Category: flora

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along the seashore

The beaches at the foot of the cliffs west of Victor Harbor are mostly deserted outside of school holidays and public holidays so we can wander along them. When we are on a daily poodlewalk along the beaches around the cliffs west of Victor Harbor I’m usually looking out for interesting objects lying scattered on the beach. These are mostly seaweed, dead birds and shells.

Often I wonder what would these objects look like as a photograph.Sometimes I bring them back to Encounter Studio to do close ups. Other times I just photograph them on the beach and move on:

crab, shell, sand

This particular one was constructed. I’d seen the crab on the walk up the beach in the late afternoon, then on the return, I wondered what it would look like sitting atop a cuttlefish bone.

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Inman River: failure

We are down at Victor Harbor for the long October weekend, and I decided that I needed a break from my rock studies. I needed another little project that I could work on with a large format camera now that I’m aware of what is required. I need something that would allow me to become comfortable using an 8×10 monorail using black and white film, but which didn’t require too much walking with the heavy equipment.

So I’ve been hunting around for a suitable subject. I started exploring the bushland along the Inman River today because it is protected from the coastal winds. But very little in the way of possibilities came of it. It was mostly an exercise in frustration:

waterlilies, Inman River

I went there early this morning on my own and then returned late this afternoon with Suzanne and the poodles. The light was hard to handle and you only have a limited amount of time to take photos. So the scene has to be preselected and the exact time of the day:

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Eyre Peninsula

This image is from the archives that I have just scanned into the Mac Pro desktop computer.It was taken around 2002 on a trip to Venus Bay, which is on the west coast of Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. Agtet must have been 3-4 months old as he still had his puppy coat.

Yanerbie

I can remember the shutter on the newly acquired Rolleiflex SL66 jamming up on the very first shot–I was photographing plants on the shadow side of the sand dunes— and then having to rely on the ever reliable Rolleiflex TLR.

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The Coorong: being humbled

I have spent the last day or so scanning some old medium format negatives that I’d taken with my old Linhof medium format camera–Technika 70. The results have been disappointing.

The 6×9 camera back wasn’t working properly, the colours are all over the place, some of the images are underexposed and out of focus, and Silver Efex Pro will not work on them for some reason.

near Salt Creek

It’s all rather humbling. The mostly landscape pictures of the Coorong and the River Murray’s wetlands looked quite okay on the contact sheets, but unlike the work at Andamooka that was done with a Rolleiflex TLR, they have failed to live up to their promise.

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Andamooka

The picture below is from the archives. It was taken on a trip that Suzanne and I did to Andamooka circa 2001. Agtet was just a pup then and Ari had yet to join the family. We stayed in the shanty mining town for a few days at a friends place. It was a very dusty and hot place from memory.

I used to wander around the area with a Rolleiflex 3.5F TLR in the early morning and in the late afternoon light. Then I’d explore the shanty town with the old Leica during the day. These were the days way before I owned a digital camera, or even knew about them.

Andamooka

The negatives (the 6×6 and 35m) plus the contact sheets have sat in a brief case beside the desk all this time. Now that I have acquired an Epson V700 scanner I can finally do something with them.

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time

One of the themes that I unconsciously explore in my local neighbourhood is urban nature. Not so much the cultivated nature that is the result of gardening by city councils (shade tree plantings, revegetation projects etc) or individual’s gardens but wild nature.

time

Wild nature in the sense of weeds growing up through the concrete, or brick walls, creeper reclaiming walls–the urban nature that no one really notices. Or they want to eradicate it when they do notice.

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boardwalk, Hindmarsh River

The solar photovoltaic electricity system is up and running and I was able to concentrate on doing some photography. This is was the subject that I had in mind for a large format shot, and so I went and checked it out late this afternoon in terms of lighting and composition.

boardwalk, Hindmarsh River

It is a boardwalk along the Hindmarsh River just before it enters the sea at Victor Harbor. So the melaleucas are part of the river’s estuary. I’m standing next to the old railway track. I have room to work in to do either a 5×7 in colour of and an 8×10 in black and white.

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competitions

Whilst Suzanne is having fun in Rome I drove down to Victor Harbor for a couple of days to work on some archived images to submit to some local photographic competitions. I am interested in the credit given at a prof lab for processing my the backlog of my medium format work.

This is where where poodlewalk happened this afternoon. We see it as our backyard to so speak as we are walkalong or around there each morning and evening:

Petrel Cove

There is such a sense of space after being confined in the city.

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rising sea levels

I went back to photograph this scene this afternoon with a medium format camera, only to find that it was nothing like it was yesterday afternoon. All the sand, that had provided a balance to the rock in the picture, had gone. We are talking a half a metre of sand that had been washed away by the tide and several levels of rock had been exposed. I was stunned.

moss+rocks

This only confirms to me this kind of global weirding scenario. As I walked along the cliff tops to the beach I could see the sea was swirling around locations on the foreshore that I often photographed in–they were inaccessible.They were surrounded by water and waves crashing over the top of them.

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