A lo fi visual diary
We spent the 3 day Queens birthday weekend (7-9th June) at Victor Harbor trying to avoid the day tripper crowds on our poodlewalks. People are discovering that winter on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula is quite pleasant.
Kings Beach was one option as winter time means that there is no one swimming or sunning themselves on the beach.
People were mostly walking along the Heysen Trail, which meant that we could walk the beach slowly around to the rock coast of Kings Head.
The 2-3 weeks of the so called “Indian Summer” that southern Australia experienced in late Autumn has finished. The rains have come along with the storm clouds. The rain was really needed.
It rained steadily all day yesterday at Victor Harbor on the Fleurieu Peninsula. We got very wet on both the morning and evening poodle walks.
We are at Victor Harbor for the Easter to Anzac Day break. As it’s also school holidays we have been trying to avoid the crowds by going to Kings Beach and Kings Head for our poodle walks.
These locations have had fewer people than Petrel Cove, Dog Beach or the mouth of the Hindmarsh River. We have had to be careful walking around the rocks in this area because it has been a high tide in the late afternoon, and the waves have been very big because of the full moon.
On Sunday mornings when we are in Adelaide Ari and I generally walk the CBD. It’s reasonably quiet and safe to wander the streets and this allows me to concentrate on photographic scoping with my digital camera.
This particular building–Sir Samuel Way Building, which was formerly Moore’s Department Store –is at the end of the street in which we live. It fronts onto Victoria Square and it was transformed from a department store into a comprehensive law courts building in the early 1980s.
Whilst walking the streets that morning I kept on thinking how the photographic culture has changed as a result of the digital revolution. Its not just the steady improvement in digital cameras or the existence of community-based photo sites like Flickr; it is also the emergence of online galleries and photography magazines, such as Refractions which are sifting and winnowing the published work that is a core part of the culture of 21st century image-making.
I spent a couple of days at Encounter Studio in Victor Harbor scanning a variety of negatives that had been taken earlier this year. Rolls of 35mm colour, 6×6, colour, black and white, and tranny and 5×4 colour sheet film needed to be done.
Scanning film is a slow, tedious task. I do not enjoy it. So I welcomed the break in the late afternoon to walk the poodles around the mouth of the Hindmarsh River in Encounter Bay, along the beach and through the estuary.
I’d initially checked the Hindmarsh estuary out because I wanted to do some large format studies of the melaleucas in the estuary that I’d scooped last year. But they were still flooded. There hadn’t been enough rain for the river flow cut through the sand bar and open the mouth of the river. So the water was backing up.
We’ve started wandering down the lane ways in Adelaide’s CBD on some of our early morning poodle walks. I don’t really know them as I mostly walk past them. It is Ari who wants to go down and explore them. So I’ve started to follow him.
This is a laneway off Gawler Place near North Terrace:
Most of the laneaways in Adelaide are grungy, dirty and neglected. Unlike those in Melbourne, they are not seen to be places for people to gather or hang about. They are urban spaces that you don’t bother going down because there is nothing there. It is recognised that some do need to be cleaned up and ‘re-vitalised’ through good urban design. It is happening slowly, but Leigh Street is a street not a lane way.
The poodlewalk yesterday afternoon was in the West Terrace Cemetery in the Adelaide parklands that surround the square mile of the city. We returned there because I was sick of all the junk food and rubbish that was tossed on the ground in the Adelaide parklands proper and fighting the dogs over chicken bones. I wanted an easy walk away from the rubbish and the people playing sport so that could concentrate on photography.
I was looking for material for my 1picaday2014 project. The graveyards in the cemetery have lots of letters and signs to work with as many of the gravestones have been badly damaged by vandals.
We have had what seems like weeks of blue sky and bright sunshine with only the odd puffy cloud here and there. Finally, the clouds returned to the coast late yesterday afternoon when we were on the Kings Beach walk:
It was a welcome sight. Summer, with its heat waves, is finally over. The patterns the wispy clouds were forming around 7pm yesterday were intriguing.
This is a landscape picture taken whilst standing on top of Rosetta Head or The Bluff in the early morning, just after the sun has risen. It is looking west and it shows the cliff top walk and the beaches that we enjoy when we are at Victor Harbor. Petrel Cove is in the foreground, then Dog Beach and in the distance Kings Beach and Kings Head. The ocean is the Southern Ocean.
It has become a very popular spot as it is the beginning of the Heysen Trail. There are lots of locals walking their dogs, people fishing, as well as the usual bevy of day tourists.
We–Ari, Raffi and myself— walked around The Bluff before sunrise this morning before we returned to Adelaide via Mt Barker.
‘Mad March’ is here tomorrow and that means its Festival time in Adelaide. Fringe, the Adelaide Festival of Arts, the Clipsal 500 and Womadealide. There’s even a state election for political junkies.
Ari and I continue to cruise the CBD in the late afternoon looking for spots with interesting interplay of light and shadow:
It’s the 1picaday2014 project that has motivated me to get out and walk the city–to get away from the computer and working on images for an exhibition in April.