daily walks Archives - Page 25 of 40

October 29, 2012

snap your city

I’ve been looking at my archives for pictures of the Adelaide CBD that would be suitable for the Adelaide City Council’s photography competition entitled Snap your city. It has to be a quality 8 x 12 inch print in a landscape format. Most of my urban work is in a square format or a vertical one.

I have little urban work in the horizontal format. There are the odd 5×7 image. I have yet to scan some of these. I’ll scan some more on the weekend and see what I’ve got. I’ve scanned them because I have trouble with the colour of the picture using Lightroom, and so I’ve been converting them to black and white.

October 26, 2012

Pitt St car park

It’s back to hanging around the rooftop of car parks. With early summer almost here it is now possible to photograph on the roof after the commuters have picked up their cars and returned to the suburbs. Adelaide has really been dumped on in the last couple of decades as backward, provincial and boring. Nothing happens in the city of churches. Sydney and Melbourne are where it is at. So we don’t see the city for what it is. What we see is what it lacks.

The city is changing due to a post the global financial crisis mini building boom, even the fabled BP Billiton Olympic Dam mine, which the boosters said would have produced rivers of gold in the streets of Adelaide, has been put on hold indefinitely.

Pages: 1 2

October 25, 2012

exploring Thomas St

Thomas St in the Central Market precinct of Adelaide provides views of the back of the strip of restaurants along the Gouger St. It has a grimy atmosphere that is lessened when the rays of the late afternoon sun in early summer lighten up the objects that are usually in deep shadow.

The street is compact and easy to explore photographically using a digital camera. The picture shows undercuts the tedious debates between photography and the digital image, the loss of the real from digital imaging technologies and the end of photography as we have known it.

Pages: 1 2

October 24, 2012

Cannon St

After returning to Adelaide from painting the weekender at Victor Harbor Ari and I walked the streets of the CBD around the Central Market Precinct. It was the late afternoon walk and I was looking for some ideas to continue working on the Adelaide book.

Daylight saving had just started and there is now light in the city until after 7pm. Summer is just around the corner. The urban light has changed and become more hard edged. I stay in the shadows more.

Pages: 1 2

October 20, 2012

rock pools

Before we returned to to Adelaide from Victor Harbor Ari and I walked amongst the rocks just east of the road to Kings Beach. I was wanting to do more sea abstracts. I recalled that there was an area of the coast with a small stream from the hills flowing through the rock to the sea and that the rock pools had some strange colours.

The pools looked weird and strange. Were they were conducive to being photographed in the late afternoon?

How would the rock pools photograph as abstractions from nature? What kind of abstractions would emerge? I’d been glancing through Lyle Rexer’s The Edge of Vision:The Rise of Abstraction in Photography–it’s the first book in English to document and contextualize this canon.

Though some of the pictures are formal rather than abstract, and are concerned withe the medium of photograpahy I’ve been impressed by the diversity of the work.

Pages: 1 2

October 15, 2012

wandering Franklin St

I made this picture whilst we were wandering our way to see the Jeffrey Smart exhibition at the Samstag Gallery. We were to meet up with Suzanne and then look over the exhibition.

It took Ari and myself a couple of hours to get there, as we more or less strolled up and down all the little streets and alleyways between Sturt St and the gallery on North Terrace. There was so much to check out.

I was trying to think through a different approach to photographing the city to the bird’s eye view from the top floor of carparks. I was experimenting as we slowly weaved our way in and out of this part of the city, but I didn’t come up with much.

October 12, 2012

salt abstract

The weather has been very stormy at Victor Harbor these last couple of days–cold, wet and very windy. I didn’t bother to do much photography on the morning and evening walks as it was mostly raining on these occasions.

The pictures that I did take before the wild weather came in have been deleted. They were mostly sea abstracts that I took for the book I’m working on and they were terrible.

September 30, 2012

re-tracing our steps

Last week, on one of our back country road walks looking for possible pictures for the conceptual photography book on pink gums and Xanthorrthoea, Ari and I stumbled across this scene:

roadside vege, Mt Hill Rd, Victor Harbor

It looked good on the computer screen–a candidate for the book— and so we went back on the following afternoon to reshoot it with a film camera. But I couldn’t find it, even though I searched everywhere. As I’d deleted most of the pictures on the SONY NEX-7 I couldn’t retrace my steps from the sequence of pictures. I returned the following morning and started from the other direction of the walk to no avail.

Pages: 1 2

September 29, 2012

between the showers

Southerly storms have been hitting the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula since Thursday night. The south westerly winds have been very strong whilst the showers of the last day have been frequent and intense. So it is a matter of trying to walk between the showers and staying away from the cliff tops.

We had one such moment yesterday on the late afternoon walk:

We strolled around the Victor Harbor rubbish dump trying to avoid all the mud, and keeping an a eye on the clouds rolling in. We only had 20 minutes or so between the showers. So there wasn’t much chance to experiment with a digital camera.

September 23, 2012

regionalism?

Ari and I went walking along a back country road west of Victor Harbor yesterday afternoon looking for more material for the conceptual photography book I didn’t find much in the way of the pink gum and Xanthorrhoea combination, but it was an enjoyable walk along Wilson Hill Rd. I found myself wondering how difficult it would be like to take pictures with a digital field view camera. Would it need to be tethered to a computer?

This part of the Fleurieu Peninsula region is dairy country and there is very little native bush left. This region been extensively cleared.

Thinking in terms of regionalism—the expression of a type of local identity—recalls the divisions between figuration versus non-figuration, and regionalism versus internationalism in the early 1970s where there was an identification of foreignness with non-figuration that was set against an emerging post-colonial regional cultural identity (Antipodeanism) that did not seek to create a national style.

Pages: 1 2