Category: digital

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street photography

I don’t do that much street photography, even though I live in the heart of this lawyer precinct in Adelaide. I’ve never had the confidence doing this genre with 35m film, let alone using medium format. It is pretty much hit and miss for me and film is too expensive for this kind of work.

Bean Bar, Adelaide CBD

Digital makes it so much easier to experiment and I can check the results on the spot whilst I wait for the next person to move into the urban space I’ve selected. Its convenient. However, the fundamental underpinning is very simple—film and its processing cost money, digital does not.

With the latter you can correct mistakes right away, experiment, try new approaches or techniques and have fun—and do so at no additional cost. It’s a no brainer.

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a public holiday

I spent the afternoon returning to my commonplaces along the foreshore west of Petrel Cove, near Victor Harbor. Only this time I started working it as a photographer, rather than just taking snaps whilst working through it on a poodlewalk.

creeper rocks, sea

I was looking for possibilities that would work for large format—were accessible for using a heavy duty tripod etc. It was a public holiday and there were too many people and dogs around to use big camera gear and keep an eye on the poodles.

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the little places

I find that I often return to the little local places to take my photos, rather than seek to go to the exotic or distant places, such as Shanghai in China; or Zhouzhuang, Jiangsu Province, China; or anywhere in China This is especially the case when I am based in Victor Harbor, as it feels like nowhere, or the edge of the world.

near Petrel Cove

This would be an example. I’ve gone past this rock many times on poodlewalks but I’ve never really looked at it seriously as a photos. I’ve noted it but maybe taken the odd snap, but I’ve never thought—gee that’s a suitable subject for an 8×10. But is it possible using a heavy duty tripod? I’d have to check.

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urban-scapes

I’ve been hunting around the Adelaide CBD looking for some high up locations to take large format urbanscapes. These are few and far between, as the roofs of most buildings in the CBD are inaccessible to the public. The best options so far are the car parks, but these have now been grilled to prevent people from jumping off them.

Franklin St, Adelaide

This is one possibility. It’s easily accessible, is an older style car park with the top roof uncovered and open, and the perspective it offers on Franklin Street is suitable for the Cambo 5×7 view camera. It is the best location that I have found so far.

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Bam, Pow, Zapp

Our responses to adverts in the city is often a blase one. In moving around the city we rarely distinguish individual advertisements from those of other campaigns and rarely `read’ the advertisement in a classic sense. It’s a defensive mode.

Pulteney Grammar

This is in spite or advertising companies producing urban mappings of the trajectories, speeds, social groups, and experiences in ways that are instrumentally oriented towards selling or promoting those urban `texts’ they write as efficient consumer-targeting material.

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a mummy daddy visual language

Photography in the common visual language of the snap shop would be more than an aesthetics of the fragment.This aesthetic has dominated the poetic since the romantics; including the fragment as transmogrified by modernism, high and low, and more recently retooled in the neoclassical form of the citation—ironic and/or decorative—throughout which is called “postmodernism.

Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor

People ofter refer to the common visual language of the snap shop as the mummy daddy language. What is attractive about the visual language of the snapshot is that it is an anti-hierarchical means of organizing knowledge and of recognizing intersections and engagements between seemingly disparate ideas and things.

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banksia

As its been raining off and on in Adelaide this past week my photography has consisted of taking a few quick snaps of the banksia in a pot in the townhouses’ corner balcony that overlooks Sturt St. My photographic time has been spent in front of the computer working on archival photos that I’ve scanned.

banksia

The walks during the week have been done between the showers as much as possible. Today is the first sign that the rain depression may be lifting. We have both sun and rain alternating today.

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living in a commodity culture

We are surrounded by the images of our commodity culture whether we are watching tv, walking the streets of the city or working on our computers. The visual signs are everywhere.

Our experience is that we live under the assumption that there is no other way of knowing and being outside the phantasmagoriac realm of representation of commodity culture.

mannequin, Rundle Mall, Adelaide

So I photograph these visual forms. We often sleepwalk through their world, barely conscious of the way they speak to our desires or shape our sensory experience. ‘Sleepwalk’ because I often feel that we are living a dream of what it is to be modern in a world of progress (to a better life or future); a dream woven for us by the culture industry of capitalism.

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about monsters

I couldn’t resist taking a photo. The street art appeared on the wall in Wright Street over the weekend. When I saw it I thought of the well-known phrase attributed to Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters.”

I have little idea why I thought that, then and there. It popped into my head.

Be the Bigger Man

Maybe it is because so much street art depicts the monsters. They seem to come from the unconscious. Anyhow, I went back home, grabbed the camera and took a snap, as it was getting dark.

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industrialscapes

I’ve become tired of just taking photos, building a decent archive of images and then posting them on Flickr and my photoblog to share with others. It’s become something of a cul-de -sac. I’ve run out of enthusiasm and becoming jaded.

I have to do something more substantive with the photos—to construct them into a project and publish them in some way. The next step is to begin to work on a project for publication–a DIY book—from the Port Adelaide archive. So I’ve returned to the Port Adelaide arcchive, and starting looking over the work I was doing last year.

Port River expressway

So I am picking up where I’ve left off last spring:–returning to the digital studies I made of the Port River Expressway that were done for a reshoot with a large format camera. The above image is one that I had planned to do. This is another.

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