Tag: daily walks

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8 x10 photography

I’ve came down to Victor Harbor for a couple of days before I fly over to Melbourne to do some 8 x 10 black and white location photography. I haven’t done any for a while mainly because I’ve had no way to scan the negatives.

My Epson V700 can only scan 8×10 as a negative, and up to now I’ve had no way to invert it into a positive. So I’ve ordered Photoshop from B+H in New York, as this professional software enables me to invert the negative into a positive.

8x10 Cambo

It was overcast and still today so I struggled down to the foreshore with the 8×10 gear (monorail camera in the right hand, the heavy duty Profi Linhof tripod with its centre post and heavy duty pan tilt head on my left shoulder, and the computer bag with the darkslides + darkcloth, lightmeter etc on my right shoulder). I was accompanied by the two standard poodles.

My aim was to take two photos of a particular rock. One photo was in portrait mode and the other in landscape mode. That was it. I struggled back to the car, unloaded my gear, and then took the poodles for a walk.

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AAMI

How do you order the chaotic flow of the city? How do you arrange the different elements in the picture plane so that relate to one another in some coherent fashion?

I avoid “street photography”–that is, representing the everyday flow of the city — because I cannot satisfactorily resolve the above problems. I started working by sitting in a tram and taking shots but I found that very limited.

Sturt St, 5.30pm

The next step was to stand in front of a building and wait for someone to walk past. That didn’t work that well for me as I wanted to cram more urban stuff into the picture plane. The city is full of flowing stuff–eg., ever changing and moving events and situations.

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Ballarat International Photo Biennale

I haven’t taken a photo all this week. The camera has sat on the table. I haven’t even looked at it. I have been busy preparing prints for two exhibition and prints for some portfolio reviews for the Ballarat International Photo Biennale. That means sitting in front of a computer screen for long stretches of time.

Gilbert St, Adelaide

Lucky for me it has been raining heavily most of the week. So I have selected a picture of shopwindow in my neighbourhood snapped on an earlier poodlewalk just before I went down to Victor Harbor. The weather was similar—rain with sunshine.

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making time for photography

I’m down at Victor Harbor for several days. Family from Tasmania are staying and it is difficult to find the time to do photography. I did manage to do a 5×4 photograph of this image late yesterday afternoon with the over-engineered Linhof Technika IV and this rock study with the Sony point and shoot digitial earlier in the afternoon when I was walking with the dogs:

rock study, Victor Harbor

It’s a question of being selfish to make time for photography. Otherwise it doesn’t get done. The dogs were walked early in the afternoon so that I had the 4-5 pm time to myself. Then I picked up Suzanne from the bus and we went home and cooked dinner for the family.

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urban documentary

I keep plugging away at the large format series or study of Adelaide. I’m slowly ticking off the locations and finding new ones:

French St

I am not sure what the content is, how the series will be constructed, or how it will unfold. It will be something about documentary, empty streets and history with an eye to a DIY photo book. I want book making to be a central part of my practice.

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Eyre Peninsula

This image is from the archives that I have just scanned into the Mac Pro desktop computer.It was taken around 2002 on a trip to Venus Bay, which is on the west coast of Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. Agtet must have been 3-4 months old as he still had his puppy coat.

Yanerbie

I can remember the shutter on the newly acquired Rolleiflex SL66 jamming up on the very first shot–I was photographing plants on the shadow side of the sand dunes— and then having to rely on the ever reliable Rolleiflex TLR.

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time

One of the themes that I unconsciously explore in my local neighbourhood is urban nature. Not so much the cultivated nature that is the result of gardening by city councils (shade tree plantings, revegetation projects etc) or individual’s gardens but wild nature.

time

Wild nature in the sense of weeds growing up through the concrete, or brick walls, creeper reclaiming walls–the urban nature that no one really notices. Or they want to eradicate it when they do notice.

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strolling the city

I’ve started walking around the urban neighbourhood that I live in–the south east corner of Adelaide–with a photo eye. It is a digging behind the surface of the functional drudgery of inner city life–what the situationists called dérive: a stroll through the city that includes and interpretive reading of the city, an architectural understanding

units, Vinrace St, Adelaide

Another way to look at the city is in terms of repressed desires–eg., the poverty and alienation of the conditions of everyday life despite the plenty of commodities and the glossy consumer lifestyle on the billboards.

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28A Sturt St

This is our home in Adelaide–it’s the townhouse on the corner. The picture was snapped when I was returning from a walk with the dogs in the parklands. The sun was going down. My office is the top left window in the reddish wall.

28A Sturt St

The creamy orange brick building on the left (going west) is a hockey shop, and then further west an accountants office, then a council carpark that is marked for residential redevelopment. The neighbourhood is in rapid transition as the old warehouses are given up and the lawyers and residents move in.

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