landscape Archives - Page 5 of 13

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 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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January 26, 2015

at Second Valley

We took a break from our shift to Victor Harbor on Sunday afternoon. We’d had enough of packing up at Sturt St and clearing out the years of accumulated junk at Victor Harbor. So we went for a quick trip to Second Valley on the western Fleurieu Peninsula.

This was the location for the Fleurieu Four Seasons Photography Landscape competition in 2014. You can view the images online, if you register and vote for the People’s Choice Award.

We meet up with Heather Petty at Leonards Mill, and then we walked along the cliffs above the beach at Second Valley with the poodles for an hour or so. The beach was packed with people.

Suzanne, Heather and Maleko continued walking up a step hill whilst Ari and I waited for them on a stoney/rocky beach. Ari’s arthritis means that he can no longer climb hills.
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November 25, 2014

in Canberra

We stayed at Banks in Canberra during the opening of the Edgelands exhibition at Manning Clark House.

Banks is on the eastern edge of this car-based, suburban city and is in the Tuggeranong district/valley. Banks is on the edge of Canberra’s outer suburban fringe. Our poodle walks in the morning and evening were along firebreak trails on both sides of the valley. We found the walks to be thoroughly enjoyable and attractive.

But you need a car to get around Canberra as the public transport to the city is woeful. It’s a long drive to school, work, shops, doctors, or leisure centres. Since the dominant mode of transport is by car, there is congestion in and around the CBD in spite of all the transport planning to ensure the flowing movement of the car.

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November 24, 2014

at Hay, NSW

On our way to and from Canberra to attend the opening of my Edgelands exhibition at Manning Clark House we stayed at Hay, which is about halfway between Adelaide and Canberra. The poodle walks in both the morning and evening were along the river trail on the banks of the Murrumbidge River.

The Murrumbidgee is the second largest river in the Murray–Darling Basin and this 1,600 km long river is ranked as one of the two least ecologically healthy of 23 tributary rivers in the Basin. It looked dead to me. Yet the Basin Plan will do absolutely nothing to restore the environment of the upper Murrumbidgee.

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September 14, 2014

limited walks

The nature of our poodlewalks has changed with the arrival of Maleko, a 8 week old blue standard poodle pup, last Friday. We cannot walk far, and we more or less hang around on the beach at Encounter Bay, in the morning.

Or rather, Suzanne walks Ari in the morning whilst I hang out on the beach with Maleko, so that he becomes at ease with, and confident in, this coastal environment.

The photography is circumscribed until Maleko can walk a greater distance. Or we carry him some of the way, which is what we did yesterday afternoon when we all went to hang out at Petrel Cove:

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August 19, 2014

at Kuitpo Forest

On the way back to Victor Harbor from Mt Barker this afternoon Ari and I had a walk around the Kuitpo Forest on the Brookman Rd in-between Meadows and Willunga Hill. I’d noticed a strand of native eucalyptus forest in small areas within the designated forest of pinus radiata on my way to Mt Barker early this morning:

I’ve tended to drive past this pine forests as I see them as dead zones for native flora and fauna. No vegetation grows underneath them. This eucalypt strand caught my eye and I looked more closely as I drive past for a way to enter into the small area of native eucalyptus. I saw Chookarloo, the main camping area at Kuitpo. This is what we walked around it on our way back

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August 3, 2014

at Cape Jervis

Ari and I went to Cape Jervis yesterday afternoon on a photoshoot for the Fleurieu Four Seasons Prize for Landscape Photography. Cape Jervis is where you catch the ferry to Kangaroo Island in South Australia.

The recent storm had given way to sunshine, light cloud and gentle winds in Victor Harbor. So we took our chance, hoping that the weather on the western Fleurieu Peninsula would be similar to that in Victor Harbor. It was, but there was little cloud.

We—Ari, Suxzanne and myself— had gone there a week before, but we’d arrived too late to walk out to the point. Hence the need for me to return.

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April 25, 2014

hanging out at Kings Head

We are at Victor Harbor for the Easter to Anzac Day break. As it’s also school holidays we have been trying to avoid the crowds by going to Kings Beach and Kings Head for our poodle walks.

These locations have had fewer people than Petrel Cove, Dog Beach or the mouth of the Hindmarsh River. We have had to be careful walking around the rocks in this area because it has been a high tide in the late afternoon, and the waves have been very big because of the full moon.

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April 1, 2014

Rosetta Head

The poodles and I are at Victor Harbor for a couple of days. The weather has returned to summer conditions: it is dry, hot and strong northerly winds. People were out walking before dawn this morning to escape the heat.People have been swimming and surfing at Petrel Cove since Sunday.

It’s autumn but it really feels like summer with families hanging out on the beach in the late afternoon. It was actually too hot to have breakfast on the balcony this morning.

Raffi burned off his energy by chasing rabbits and kangaroos whilst Ari and I scrambled around Rosetta Head. I took the odd snap but I was thinking about how to take a photo of the Petrel Cove landscape through the car window for the April ‘windows’ theme in the 1picaday2014 project.

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