A lo fi visual diary
Ari and I made another visit to Magpie Springs for another photoshoot for their photo competition. The exhibition there was Rita Hall’s Museum bird studies. These were mostly arrange into compositions, singularly rather than in groups.
The emphasis of these drawings/water colours/oils is on the bird’s forms, the shadows they created, their colours, textures and shapes. Rita Hall used the South Australian Museum’s collections in her work.
Though it is the capital city of South Australia Adelaide is a provincal city, and so it has little by way of high rise in the CBD. So the opportunities for me to make these kinds of pictures are limited.
However, the parklands, which bound the CBD, offer a contrast to, an escape from, the CBD’s high rise glass masonry, asphalt surfaces dotted with street trees and canyon like streets. They help to green the city.
This urban nature, some sections of which are woodlands thanks to the “green-shift”, provide a refugee from the summer heat. The trees help cool the urban environment in contrast to buildings and asphalt that increase heat absorption and reflection. The latter do not cool down during a heatwave and the streets of the CBD can become oppressive.
Now that Posterous is definitely closing on April 30th my Encounter Studio blog will be incorporated into poodlewalks. I will upgrade it so the image quality is improved and then shift to hosting the bog myself. I am not sure at this stage where I will migrate the draft of my Victor Harbor book. I still need a platform that I can continue to work on, and to add additional material (text and photos) to old posts. Tumblr is out.
Yesterday evening we–myself, Suzanne, Ari and Raffi— all went to Kings Head. It was a still, soft evening and it incorporated a poodlewalk for Ari and Raffi, a swim for Suzanne, and some photography for me on the point:
I’d returned to make a photo of this picture with a medium format camera in colour and black and white. I was continuing to pick up from where I’d left off before we went for our holiday at American river on Kangaroo Island.
I had an hour to fill in this morning whilst I waited for new lenses to be put into the old frames of my glasses. So I wandered around the CBD with my digital camera looking at the shops in and around Rundle Mall, the CBD’s premier shopping strip.
Nobody was buying. Some of the fashion shops were empty. The shop assistants looked bored. A few of the fashion chain shops had closed. Plenty of people were having coffee with friends and colleagues though.
On our second to last evening at American River Ari and I walked along a section of the Independence Point trail. We have been out at the Redbank Cliffs earlier in the day but, once the cloud cover went around midday,the sun and heat defeated us. We could only work at midday because the high tide at early morning and late afternoon prevented access to the foot of the cliffs.
So we wanted an easy walk in the late afternoon where we could mooch around:
I was basically looking for more landscape possibilities for the 5×4 Linhof, but I didn’t find that much that was worthwhile. Maybe the above picture. Still, it was a pleasant walk.
Suzanne, Ari and I visited Michal Kluvanek’s Hindmarsh studio yesterday. He has made a living for 30 years photographing art works and artists as well as doing his own work–landscape and urban. Some of his work was on the walls of the studio, on a table in the studio and in a gallery-type print rack. He is an analogue photographer who has not established a web presence.
Afterwards, we checked out parts of the Glendi Greek Festival, before going for a walk along the River Torrens down by the Port Rd Park Terrace corner. It was an area that I used to visit regularly to walk and photograph when I had a studio in Bowden. The area has been cleaned up since then.
I made this picture whilst we were wandering our way to see the Jeffrey Smart exhibition at the Samstag Gallery. We were to meet up with Suzanne and then look over the exhibition.
It took Ari and myself a couple of hours to get there, as we more or less strolled up and down all the little streets and alleyways between Sturt St and the gallery on North Terrace. There was so much to check out.
I was trying to think through a different approach to photographing the city to the bird’s eye view from the top floor of carparks. I was experimenting as we slowly weaved our way in and out of this part of the city, but I didn’t come up with much.
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:
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.
Southerly storms have been hitting the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula since Thursday night. The south westerly winds have been very strong whilst the showers of the last day have been frequent and intense. So it is a matter of trying to walk between the showers and staying away from the cliff tops.
We had one such moment yesterday on the late afternoon walk:
We strolled around the Victor Harbor rubbish dump trying to avoid all the mud, and keeping an a eye on the clouds rolling in. We only had 20 minutes or so between the showers. So there wasn’t much chance to experiment with a digital camera.
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.