Poodle Walks

February 15, 2011

cacti

The poodles and I are down at Victor Harbor for a couple of days. The automatic irrigation system for the garden is not working properly and, as it is ten years old, it needs some repair work. This was meant to be done on Monday but the irrigation chap had been held up on another job.

Yesterday, after the walk along the beach, we went exploring the roadside vegetation on the road to the rubbish dump. It’s quiet and it has picturesque views both to the sea and to The Bluff or, more accurately, Rosetta Head.

We had been along the road before when we’d been exploring the landscape around rubbish dump. I’d taken a picture of this pink gum and farm dam

I was checking out the light for a large format shot of the pink gum, but the sun has shifted and it no longer shines on the tree before it goes behind the hill. So the picture will have to be done in the early morning just after dawn after returning from my Melbourne trip next week.

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February 14, 2011

fungi

The best poodle walks are down at Victor Harbor, which is on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula about an hours drive south of Adelaide. There Ari and Agtet can run and hunt freely once the short walk past the holiday houses is over and we access the field adjacent to the cliffs. We walk along the cliff tops to the various beaches or we climb Rosetta Head.

Just outside our weekender is a heavily tree’d reserve and this constitutes the start of the first section of the short walk. I noticed these fungi on the start of one of our walks. It is from the archives and it was taken in the winter of 2010.

That was a particularly wet winter as the decade long drought had just broken and all the storm water from the houses up on the hill flows through the little reserve then to the seashore.

February 13, 2011

red bag

What becomes very noticeable walking with the poodles is the amount of rubbish lying on the streets and in the parklands. Whereas I would have just walked by without a second look–rubbish is just part of the urban background for me—Ari and Agtet check it out very thoroughly. So I am forced to stop and look:

There is just so much waste.

In the parklands it is mostly the junk food scraps that people leave lying on the ground where they have been sitting. In the city it is mostly packaging and objects that are no longer deemed useful, or have broken down. They have been put on the footpath to be collected.

It was on these walks that I started to realize just how much Australian society throws away as waste. Often the waste is the leftovers from excess consumption. Or the object—including digital cameras— is so badly made that it falls apart and is tossed away. It is not cost effective to repair.

February 12, 2011

shadows

This picture was taken whilst we were mucking around the Optus Building on the corner of King William Street and South Terrace on one of those very hot summer days in Adelaide. You know the ones when the temperature is above 40 degrees C.

We were on our way back home to the inner city townhouse in Sturt Street after walking in the parklands. We were hot, and we hanging about in the alleyway’s shadows trying to cool our bodies down.

As with the earlier posts I used a digital point and shoot camera (Sony DSC R1). Digital is so much easier and more convenient to use compared to film based photography. Though digital photography has supplanted film, the same way wet collodion isn’t about anymore, film has become a niche style of photography.

This photographic moment was about exploring photography, exploring the way we communicate, not about creating pretty pictures (eg., National Geographic type photographs) that people will say, “Oh that’s nice”.

February 11, 2011

paint can

I spotted this decrepit object–it is waste– in Myers Lane on our way to the Adelaide parklands:

I found it lying against the tin wall of an old industrial site that has been sold and is earmarked for urban redevelopment. This will probably be a mixture of offices and apartments as the Adelaide City Council’s preferred model of urban renewal is one of mixed use.

February 11, 2011

lily

This picture has been posted from the snaps that I’ve taken recently whilst on my daily walks with the two standard poodles–Ari and Agtet. Sometimes we stop for me to take a photo, which is what happened in this case, and then we move on.

The idea behind this lo-fi photo blog is that of a visual diary: this is what I am seeing when I’m walking. I stop and explore what has caught my eye. I work at it photographically, then move on.

The walking that is done with the dogs is different to my usual walks as it is much more exploratory. It is the poodle’s walk–that is how they see it— and I am part of the pack. Whilst the poodles check out the areas of their route for smells and food I check them out for photos.