Category: phototrip

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Gormanston landscape

The rains have come and gone in Queenstown. Today we are back to the bright sunshine with a bit of cloud cover. Yesterday was passing showers and misty conditions. The showers meant that I stayed close to the car when photographing so that I could sit them out.

In the morning I wandered around Gormanston. There are lots of ‘For Sale” signs–for blocks and houses— but there are few buyers. This is surprising, for Gormanston is just down the road from Lake Burbury. Why aren’t the fishermen buying the old houses for their fishing shacks?

Dreams die hard in this old mining village:

Gormanston, Tasmania
Tasmania, Gormanston, house, abandoned, digital, Olympus, phototrip

The brick walls were being built around the old tin wall. These were mostly completed and then everything stopped before the roof was put on. That’s what happens to old mining towns. They become ghosts towns.

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Gormanston cemetery

Gormanston is an old mining town near Queenstown in Tasmania that has pretty much died. There are only a few people living there now. There are more abandoned and derelict houses than lived in ones.

Gormaston Cemetery

The cemetery is on a side of a hill and is unmarked. There is just a low grade gravel road off the Lyell Highwav as you head towards Lake Burbury. What is fascinating about the cemetery is the way that it has become overgrown with the native flora. You need to dig around to even find some of the graves.

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too windy to photograph

It was very muggy early this morning in Queenstown. A very gusty north west wind was blowing. The locals say that rain and thunderstorms are on the way. If so, then this brings to an end to the spell of hot weather on the south west coast of Tasmania.

The large format photoshoot this morning didn’t turn out as planned. I went to the location above the town that I’d scoped yesterday. Although I managed to set the Linhof up, the gusts of wind blew the gritty white dust into my eyes and ears as well as into the camera.

photoshoot, Queenstown

I had to bail out and wait for another day and walked along the Queen River looking for possible photographic subjects of the contaminated river. It was protected from the wind and the light was soft.

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in Queenstown, Tasmania

This is my second day in Queenstown, Tasmania. The first morning was very similar to what I’d encountered when I was here in April last year—very heavy fog in the valley until about 11am:

fog, Queenstown

The early morning walk with the standard poodles was in the fog until we climbed above it on soem kind of fire break or electricity track. When the fog lifted around 11am the rest of the day was bright, still and very hot. The night was quite mild.

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in Tunbridge, Tasmania

The three or four days that we spent in Tunbridge in the Tasmanian Midlands allowed me to do a little bit of large format photography. I was able to scope out some suitable subject matter, including this salt lake:

Salt lake, Tunbridge, Tasmania

I basically ran out of time before I could come to grips with the arid landscape—its ever changing moods, cloud formations and light. This is the third time I’ve visited the Midlands and I’m becoming familiar with this landscape and its various representations.

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Bass Strait

We have been on the road to Tasmania for the last couple of days. We left Adelaide for Melbourne on Saturday (3rd March) travelled across Bass Strait on the day ferry to Devonport, then on down to Evandale, which is just south of Launceston.

We will spend a couple of days in Evanston exploring around Launceston, then several days in Tunbridge in the Tasmanian Midlands, before travelling over to Queenstown on the west coast.

Spirit of Tasmania

I bought a little digital point and shoot camera before I left —an Olympus XZ-1. I will use it as a scoping camera for my large format work in Queenstown, then Suzanne will use it as a travel camera when she is in Europe next month.

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in the studio

My time since Xmas Day has been spent cleaning up, and reorganizing, in Encounter Studio and doing some photography around Victor Harbor early in the morning.The cleanup has also involved me starting to go through the archive of the black and negatives from the days when I used to have a darkroom and I processed my own film. I’m beginning to scan them.

I stumbled across this negative of Bowden in a box of old black and white 5×7 contact sheets. I would have tray developed the film. It was a pleasant surprise to see that the negative was in good condition and was properly exposed. I would have had other 8×10 negatives but I cannot locate them.

The picture below of the boatsheds at Second Valley, near Yankalilla in the Fleurieu Peninsula is in keeping with history, memories and archive as these no longer exist. They were pulled down around 2009.

boatsheds, Second Valley, Fleurieu Peninsula

They were a favourite subject of local photographers and much photographed:—I even think that there was some kind of photographic wake or meet just before they were pulled down.There is an in memoriam Flickr group.

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without a digital camera

I’m lost without the use of my digital camera. I had initially bought the pro-sumer Sony DSC R1 to enter the world of digital imaging, to see how the digital work flow operated, and to judge the quality and look of the digital image.

Over the next couple of years using the Sony had become habitual, with it primarily being used to study a particular object or scene to see how it looked as a photograph. I’d post some of these images on the web–on Facebook, Flickr or on my blogs—and if the picture looked okay I’d go back to reshootthe object with a medium or large format camera.

Kouko's

The digital camera was my scoping instrument and sketch pad–a pocket sketch pad as it were.

When it was stolen in Melbourne I found myself back to using film and not knowing how things would look as a photograph. I didn’t like the process of taking pictures blind, especially when it came to using the 5×4 Technika in Ballarat before I caught the overnight bus back to Adelaide. I stayed close to what I could remember from my previous trip and which I had filed away as suitable subjects.

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along the Moonee Ponds Creek

I went photographing yesterday afternoon with Stuart Murdoch. The rain and heavy cloud cover cleared whilst I was travelling on the Frankston train into the CBD, and the bright sunshine put paid to the 5×4 car park rooftops scenario I had planned.

So we decided to explore around North Melbourne and Sunshine. We initially explored the areas along Railway Canal or the Moonee Ponds Creek in North Melbourne that I’d started to explore on an earlier trip.

overpass, Bolte Bridge, Melbourne

Luckily for me Stuart knew the area quite well as he had photographed in and around there about a decade ago. There is a bike path under the City Link overpass that provides walking access to the area under the Bolt Bridge over pass. The area has everything—nature, concrete architecture, industry, rubbish–and it is fertile ground for an Australian topographics style of photography.

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