daily walks Archives - Page 23 of 39

December 21, 2012

a different way of walking the city

An important aspect of poodlewalks in the city is that Ari, who loves walking the city, takes me to nooks and crannies of the city that I would normally miss. I wouldn’t even notice them as I walking too fast or I have pre-conceived ideas of what I want to photograph.

Ari’s mooching around these nooks and crannies slows me down, and it means that I am able to look more closely at what is around me, rather than just walking through the environment.

I have time to actually look as a photographer at what is there in front of me or at my feet.

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December 18, 2012

Wright St, Adelaide

I walk past this building almost everyday and I’ve been wondered how to photograph it. This photo was made early on a weekday morning around 6.30am before there was any one around. There was just a security guard collecting money from the parking meters and she was hostile. Security guards are just suspicious of photographers these days.

I also look at the beginnings of the redevelopment of an open car lot to its left along Frew Street. It is an affordable housing project. Most of the year has been taken up with digging out the contaminated soil and replacing it.

I understand that the development will done in several stages, and it will allow low and moderate income households to live in the CBD. It is part of the Council’s strategy to encourage more people to live in “a vibrant, populous and sustainable Capital City built upon Adelaide’s heritage and lifestyle”.

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December 14, 2012

rock abstract

My 8×10 black and white negatives arrived today from Sydney, just before I was to leave Adelaide for Victor Harbor for the weekend. Several negatives have light leaks (damaged dark slides) or are fogged (dunno why) but most look okay. I’ll scan them tomorrow.

It was very still and muggy along the coast around Kings Head which is where we went for our evening walk. The rain had passed, the sticky flies were everywhere, and there was no cooling wind amongst the rocks. But the tide was low, lower than I’d ever seen it. So I was able to get amongst rocks that would normally be surrounded by surging water:

Ari and I were quite distressed by the heat so we returned to Kings Beach where we were able to cool off by paddling in the sea. Low tide means that I can take the 5×4 Linhof and the heavy duty tripod to this spot over the weekend.

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December 13, 2012

it’s too hot to do much

It’s very hot in Adelaide at the moment. The temperature is around 38 degrees on our evening walks and 28 degrees during the night. There are no cool gully winds at night now. So Ari and I just mooched around the shade in Veale Gardens yesterday evening. The sprinklers only come on in the early morning.

We sat for a while by some of the trees that I wanted to photograph. These were abstractions of the bark currently peeling off the trunks of the eucalypts. The colours of the bark and trunk are soft and subtle:

I took some hand held close-up photos with the Rolleiflex SL66, since this medium format camera system doesn’t need closeup rings. Then we move on to the next tree taking care to remain in the shade. We pretty much just sit in the shade and watch the world go by.

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December 12, 2012

Adelaide: early morning

It was my day off from the gym this morning so I went out photographing in the early morning around the Central Market Precinct from about 6.30 am to 8am. It will be about 36 degrees today and tomorrow. By 8am it already was hot and the light was very bright. The city was very quiet between 6.30-7am. People were having their morning coffees and reading newspapers at the cafe’s in Gouger St.

I was interested to see this precinct of the city in the early morning summer light, as I generally only see it in the late afternoon light.

I basically reworked familiar ground to see the difference that the early morning light made. I was pleasantly surprised. The light highlighted the modernist buildings that are emerging above the low rise nineteenth century ones.

The Adelaide CBD skyline is changing from being that of a small quaint village or just another suburb.

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December 11, 2012

Adelaide architecture

The heat has returned to Adelaide. As the temperatures are going to be in the high 30’s for the rest of the week, so our poodlewalks include carparks and streets in the CBD that deep shadows in the early evening.

The carparks give me a ariel perspective on Adelaide’s architecture and I’m finding find a lot of it rather depressing. This TAFE building,for industry, reminds me of a prison—it is actually very similar to the Remand Centre just down the road.

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December 9, 2012

tree abstract

Suzanne, Ari and I visited Michal Kluvanek’s Hindmarsh studio yesterday. He has made a living for 30 years photographing art works and artists as well as doing his own work–landscape and urban. Some of his work was on the walls of the studio, on a table in the studio and in a gallery-type print rack. He is an analogue photographer who has not established a web presence.

Afterwards, we checked out parts of the Glendi Greek Festival, before going for a walk along the River Torrens down by the Port Rd Park Terrace corner. It was an area that I used to visit regularly to walk and photograph when I had a studio in Bowden. The area has been cleaned up since then.

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December 6, 2012

organic abstract

The weather is warming up again. It was a gentle meandering walk amongst the eucalypts in the parklands looking at the tree trunks this evening. The trunks of the eucalypts are to loose their bark and to change colour.I started looking for possible abstracts:

I was interested to see if I could take abstractions with the Sony NEX-7 with a Leica Summicron 35m asph lens. This functions as a 50mm lens on the NEX-7, due to the crop factor of the smaller than full frame sensor and it doesn’t allow you to get very close to the object.

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December 5, 2012

tree lines

On a poodlewalk last night I noticed that the Adelaide City Council staff had cut down some of the dead elm trees in the parklands near Veale Gardens. The trees had died a couple of years ago from lack of water caused by the ten year long drought.

The sawn branches and trunks were still lying on the ground last night. I presumed that the logs and branches will taken away today, so I photographed them early this morning between 6.30 and 7.30 am.

Normally I am at the gym between 6 and 7am each morning, but I have decided to take Wednesday’s off so that I can take some early morning photos in Adelaide. It was overcast so I didn’t have to contend with the sunlight.

November 29, 2012

remembering a picture

It is hot and muggy in Adelaide at the moment. It is around 40 degrees and it is unpleasant to be outside away from the air conditioning. Ari and I stayed in the shadows in the parklands early yesterday evening and we didn’t walk that far. It was too hot. Rain is forecast to be on the way late Friday afternoon, but I’m sure that, in itself, will not reduce the temperature.

I wanted to use the poodlewalk to make some more studies of the Morton Bay Figs in the parklands. I wanted the late summer light on them and I was thinking about the inside and outside of the photographic frame:

I remembered a picture from a year ago, which I’d seen but never returned to photograph. It was in late summer and when I did return the sun had shifted and the last rays no longer fell on the tree. The time difference was only a matter of a week to ten days. I had made some other pictures then, but I felt that I could more.

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