A lo fi visual diary
The last walk just before the end of the heat wave was difficult. Everything was hot and dusty. Walking was an effort for all of us.
The heatwave conditions in Adelaide finally broke on Thursday. It has been raining pretty much non-stop for the last couple of days. It eased late Friday afternoon and it was possible to walk the city in comfort.
There is a 3 day holiday in Adelaide this weekend. It’s Adelaide Cup day on Monday.
We left the heat in city of Adelaide for the coast at Victor Harbor. Though it is still muggy, the air is cooler, there is a bit of a sea breeze, and the outside temperature is lower than that inside the house. It’s a pleasant change.
It seems that everybody else has the same idea, as the coast is full of people. The beaches are packed. The cafes are overflowing. The holiday houses are occupied.
Columns of warm air continue to move across southern Australia, whilst a slow-moving high-pressure system means that the hot conditions are expected to be stable over much of south-eastern Australia for another week.
We are midway through a long heatwave in Adelaide with no relief (tempertures below 30 degrees) expected until Thursday of next week.
The earth in the parklands is cracking badly, from the lack of moisture and the prolonged heat.
Even though we were walking through the patches of shade made by the trees it was too hot for the poodles on the lunchtime walk in the parklands today.They walked so far, then turned around and headed back to the car.
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.
The heatwave continue due to the blocking high-pressure system that has set in over the Tasman Sea. This is steering hot continental winds over south-eastern Australia.
The daytime temperature is consistently around 35 degrees C, whilst the night time temperature stays around 21 degrees. There is very little by way of a cooling wind and its mostly bright blue skies. These conditions makes the daily poodlewalks difficult, especially at lunchtime and in the early afternoon. We move slowly, staying in the shade as much as is possible.
This pile of stones has been sitting in the parklands for some time now. I’ve kept on looking at them as we walk past. Yesterday I decided to start photographing them. I did a few snaps in the morning with the Leica with black and white film, then I made some colour snaps with a digital Sony NEX-7 camera on the afternoon walk.
Our poodlewalks are severely restricted whilst we are in the city.
We walk down Sturt St to Whitmore Square around 9am; take the car to Veale Gardens at 1pm and walk to Veale Gardens at 6pm. We are restricted by the long spell of the late summer heat and Raffi not being able to walk very far in the heat. So we just go to places like Whitmore Square and Veale Gardens where he can safely play off lead in the shadows of the trees.
I take what photos I can, but my options are very limited as I am basically a dog carer. This picture was taken on a day late last week when it rained. Now we are in a 14 day heatwave.
This picture was taken with a Leica film camera on a poodlewalk in the CBD of Adelaide before Raffi arrived from Melbourne, and we had the week’s break down at Victor Harbor. Ari and I are currently unable to wander the city like we used to used. Raffi is just too small.
Consequently, this week has been one of mostly hanging out in Whitmore Square, or in the protected areas in the Adelaide parklands near Veale Gardens where it is safe for Raffi to be off lead.
During the high temperatures this summer weekend we have been hanging out at Petrel Cove in the late afternoon. Its western end provides some shade from the heat of the sun, the cove has a sandy beach and it is possible to swim if you are careful of the rips.
It was very busy early this morning. There were families swimming, people fishing, people walking their dogs or walking and DSLR photographers in action taking advantage of the temperate conditions before the hot northerly wind sprang up mid-morning.
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.
On our early morning walk along the beach at Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor this morning, I started noticing the colour of the seaweed amongst the rocky foreshore:
The sand had gone exposing the reef (Black’s reef that lies between the Bluff and Wright Island) at low tide, and the seaweed was scattered amongst the rocks.