Category: neighbourhood

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a “Kodak moment”

I just couldn’t resist. I was seduced by the light.

Sunday had been overcast, still and cold at Victor Harbor and on the evening walk around Petrel Cove the sun came out briefly. It illuminated the rocks at the base of Rosetta Head just before it sunk behind the hills. So I took a quick snap:

Rosetta Head, Victor Harbor

It is one of those “Kodak moments”–those most intensely personal moments of our lives that needed to be recorded for memory? Those times when you reached for a camera to stop life for a second, to grab a memory. Remember those when film was king and Kodak was dominant?

Analogue photography then became a piece of nostalgia with digital.Nostalgia turned into something old-fashioned. Old-fashioned became unfashionable. The unfashionable has become hip.

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stormy weather

I scanned the remaining 5×4 negatives from the Queenstown, Tasmania trip last night. They look good, given the wet conditions I was working under.

The weather at Victor Harbor this weekend has been stormy with lots of rain and wind from the south west. Ari and I got drenched on both the walks yesterday afternoon and early this morning due to heavy rain squalls.

early morning, near Kings Head

There has been little photography even though I carried the Sony NEX-7 with me. The weather was too wild to return to my favourite location at the base of the Newland Clifs on the Heysen Trail to explore the photographic possibilities with the 5×4 Linhof.

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at Victor Harbor

I’ve come down to Encounter Studio at Victor Harbor this weekend to scan the 5×4 negatives from the Tasmanian shoot. Suzanne is staying in Adelaide this weekend.

Rain squalls were sweeping across Adelaide as we left, but the weather at Victor Harbor was sunny and a cool wind was blowing. Ari and I went on a poodlewalk along the cliff tops and the rocky foreshore. The tide was very high, there was more erosion of the dunes on the beach and the seals were hunting along the coast. There was the odd jogger but no southern right whales to be seen. The afternoon walk was very enjoyable after several weeks in the city suffering from the flu and hanging out in car parks.

looking towards King Beach

I got drenched from a rogue wave whilst I was taking photos of the rocks on the shore. I was so busy trying to figure out why the bloody Sony NEX-7 switches to video so easily that I didn’t see it coming.

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looking for carpark rooftops

Our afternoon walk yesterday and today was spent checking out the open access car parks around Adelaide to see what views they offered of the city for the Adelaide book that I am working on.

Gilbert St, Adelaide

I’m using the rooftop locations of these car parks to work from to obtain views of the city skyline. I’m running out of locations and I need to find more. The locations I explored on Saturday, such as The Frome Street car park, weren’t that interesting in terms of the view they offered of the CBD.

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at Newland Heads: digital photography

We spent the long weekend just passed (Queens birthday?) down at Victor Harbor. I used the time on the afternoon poodlewalks to refine the focusing on the Sony NEX-7 and to explore its image quality. What I wanted to know was whether could I get most of the pictures I was taking in focus and, secondly, whether the larger sensor could handle landscape detail as good as 35mm film.

rock pool, Newland Cliffs

I mostly succeeded with the focusing issue–all were in focus. And I was pretty happy with the image quality of this picture. The 24.3 Megapixel sensor produces images that are an improvement on those produced by the 10 Megapixel sensor of the old Sony DSC R1 that I used to use.

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poodlewalks in Adelaide’s CBD

I’ve decided to change my work flow for colour film photography.The old work flow wasn’t really working for me.

Instead of building up six to nine months work and then having it processed at a professional laboratory in one hit, I’ve decided to have the 35mm and 6×6 film processed on the day of the shoot. I can drop it off to Photoco’s one hour minilab in the Central Market on the way back from the shoot. The sheet film can be processed at the professional lab—Atkins Technicolour.

My reason is that it is cheaper, more convenient and I can quickly assess what I’m doing in terms of feedback. I did a dummy run on Friday to see how things would turn out:

carwash, Adelaide

I’m happy with the result. It works for me:

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in West Terrace Cemetery

The carpets in the studio apartment in the city were being cleaned this morning so Ari and I went down to West Terrace Cemetery to fill in a couple of hours. I wanted to use the time to walk around the cemetery to sort out the focusing problems I’ve been experiencing with the Sony NEX-7 rather than express a general sense of foreboding within a utilitarian culture.

Up to now the focusing with my M mount Leica lens has been very hit and miss. I needed to figure out why and to find a more reliable way of working. 75% of pictures out of focus is not acceptable.

gravestone, West Terrace Cemetery

I’m finding manual focusing with the peak focusing technology slow work compared to using a Leica rangefinder. I’m also coming to realize that the Sony NEX-7 is not a point and shoot or a scoping camera for large format photography. It stands on its own.

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a new digital camera: Sony NEX-7

After I finally found out how to get the Sony NEX-7 to take photos with a 35mm Leica M mount lens—-with some help from friends at Photoco in the Adelaide Central Market —-I wandered around with Ari taking some pictures.

The camera is a good fit in my hand, is easily portable and feels like a relatively affordable rangefinder-like camera with a built-in viewfinder.

tables, Adelaide Central Market

Unfortunately for me 75% of them were out of focus, even though I used focus peaking. I found it to be fairly inconsistent or hit and miss. It was as if I got just an approximation and I needed some further refinement.

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walking amongst the dead

With Agtet gone Ari is listless and lonely. The poodlewalks have lost their sparkle and their joie de vivre. He just walks behind me. Last week he walked me down to the West Terrace Cemetery and then just stood amongst the gravestones looking for Agtet.

West Terrace Cemetery, Adelaide

Atget, Ari and myself had often gone to the West Terrace Cemetery together in the late afternoon for our poodlewalks. It was one of our favourite walking places. I could take photos and the poodles could hunt for rats.

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roadside vegetation

During the Xmas break at Victor Harbor I did some photographic studies of the road side vegetation on the back roads. These arose from searching for a place with some shade to walk the dogs away from the intense heat in the late afternoon. I just started looking at the shapes of the vegetation whilst walking down the dusty unsealed road. I was seeking new content–souping up my creativity or design juices.

roadside vegetation

The country side is basically all farmland—cattle and sheep– and what remained of the native vegetation was a strip along side the road. Even then a lot of that roadside vegetation had been cleared , and what remains is gradually degenerating.