A lo fi visual diary
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.
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.
I’ve came down to Victor Harbor for a couple of days before I fly over to Melbourne to do some 8 x 10 black and white location photography. I haven’t done any for a while mainly because I’ve had no way to scan the negatives.
My Epson V700 can only scan 8×10 as a negative, and up to now I’ve had no way to invert it into a positive. So I’ve ordered Photoshop from B+H in New York, as this professional software enables me to invert the negative into a positive.
It was overcast and still today so I struggled down to the foreshore with the 8×10 gear (monorail camera in the right hand, the heavy duty Profi Linhof tripod with its centre post and heavy duty pan tilt head on my left shoulder, and the computer bag with the darkslides + darkcloth, lightmeter etc on my right shoulder). I was accompanied by the two standard poodles.
My aim was to take two photos of a particular rock. One photo was in portrait mode and the other in landscape mode. That was it. I struggled back to the car, unloaded my gear, and then took the poodles for a walk.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I did an experiment this morning, now that Wednesday has become a gym free day.
I took my Leica M4-P film camera and the digital Sony DSC R1 with me when I went to the IMVS Pathology Centre at the Royal Adelaide Hospital to have a blood test. I wanted to see which one I used instinctively as a working photographer.
I started out using the Leica with a 35mm lens (a Summicron F2-ASPH) as I walked through the dense shopping precinct that is Rundle Mall. It was just as I would have done in my pre-digital days. But I actually ended up using the Sony a lot more. I did so without thinking about it. It was instinctive in a photographic sense.
The film Leica with its expensive lens was basically put away in favour of the pro-sumer digital Sony because the latter was more flexible, I could get more shots with the variable Zeiss lens, and I felt a lot more more comfortable experimenting with digital than film. Film costs money. Towards the end–on the way back through Rundle Mall after having the blood test—I only used the Lecia if I thought that I had a worthwhile image.
So this confirms what I said in my earlier post about using 35mm cameras. The shift to digital at this format is a worthwhile investment. That means the film camera is used in order to get that film look. Or the Leica ‘look’.
As I suspected most of the photography done whilst I was in Melbourne and Ballarat over the weekend were snaps taken whilst travelling to and from Ballarat. Unfortunately I had no time for a photographic walk in either city.
This snap was taken from a car whilst travelling on Kings Way to the Nepean Highway.
Though I’ve always been seduced by Melbourne’s skyline, I’ve rarely had the time to explore it in any systematic fashion. It is difficult to do from the street level with a handheld digital camera.
I’m travelling between Safety Beach on the Mornington Peninsula, Melbourne to Ballarat on Sunday (24th) and Monday (25th) to participate in workshops on photographic book publishing and portfolio reviews.So my photography is limited to what I can take whilst I am on the road.
This was taken Sunday morning at Southern Cross Station whilst I was waiting to catch the train to Ballarat for the workshop by Blurb on DIY photo books. I am thinking of doing one and wanted a bit of help.
I haven’t taken a photo all this week. The camera has sat on the table. I haven’t even looked at it. I have been busy preparing prints for two exhibition and prints for some portfolio reviews for the Ballarat International Photo Biennale. That means sitting in front of a computer screen for long stretches of time.
Lucky for me it has been raining heavily most of the week. So I have selected a picture of shopwindow in my neighbourhood snapped on an earlier poodlewalk just before I went down to Victor Harbor. The weather was similar—rain with sunshine.
I’m down at Victor Harbor for several days. Family from Tasmania are staying and it is difficult to find the time to do photography. I did manage to do a 5×4 photograph of this image late yesterday afternoon with the over-engineered Linhof Technika IV and this rock study with the Sony point and shoot digitial earlier in the afternoon when I was walking with the dogs:
It’s a question of being selfish to make time for photography. Otherwise it doesn’t get done. The dogs were walked early in the afternoon so that I had the 4-5 pm time to myself. Then I picked up Suzanne from the bus and we went home and cooked dinner for the family.
After much indecision I’ve decided to do a little project in the Wirranendi section of the Adelaide parklands. What tipped the scales in favour was the wetlands as this could become the focus of the project rather than the public sculpture.
The urban forest just wasn’t enough on its own, even though some of the work is fascinating. But it requires the use of a large format camera to get the subtle detail.