flora Archives - Page 4 of 11

December 15, 2015

beach erosion and coastal management

The early morning poodlewalk today was along the beach between the mouth of the Inman River and Police Point near the Granite Island causeway in Encounter Bay. This is the beach east of Kent Reserve and I call it the Esplanade beach in the absence of any official name.

I wanted to have a closer look at the erosion along this section of the beach and to see how the Victor Harbor Council is planning to protect this part of the coastline from the sea eroding the foreshore and the sand dunes. I knew that sections of the foreshore along the Franklin Parade seawall is under threat from sea level rise and storm surges and that it requires upgrading.

This erosion has been going on for some years now, along with the sand depletion abutting Franklin Parade. The Council’s coastal management response to the increase in the intensity of storm damage and erosion since the 1990’s is to replenish the sand on the Esplanade beach.
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November 27, 2015

off to New Zealand

This will be the last poodlewalks for a week or so as we are off to Wellington, New Zealand tomorrow for a few days. We managed to obtain some dirt cheap promotional air tickets, and we decided to use them to drive north to explore the Tongariro National Park —and, hopefully, to walk the Tongariro Alpine Crossing.

A friend–Heather Petty-— is staying at our Encounter Bay house and looking after Kayla and Ari for a week whilst Maleko is staying at the house of a dog minder in Victor Harbor. That enables Suzanne and myself to get away together, which is a change from the separate trips we have done recently.

Although I grew up in Christchurch NZ, and worked in Wellington as an economist, I haven’t been to the Tongariro National Park nor the North Island Volcanic Plateau. I did travel though the plateau by train to Auckland once. It was at night so I didn’t see much.

So I’m not sure what to expect photographic wise whilst walking the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, as many of the images that I’ve seen are from the air. From what I can see from the pictures on the internet most of the walk is on raw volcanic terrain with no vegetation.
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November 12, 2015

Xanthorrhoea

I returned to an old country road that I used to walk along in winter yesterday evening with Maleko and Ari. I was tempted because the late afternoon light was soft due to the cloud cover, and I hoped that the various grass seeds along the roadside vegetation the side of the road would be manageable with Maleko racing around. I was wondering how much of the roadside vegetation had changed during the spring.

We normally walk on the beach this time of the year because of the grass seeds. The previous night’s walk along Hall Creek Rd–to see if things would be okay— was a disaster grass seed wise.

The land is drying, the temperatures are warmer than usual (starting to be in the early 30s) and the dust is forming on the roadside vegetation. Southern Australia looks to be in the grip of an El Niño that has been established in the Pacific for the last six months and it is not expected that El Nino will break down until after the start of 2016. That means below-average rainfall across eastern Australia in winter and spring, and also warmer-than-normal daytime temperatures over the southern half of the country.
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August 2, 2015

off to Canberra

The Australian Abstractions exhibition at The Light Gallery has opened, the artist talk has been given, and work on the abstraction book with Moon Arrow Press has started. The artist talk addressed why the black and white part of the exhibition is a stand-in for the absent modernist black and white works of the 1950s and 1960s. It also addressed the claim by photographic historians that Australian photography does not have a tradition of abstractions and that Australian photographers are not interested in abstraction.

The preparatory work for my image in the ‘Time’ exhibition at the Lost Ones Gallery for the Ballarat International Foto Biennale 2015 will be done early this week. Then I’m off on a photo trip to Canberra on Thursday to continue working on the Edgelands project.

Meanwhile we continue to walk around the coast if the winter weather permits. It has been very stormy during July, and we have often walked around the town centre or the Heysen Trail to seek protection from the strong off shore winds. Continue reading “off to Canberra”

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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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 19, 2015

taking it easy

During the recent week of rain and wind we mostly walked around the Victor Harbor township in the morning and along back country roads in the afternoon. I’d badly damaged my back when walking around Wellington and I had great difficulty in walking, due to the pain.

I needed easy walking terrain whilst my back was slowly beginning to heal. So no stairs or steps and no climbing over rocks on the foreshore.

I couldn’t walk for that long so I just explored the afternoon light on the roadside vegetation. Maybe I could use my limited mobility to uncover some photographic possibilities amongst a landscape of pasture and scrubland left after the clearing during the white settlement.Maybe I could reconnect with this body of work.
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May 14, 2015

a fading autumn

Winter is fast closing in. The clear, still, sunny autumn mornings are fast becoming a memory.

We have had a week or so of strong winds, storms, on and off showers throughout the day, lots of cloud cover and the occasional sunny period. So we have increasingly avoided the southern beaches in our morning and evening walks in order to seek shelter from the incessant wind.

The poodles love the bush for it is full of fresh animal smells, but I find it extremely difficult to photograph the chaotic messiness of the bush or woodlands whilst we are walking through it. It is almost impossible to try and impose strict visual order upon this subject matter since the clear visual patterns are not really there.

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May 9, 2015

2015 Magpie Springs photo competition

The last poodlewalk before I left for a photo trip to Wellington, New Zealand, was to Magpie Springs to take some photos for their 2015 photography competition. I had already scoped the area I was interested in and Ari and Kayla hung around and waited for me.

Once the negatives had been developed and scanned and I was looking at them on the computer screen it was clear that some of the 5×4 pictures did not work including one of the above. It was also too similar to the picture that I’d entered in the 2014 competition.
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April 24, 2015

contained walks

Suzanne and I have started looking for ways in which one person can walk the three poodles together. It is a question of avoiding the beach where Kayla and Maleko go into their crazy chasing games, and looking for contained areas that are full of smells so they forget about their mad play. This often becomes destructive and is beyond the control of one person.

We have found one–a back country road near Encounter Studio which has very little traffic. Halls Creek Rd is an area where the poodles can walk freely off lead:

Halls Creek Rd is bounded by fences and, as it has a number of kangaroo crossings, the poodles spend their time checking things out. Continue reading “contained walks”