In the last month I have been walking in the early morning. with Kalani, our new male standard poodle puppy. He has replaced the recently deceased Maleko. We picked Kalani up in February from Katsto Kennels in the La Trobe Valley in Gippsland, Victoria on our way back from a week’s walking in and around Mt Buller.
Kalani
Most of our walks during the late March/early April period have been on back country roads and the local bushland in Waitpinga, due to the toxic micro algae bloom along the Encounter Coast. The alga bloom was caused by a marine heatwave and the spread of the bloom was from Goolwa to York Peninsula.
The alga bloom placed the beach off limits, as it had caused the deaths of dozens of marine creatures as well as coughing, sore eyes, and blurry vision amongst humans. It was quickly identified as a type of planktonic algae calledKarenia mikimotoi. It has now cleared enough for us to return to walking on the beach.
These photographic fragments of a walk artwork are a memoriam to those times when Maleko, our silver standard poodle, and myself spent together walking and hanging about in the local Waitpinga bushland in South Australia’s southern Fleurieu Peninsula. It also addresses the question: ‘what are photographers for?’
Maleko had an aggressive rectal cancer tumor that spread through his body in a very short time. He was ten years old. Towards the end he turned to scavenging on the walk, started losing his sight, became disorientated, and failing to keep in touch with me.So the bushland walks had to stop. Maleko’s body eventually collapsed when we were in the Grampians (Gariwerd) in September. He was euthanised in Horsham on Saturday night, the 15th of September.
entry path, Waitpinga bushland
Maleko and I had many photowalks in this bushland over the years and we would usually walk for an hour or more. We would often start on a path made by the kangaroos then just wander around. Our time on these walks were a form of immersion of a being in the bushland in the sense that we become a part of it, and it becomes a part of us. This kind of immersion is a being-in-the-world, rather than a standing outside looking at, and walking through it, as an object.
It was Maleko who lead the way for me to become at home in the bushland and he was much better at mapping it than I was. I would often become dis-orientated and would lose my sense of where I was — but Maleko never did. On those occasions I would follow him back to a familiar trail that lead back to our normal exit point.
exit, Waitpinga bushland
This photowalk references, builds on, and is a continuation of, an earlier one in the local Waitpinga bushland on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The idea of a walking art in the local bushland frames how Maleko and I enter into, wander around, see and exit the bushland whilst on our morning and afternoon poodlewalks. I would see possibilities. scope with a digital camera, and return the next day to photograph.
It has been about five months since the last post on poodlewalks. Some explanation for the hiatus is mentioned here on The Littoral Zone. Posting on this website was also on the backburner due to the trip to Japan, which took place shortly after the last post in late September 2023. Roughly editing the photos that I made whilst in Japan pretty much preoccupied me for the rest of that year.
The last photos I made before I left for Japan in mid-October were those in the seascapes series on the early morning walks and in the evening ones in the magic hour.
dusk seascape
The archive indicates that even though I was walking with the poodles and making photos in the Nov-Dec period after I’d returned from Japan, I didn’t re-connected to the next step of posting the images on the poodlewalks website.
This update on making photos whilst walking with Maya along the coast starts to explore ways of augumenting the still photography. Large format art photography has been my way of creating an art work from these poodlewalks, which are embedded in a particular place.
Maya is now between 5-6 months old and she is quite comfortable walking for an hour or so with me along the coastal rocks on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. As we are on the cusp of winter in South Australia there is early morning cloud cover, the showers sweeping in from the south west are more frequent, and the coastal winds are much stronger.
Whilst I’ve been on these early morning walks I thought that it would be interesting to find a way to show what Maya is hearing, smelling and seeing whilst she is with me. I have no idea how to do this, but I started wondering how Augmented Reality (AR) could add to these kind of walks; or alternatively what could be added using generative AI for texts written by ChatGPT, or an image using Midjourney.
I quickly realized that generative AI is step too far for me as is that that version of AR with its overlay of digital data on top of the real world that is consumed through a camera-and-sensor-laden headset. There is little point in the latter as few people would have the required equipment that mediates the entire world through screens placed centimeters from users’ corneas that makes the whole world a screen.
However, there is a space for something along the lines of supplementing, augmenting, adjusting, or overlaying reality; such as supplementing the still photography is a video. A video offers sound and movement that would augment the frozen moment of the still photography. I need to do more video as I am not sure about podcasts or films, as is done with MAP‘s. Nor do I have the connections to collaborate with a writer like the SALT project which was commissioned by Art Walk Projects.
The Japanese camera manufacturers currently reckon that the camera industry has stabilized after smart phones had wiped out the point and shoot camera market. They also hold that the future of the photographic is not just A1 generated imagery (in the form of text-to-image generators such as Midjourney) it is also video and not still photography. Hence the increasing shift to hybrid and video orientated cameras by implementing video features in camera because they judge that video will dominate the future over still images.
So here we go — a very brief and old unedited video from 2021 of the Hindmarsh River at Sawpit Rd in the Hindmarsh Valley. It was made with an old hand held iPhone 6, which probably is much more suitable for the popular Instagram Stories than v-blogging.
The full video can be seen here on the mostly dormant Thoughtfactory Youtube channel, which currently has no subscribers. That is understandable as there is very limited interesting content on that channel.
Given the general decline of the rural sector seaside or coastal towns depend on domestic tourism to survive. In the process of encouraging tourism, seachange retirees and regional growth they are in danger of damaging, if not destroying, the very natural attractions that made them so attractive to people in the first place.
Victor Harbor on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia is a classic example . Tourism has replaced the dairy and grazing farms in terms of economic importance. The city council has invested substantial funds to rebrand the town from being a run down and decaying service centre for the the agricultural industry to a tourist town. The rebranding involved giving the town centre a design facelift. The town has become more attractive but its economy is low-wage work such as retail and hairdressing that exist to serve local residents. A high tech hub of innovation and creativity it is not.
Tourist development is already happening. There is a Heritage Trail that runs west from Petrel Cove, which link up with the Heysen Trail at Kings Beach Lookout. Both Trails form part of the Wild South Coast Way on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. There is also a Bluff (Rosetta Head) Master Plan, which is in process of being put together, based on community feedback that emphasizes walking not more carparks. These are low key eco-tourist developments with a light footprint. You enjoy the coastline by walking it.
Petrel Cove coastline
The Victor Harbor Council has not publicly responded to the community feedback re the Bluff Master Plan, but the plan does not include the privately owned farmland west of the Rosetta Head reserve. Under SA’s new planning system Victor Harbor is part of the Greater Adelaide Planning Regionand it is unclear whether the Victor Harbor Council will assess the proposed development or whether the planning authority is Planning SA and the state government.
The picture above is from January 2022 and it was made from Rosetta Head (Kongkengguwar) on an early summer morning. It looks west across Petrel Cove down along the coastline to Kings Beach and Kings Head. The Waitpinga Cliffs are in the background. It is a fantastic coastline that needs to be cared for as the farmland is sold. Massive and ugly development would destroy it.
The area just west of the Petrel Cove car park and the green belt in the above picture is earmarked for a proposed tourist property development by Tirroki Pty Ltd consisting of 5 self-contained accommodation units (4 single and 1 double unit with carports) and service building/s on the current farmland. It runs east/west from Jagger Road to the Heritage Trail with access from Jagger Rd.
Whilst walking along the coast of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia this year I have been exploring how to photograph the fleeting character or the ephemerality of light in the early morning. These are photos of light, as distinct from photos of clouds or of seascapes, are a modest walking art project.
I started this modest walking art project in the late summer of 2022 and it continued through the winter. Poodlewalks is not dog walking as such, since the poodles often lead and I follow. In many ways it is as much their walk as mine.
Unlike many of the photographers in the book I didn’t see light as a metaphor. What I was seeing on my poodlewalks were the fleeting moments of light at Encounter Bay. Fleeting in the sense that the interplay of light and dark just before and after sunrise was brief: it would often last less than 5 minutes as the clouds evaporated and the darkness disappeared with the rays of the early morning sun.
The weather since our return to Encounter Bay from our 12 day trip to the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges in South Australia has been continually stormy. There has been strong to gale force north westerly winds and regular rain, with a few fine periods within, and between, the series of cold fronts. The winds have often been chilling with rain falling each day. The earth is saturated.
It has been very atmospheric as we attempt to walk avoiding the wind and the showers. More often than not we are caught in the rain as it is fine one minute then rain the next.
looking west, Dump Rd, Waitpinga
Whilst on the poodlewalks we often have to sit the rain out — either in the car or seeking shelter whilst on the walk. The showers ease and we walk on. Sometimes this happens several times on a single poodlewalk. More often than not we get caught by the rain.
An icy cold snap with lots of rain and bitterly south westerly winds hit the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia in late May/early June. It has been extremely cold when the sun has gone missing, with the cold snap lasting a fortnight or more. Though there have been the occasional days with sunshine, the rain and cold winds usually return the next morning. Consequently, walking with poodles is walking in the bracing wind and the rain:–rain walks.
The daily poodlewalks in early June included walking Rosetta Head ( Kongkengguwar ) in Victor Harbor so that I could photograph the sky, rain, sea and light. These photographs have usually been seascapes (as distinct from coastal), though I sometimes I have been photographing the clouds themselves.
rain, Encounter Bay
We have been walking Rosetta Head in the early morning before sunrise, as the weather has usually cleared by the late afternoon, with this occasion on the last day of May being a notable exception. The walking and photography in low pre-sunrise light works well with a hand held digital camera.
It is much more difficult with the large format camera and tripod, especially when it is a 5×7 monorail. Much more organization and planning is required, as I need to check out both the cloud cover and the direction of the wind to see if it is worthwhile carrying the camera equipment up Rosetta Head. If it is, then it is a slow walk and climb.
A recent afternoon poodlewalk in the local Waitpinga bushland in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula incorporated an 8×10 photo session. This session was a response to a disappointing one in the Spring Mount Conservation Park the previous day. Then I never even took the 8×10 out of the Forester. I had been hoping for misty conditions when I was driving there, only to encounter light rain when I was walking around.
Maleko + 8×10 Cambo, Waitpinga
It is more accurate to say that on the Waitpinga poodlewalk the photo session was first and the poodlewalk with Maleko came afterwards. I carried the camera equipment to the site, made the photo, returned the equipment to the Forester, then Maleko and I went on a walk through the bushland.
