A lo fi visual diary
I flew into Melbourne early this morning.
I started taking photos after I checked my gear into the hotel —Oaks on Collins—along Flinders Lane. I had seen a carpark whilst walking on Collins St with my gear from the Southern Cross Station. I hadn’t taken much notice of it before, even though I walk Flinders Lane each time I’m in Melbourne.
I’ve come down to Victor Harbor this weekend to scan some old large format negatives that I came across in a box in the storage room. I’d forgotten all about them. The 8×10 negatives are in okay condition. So are the 5×7 negatives. But the 5×4 negatives have deteriorated badly. I’m not sure why that would happen to the 5×4 negatives and not to the larger sized others. Thicker film?
Yesterday’s poodlewalk was around the mouth of the Hindmarsh River. This is a favourite spot for people to walk their dogs, and that meant that Ari could hang out with the dogs and I could take some photos of the beach:
It is one part of the coastline that is still in sunshine in the very late afternoon. In winter the light is soft and gentle.
I scanned the remaining 5×4 negatives from the Queenstown, Tasmania trip last night. They look good, given the wet conditions I was working under.
The weather at Victor Harbor this weekend has been stormy with lots of rain and wind from the south west. Ari and I got drenched on both the walks yesterday afternoon and early this morning due to heavy rain squalls.
There has been little photography even though I carried the Sony NEX-7 with me. The weather was too wild to return to my favourite location at the base of the Newland Clifs on the Heysen Trail to explore the photographic possibilities with the 5×4 Linhof.
I’m back to exploring Adelaide skylines from the rooftop of carparks for future large format shoots. Ari was quite happy tagging along on his afternoon poodlewalk on this one –ie., riding in lifts and hanging out on the rooftops.
There is a bit of a construction boom taking place in the CBD—an urban renewal now that the money is beginning to flow to the developers from the banks. The views that existed before I left for Tasmania have changed. What were buildings that were having their foundations laid before I left now rise above the Pitt Street carpark roof.
After I finally found out how to get the Sony NEX-7 to take photos with a 35mm Leica M mount lens—-with some help from friends at Photoco in the Adelaide Central Market —-I wandered around with Ari taking some pictures.
The camera is a good fit in my hand, is easily portable and feels like a relatively affordable rangefinder-like camera with a built-in viewfinder.
Unfortunately for me 75% of them were out of focus, even though I used focus peaking. I found it to be fairly inconsistent or hit and miss. It was as if I got just an approximation and I needed some further refinement.
Whilst we were in Melbourne waiting to see if Atget would recover from his operation I spent an afternoon on a photowalk with Stuart Murdoch along Gardiners Creek near, and under, the Monash Freeway.
We walked along a small section of Gardners Creek and the first stop was this old Toorak Rd bridge where the creek became more or less a drain, rather than a creek. It was what is called heavily urbanised. The creek has been degraded in much the same way as many of the other Melbourne eastern suburban waterways.
The last poodlewalk I did with both Agtet and Ari was at Evandale in the northern Midlands. The walk was along the banks of the South Esk River the night before we left Tasmania.
We were to drive to Devonport early the following morning to catch the ferry across Bass Strait to Melbourne, stay overnight in Geelong, then drive to Adelaide the next day.
It was a lovely walk in the late afternoon sun. It was very peaceful and gentle. The river flowed gently, people were fishing, others, like me, were walking their dogs. A farmer was cutting down the willows along the river bank and the occasional plane flew overhead bound for Melbourne.
On Saturday it was overcast with passing rain squalls so we went for a drive to Zeehan in the afternoon. I wanted to to photograph the ruins of the old smelter using the 5×4 Linhof. I’d scoped this on my last visit to Queenstown a year ago.
I stuck closely to what I’d scoped last year as time was short—the squalls returned just as I was finishing the planned pictures of ‘ruins as history’. After looking at the digital images I took whilst on location this time, I can see that I need to return to the site to take more. There was more here than I’d realized.
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.
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.
Just before the Xmas break I wandered the streets of the CBD with a medium format camera–the Rolleiflex 6006 and a wide angle lens. It was a dull and grey Sunday morning and I was looking for urban architectural texture with a slightly grungy feel.
I was searching for urban subject matter that would be suitable for a 5×7 shoot; one that referred back to the pictures of shop fronts in Rundle Street in Adelaide that were taken by the nineteenth century urban photographers. These early pictures (1860s-1870s) were known as carte de visite views due to their small size and they functioned like today’s business cards.