digital Archives - Page 9 of 34

August 29, 2015

walking Creswick

I was in Ballarat to see the 2015 Ballarat International Foto Biennale and for the opening of the Time exhibition, which was in the basement of the Lost Ones Gallery in Camp Street. I had a couple of photos in the exhibition.

Whilst in Ballarat I stayed in a cottage in Creswick. Even though none of the poodles were with me on this phototrip, I did the equivalent of an early morning poodlewalk around the town. I initially wandered along a small creek behind the town centre where people were walking their dogs:

Then I walked around the town looking at the old architecture in the soft, early morning light. Many of the public buildings are heritage.
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August 19, 2015

on the road to Ballarat

I was due to go on a photo trip that was to be tacked onto driving to Ballarat for the Atkins Artist’s ‘Time’ exhibition at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale 2015 early this Thursday morning. But the thermometer in the Mazda 626 stopped working yesterday thereby causing the engine to overheat, just as I started driving to Adelaide to take the film from the Canberra road trip to Atkins Photo Lab to be processed.

The car is now in the local garage waiting to be checked out, the road trip has been postponed and, at this stage. It looks as if I will be driving the Subaru to Ballarat on Friday. Suzanne can then pick up the Mazda when it is ready, as she will have finished the Victor Harbor camp section of her 3 year Heysen Trail walk.

With some luck I will be able to take photos on the way back to Adelaide. It was to be a similar scenario to the Canberra trip—a photo trip centred around large format photography focused on silos, architecture around Creswick in Victoria and old garages in small country towns.

July 25, 2015

Australian abstractions exhibition

The Australian Abstractions exhibition at the Light Gallery in Adelaide opens at 3pm Sunday 25th July, and all are welcome to attend. Avril Thomas, the portrait painter and owner of the Magpie Springs gallery, will open the exhibition.

Most of the work in the exhibition has emerged out of poodle walk in that these are the representation of the forms and textures that I’m seeing on the walks and in the different lighting conditions.

The abstractions are linked to the 2012 photographic abstractions exhibition that was curated by the Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne. Many of the images in this exhibition can be seen here.

All of my black and white images in Australian Abstractions are abstractions from nature. Unlike the abstractions of landscape from the air by Richard Woldendorp, my abstractions of both the bark of gum trees and the coastal granite cliffs are done with my feet firmly on the ground.It offers another way of thinking about ‘landscape’.
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July 16, 2015

in Melbourne: thinking about Flickr

It is argued that in contrast to the Kodak culture, where a small group of persons (friends and family) share oral stories around images with others, the digital new culture of the image on Flickr, the photo-sharing site, is one where a large-scaled conversation is shared with people that participants don’t know in real life.

That large-scaled conversation shared with people used to be the case with Flickr, but it is less so know. Flickr’s key strengths are seen as photo sharing and storage. Around 2005/2006 it was the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. There was the social sharing which used to be quite active in a community sense because Flickr was a place where people who took photography more seriously went.

No longer. The impact of the mobile phone has meant that people tick the ‘like’ button for an particular image, rather than comment or engage in a large scale conversation on other people’s photos. I used to engage in the conversations but with Yahoo’s recent (2013) revamp/redesign of Flickr I more or less drop an image into my photo stream and run. The new style Flickr represents a “sea change” in its purpose. Continue reading “in Melbourne: thinking about Flickr”

July 10, 2015

struggling with photography

I plug along trying to scope photos of the landscape whilst on our poodlewalks without making much progress in finding material that I would go back and re-photograph with a large format camera. I take snaps on the walk with a digital camera and that’s about it. Sometimes I don’t even bother taking my digital camera with me.

I find a situation where light, form and landscape converge at a particular location in space and time, but the result is banal. Uninteresting. Dull. Boring. Empty, pretty pictures that don’t do anything much at all.

So where do I go from here? How do you bring the history of this landscape into this picture making? Power or politics? How do you move beyond pretty pictures–the pastoral? It can be done in words.

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July 8, 2015

day trips to Adelaide

I have been travelling up to Adelaide once a week for the day since my return from Melbourne. The trips are centred around going to see the printer at the Atkins Photo Lab to prepare the prints for my abstraction exhibition at The Light Gallery during the SALA Festival in August.

As I have been taking Maleko with me on the day trips that means lots of short walks throughout the day in Adelaide.These are mostly in and around Veale Gardens as I can park the car easily for an hour. Often I do the afternoon walk in Adelaide before I drive back to Victor Harbor. The last time we did this the afternoon walk was in the western parklands and in and around the West Terrace Cemetery.

It has been six months since we did a poodle walk in the Cemetery and little has changed there. What does change is more smashed gravestones and objects placed on the gravestones. This teddy had been placed on one of the gravestones in the Catholic section of the cemetery. Continue reading “day trips to Adelaide”

June 19, 2015

winter has arrived

A few days after returning from walking the Larapinta Trail Suzanne is off to a 4 day Heysen Trail camp at Cape Jervis Station. I am looking after the three poodles, and working at Encounter Studio on my abstraction exhibition for the SALA Festival.

We–myself and the poodles—walked along the railway line at Hayborough early this morning. It was stormy and wet. It had been raining overnight. Winter has definitely arrived in South Australia:

At the moment the early morning is the best part of the day, since the rest of the day is overcast, with icy winds and intermittent showers that sweep across the coast. It’s not good photography weather along the coast.
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June 15, 2015

picking up the threads

Suzanne returned home last Friday from her 9 day walk on the Larapinta Trail plus some sightseeing at Kings Canyon, then Uluru and Kata Tjuta. She has a a few days at home in Victor Harbor, then she is off to a 4 day Heysen Trail camp at Deep Creek Conservation Park over the weekend.

I’m starting to pick up the threads of my photography which dropped away whilst Suzanne was in the Northern Territory. I have done little scoping of photography shoots during that period:

Most of my effort at the moment is devoted to preparing for the abstraction exhibition at the Light Gallery during the SALA Festival in August, which includes a SALA portfolio.
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June 10, 2015

a small excursion

A recent afternoon trip to Magpie Springs and Kuitpo Forest gave me spaced to take a few photos even though I had 3 dogs with me. Unfortunately the pictures were just quick snaps:

Even though I had the baby Linhof in the boot of the car it was impossible to use a view camera on a tripod with the three dogs racing all over the place. I had to keep an eye on them and not on the ground glass with my head under a dark cloth. Continue reading “a small excursion”

May 27, 2015

living with constraints

Suzanne leaves Victor Harbor today for 2 weeks or so walk to the Larapinta Trail in the western Macdonnell Ranges, and then go to explore other areas east and west of Alice Springs, such as Kings Canyon. I’ve just dropped Suzanne off at the Seaford railway station so that she can catch the train to Adelaide to stay overnight with her friend Sally, before they both catch the Qantas flight to Alice Springs tomorrow morning.

My task is to look after the 3 dogs at Victor Harbor. Our walks in the morning and evening will be in limited areas in order to keep Kayla and Maleko crazy chase and play games contained and controlled. So my photography is going to very limited, unless I can find a way to do it without having the dogs in tow. I cannot do large format tripod based photography with 3 dogs racing around the place.

The best that I can do is some handheld snaps on the walk. The above picture is an example. I was driving Ari and Kayla to the Victor Harbor beach for a dawn walk when I saw this view as I started to drive along Franklin Parade towards the Victor Harbor township. I stopped the car, took a snap, jumped back in the car, and continued driving to the township. The trouble is, not every morning is like this one.
Continue reading “living with constraints”