photography Archives - Poodle Walks

September 13, 2021September 13, 2021

People

Since my last post on poodlewalks my images for the multimedia Rock, Stone, Earth exhibition at the Onkaparinga Art Centre in late September have been printed and framed. They just need to be delivered to the gallery next week. My days have been mostly spent sitting in front of computer working on this review for Light Paths, as well as grinding my way through the texts for the Bowden Archives and Other Marginalia project.

The weather is becoming warmer in September, with temperatures in the mid-20’s on some days. More people are starting to venture out in the morning.

It is not just those regulars who are out every morning rain, wind or cold. Other people are walking along the coastal trails, hanging out on the beaches, playing with their dogs and kids, or fishing and surfing.

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February 16, 2021March 4, 2021

photographing: large format

We are at the mid-February point of summer and the weather has been more of the same: cool and overcast with just the odd hot day with a north easterly wind. The hot weather started this week but it is forecasted to last for only several days this week — not the normal two weeks. Maybe that will come in March.

I have stepped up the training programme for the camel trek by walking Rosetta Head twice a week and climbing up steeper approach and been working on a website for the Bowden Archives and Other Marginalia. I have also taken advantage of the cooler weather to photograph roadside vegetation in the early morning with the 5×7 Cambo monorail. I have been inspired by Mark Darragh’s large format photos on Flickr.

Cambo5x7 monorail — am, Baum Rd, Waitpinga,

At the moment I ‘m running my film stock down before I make the major annual purchase through B+H in New York. I have only half a box of the 5×7 Kodak Portra 160 ASA left.

It’s been a matter of selecting the location, knowing the time the light shines on the trees, setting the camera up, then waiting for the light to shine through the trees at the required time. Often the moving cloud cover means that there is no sunlight. So the large format equipment is packed away in the Forester and I continue the poodlewalk with Kayla.

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November 19, 2017

upgrading poodlewalks

I have decided to upgrade the poodlewalks blog from the free WordPress blog platform that I have been using for so long to more of a website platform with its own blog and galleries. The galleries will bring the offshoots or spinoffs from poodlewalks that are currently on various standalone Posthaven blogs–abstractions, the trees series, and the Littoral Zone. The blog will continue the traditional poodlewalks format with the website titled known as poodlewalks.

My reason is that a lot of my daily photography —outside specific projects like Mallee Routes—centres around poodlewalks. I am walking twice a day –in the morning and afternoon–with each of the walks around an hour’s duration. If the light is right, then the walks are 1.5-2 hours in duration. Often I go back and reshoot for the Fleurieuscape book and portfolio. The new format will bring all the work around poodlewalks together.

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June 3, 2017February 2, 2018

daily routines + photography

Suzanne has left Cuba and is now staying in Oaxaca in Mexico for 12 days or so before she and Lariane return to Australia.

In the meantime the household chugs along with its daily routines in the balmy autumn weather, with its still, sunny days.We are usually up before sunrise walking along the back country roads:

With the walk over I have time to take some photos with the Linhof film cameras as the sun starts peeping through the trees and lightens up bits of the roadside vegetation. The images have been scoped on earlier walks and the time when the sun lightens up the trees duly noted. So it is just a matter of setting things up and waiting.

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February 20, 2014

at Magpie Springs

We drove up to Magpie Springs winery this afternoon to scope some photos for their photographic competition. It is situated in the Adealide hills just past the township Willunga on the road to Meadows.

The poodle walk consisted in us slowly walking around the 80 acre property seeing what was there.

There is a lot to look at on the property–ponds, water lilies, trees, old machinery, buildings, landscape, vines— and these would change with the morning and afternoon light. Several visits would be needed to become familiar with the property and the different lighting conditions. This makes for an interesting competition.

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November 25, 2012

small gestures in specific places

Ari and I have come down to Victor Harbor to escape the Adelaide heat and to scan a 5×7 negative for a print that has been selected for the Adelaide City Council’s Snap Your City competition. It is refreshingly cool and pleasant on the coast. Summer has arrived in South Australia.

This seascape work is topographical in that represents the surface of a landscape and a place–topographical in the sense of place (topos) and modes of perception (tropos). These are small gestures in a specific place.

Gestures in the way of a map that is not ‘mimetic’ – ie., will not straightforwardly represent the actual space, but one that reflects or expresses the distortions and omissions of the individual’s personal experience of living in this place now being affected by climate change.

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September 30, 2012

re-tracing our steps

Last week, on one of our back country road walks looking for possible pictures for the conceptual photography book on pink gums and Xanthorrthoea, Ari and I stumbled across this scene:

roadside vege, Mt Hill Rd, Victor Harbor

It looked good on the computer screen–a candidate for the book— and so we went back on the following afternoon to reshoot it with a film camera. But I couldn’t find it, even though I searched everywhere. As I’d deleted most of the pictures on the SONY NEX-7 I couldn’t retrace my steps from the sequence of pictures. I returned the following morning and started from the other direction of the walk to no avail.

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September 23, 2012

regionalism?

Ari and I went walking along a back country road west of Victor Harbor yesterday afternoon looking for more material for the conceptual photography book I didn’t find much in the way of the pink gum and Xanthorrhoea combination, but it was an enjoyable walk along Wilson Hill Rd. I found myself wondering how difficult it would be like to take pictures with a digital field view camera. Would it need to be tethered to a computer?

This part of the Fleurieu Peninsula region is dairy country and there is very little native bush left. This region been extensively cleared.

Thinking in terms of regionalism—the expression of a type of local identity—recalls the divisions between figuration versus non-figuration, and regionalism versus internationalism in the early 1970s where there was an identification of foreignness with non-figuration that was set against an emerging post-colonial regional cultural identity (Antipodeanism) that did not seek to create a national style.

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July 11, 2012

Melbourne: Gardners Creek

I’m off to Melbourne early Thursday morning on a phototrip.

This will include being a flaneur in the CBD and a large format photoshoot with Stuart Murdoch around the Glenferrie Bridge that crosses Gardiner’s Creek. I had already scoped it—here and here with the Olympus XZ-1 on my waay back from Tasmania in May.

The topographical project around the bridges and the South Eastern freeway is a working towards an exhibition for the Ballart International Foto Biennale 2013.

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July 6, 2012

a long way to go

As I have been slowly transferring the text and photos from the working draft of my Adelaide book on Tumblr to the Posterous micropublishing software I’ve realized that the image bank or archive of my photos of Adelaide’s CBD is rather thin. I actually don’t have that many pictures to work from.

So Ari and I have been walking the CBD on our poodlewalks so that I can use my digital camera (a Sony NEX-7) to build up the archive:

I have had limited success. It has been frustrating as I realized that most of the work has been been up high on carpark rooftops in the CBD looking at the texture of the built environment with some on shop windows and the West Terrace Cemetery. It has dawned on me that I have a long way to go with the Adelaide book.

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