodlewalk.

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in the moment

We spent this weekend down at Victor Harbor, and the fine, early summer weather meant some long walks with the poodles along the beach that were coupled to me exploring the possibilities at the foot of the granite cliffs for rock abstractions.

cliff top walk, Victor Harbor

I was exploring these possibilities in order to use the 5×4 Linhof. I’m becoming increasingly comfortable with this style of photography and I want to devote more of my time and energy to it.

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without a digital camera

I’m lost without the use of my digital camera. I had initially bought the pro-sumer Sony DSC R1 to enter the world of digital imaging, to see how the digital work flow operated, and to judge the quality and look of the digital image.

Over the next couple of years using the Sony had become habitual, with it primarily being used to study a particular object or scene to see how it looked as a photograph. I’d post some of these images on the web–on Facebook, Flickr or on my blogs—and if the picture looked okay I’d go back to reshootthe object with a medium or large format camera.

Kouko's

The digital camera was my scoping instrument and sketch pad–a pocket sketch pad as it were.

When it was stolen in Melbourne I found myself back to using film and not knowing how things would look as a photograph. I didn’t like the process of taking pictures blind, especially when it came to using the 5×4 Technika in Ballarat before I caught the overnight bus back to Adelaide. I stayed close to what I could remember from my previous trip and which I had filed away as suitable subjects.

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stranded in Melbourne

Things were working out fine in Melbourne.

The Melbourne Silver Mine Inc’s Unsensored11 exhibition had been hung, opened on Friday night at the Collingwood Gallery and opening night was a success. I’d seen the work at the Centre of Contemporary Photography and I was settling into urban photo exploration.

Southern Cross Station

Then my digital camera, wallet, credit cards etc, passport etc were stolen from the back of the gallery on opening night. It was a professional job. I was lucky that I still had the daily tram/train ticket in my pocket–its normally in my bag. So I was able to get back to my sister’s at Safety Beach on the Mornington Peninsula that night.

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studies for a 5×7 shoot

Sunday morning is allocated to large format photography. Today it was the urban variety. I waited for the rain to stop, then tried to get a 5×7 of Faraway House, around 8am but it was too late. To get the shot I had to stand in the middle of the road across from a major building site, but there was too much traffic. It could only be handheld work.

The light was all wrong anyway–the sun had shifted much further to the east than I had realized. So I tossed it in, and drove to the tramway overpass location on South Rd for the Adelaide-Glenelg tram. This would be a goer I thought in terms of the light and no traffic:

Tram Overpass, Glandore, Adelaide

This is an ideal location for a 5×7 shoot as everybody avoids the stairs and takes the lift to the platform to wait for the tram–they were all going to Glenelg this morning. As I walked around and found the ideal location the wind started, and it swirled around the platforms on the steps.

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