I’m arriving Thursday morning and I’m staying on until Tuesday to do some large format urban photography, picking up from where I left off on the last visit.
Kings Way, Melbourne.
This particular picture wasn’t composed well. I was rushing because it was starting to rain and I couldn’t remember the digital image from the earlier trip. The negative also had bad light leaks.
Sunday morning is allocated to large format photography. Today it was the urban variety. I waited for the rain to stop, then tried to get a 5×7 of Faraway House, around 8am but it was too late. To get the shot I had to stand in the middle of the road across from a major building site, but there was too much traffic. It could only be handheld work.
The light was all wrong anyway–the sun had shifted much further to the east than I had realized. So I tossed it in, and drove to the tramway overpass location on South Rd for the Adelaide-Glenelg tram. This would be a goer I thought in terms of the light and no traffic:
Tram Overpass, Glandore, Adelaide
This is an ideal location for a 5×7 shoot as everybody avoids the stairs and takes the lift to the platform to wait for the tram–they were all going to Glenelg this morning. As I walked around and found the ideal location the wind started, and it swirled around the platforms on the steps.
I’ve been photo-walking the streets of Adelaide these last couple of days. Ostensibly it was to hunt down and photograph the various pasteups down by Peter Drews for his street art project entitled ‘Adelaide’s Forgotten Outlaws! I wanted to do it before the temperatures reached the high 30’s–which they are today.
Then I realized that I was really using this urban wandering to basically look for new locations for the Adelaide book I’m slowly putting together.
Globe, east end
I was looking for locations from car parks that would give me a skyline perspective for large format photography. I wasn’t very successful in my last exploration as I was looking for car parks with open roofs, but these are few and far between in Adelaide. This time I was happy enough to check out the car parks with open grills to see what kind of perspective they offered.
On Friday morning I raced home after the gym, had a quick shower and breakfast, caught a tram packed with commuters, and went on a photowalk along Hindley St St on Friday morning. I caught a tram packed with commuter.
I wanted to continue finding more locations for a 5×7 shoot, to explore new territory, take some snaps and search for a suitable location to take a photo at 11.11.11.11
Duck and Dog, Hindley St
I tossed the photowalk in after the 11:11 shot of the Hawke Building because the light was too strong, and there was too much glare.
One of the pleasures of my recent phototrip in Melbourne was walking around Brunswick Street in Fitzroy with a digital camera. It was liberating after the discipline of large format photography.
I was returning to old haunts, as I used to live in nearby Gore Street whilst studying at the Photographic Studies College in Southbank, and working on the Melbourne trams. I started learning how to do photography (then 35mm black and white) on the grungy streets in, and around, Fitzroy.
Brunswick St, Melbourne
This time I was discovering Brunswick Street afresh as a photographer— exploring a world I knew, yet didn’t know, because so much had changed since I’d lived in Fitzroy.
I plan to return to Melbourne for several days in October (21st-24th) with Suzanne who is attending a conference. In looking over the digital work I did on the last trip I’ve decided to take the 5×4 Linhof Technika to shoot the urban skylines in Melbourne around Chinatown from the rooftop of the car parks.
I’ve also decided to use the time in Melbourne to make a quick trip up to Ballarat in the train:
University of Ballarat
Some of the studies that I did with the digital camera when I was in Ballarat are suitable for reshooting with a large format camera.
I enjoyed my couple of days in Ballarat. It is a very compact city and it is easy to get around on foot. I managed to do some photo walks early in the morning and late in the afternoon on both the Saturday and Sunday.
Of course, I had no large format equipment with me–I was travelling light with three handheld cameras. Many of the images that were taken were little sketches to show the possibilities.
I then pick up my prints in the exhibition on Sunday, and stay on in Melbourne until Thursday to do some urban photography in the CBD:
adult products
I’m picking up where I left off when I was over there about a month earlier: I’ll be poking around in the grungy alleyways off and around Flinders Lane and exploring the architecture of the city in Australia.
How do you order the chaotic flow of the city? How do you arrange the different elements in the picture plane so that relate to one another in some coherent fashion?
I avoid “street photography”–that is, representing the everyday flow of the city — because I cannot satisfactorily resolve the above problems. I started working by sitting in a tram and taking shots but I found that very limited.
Sturt St, 5.30pm
The next step was to stand in front of a building and wait for someone to walk past. That didn’t work that well for me as I wanted to cram more urban stuff into the picture plane. The city is full of flowing stuff–eg., ever changing and moving events and situations.
I started out using the Leica with a 35mm lens (a Summicron F2-ASPH) as I walked through the dense shopping precinct that is Rundle Mall. It was just as I would have done in my pre-digital days. But I actually ended up using the Sony a lot more. I did so without thinking about it. It was instinctive in a photographic sense.
exclusivity
The film Leica with its expensive lens was basically put away in favour of the pro-sumer digital Sony because the latter was more flexible, I could get more shots with the variable Zeiss lens, and I felt a lot more more comfortable experimenting with digital than film. Film costs money. Towards the end–on the way back through Rundle Mall after having the blood test—I only used the Lecia if I thought that I had a worthwhile image.
So this confirms what I said in my earlier post about using 35mm cameras. The shift to digital at this format is a worthwhile investment. That means the film camera is used in order to get that film look. Or the Leica ‘look’.
