A lo fi visual diary
We spent this weekend down at Victor Harbor, and the fine, early summer weather meant some long walks with the poodles along the beach that were coupled to me exploring the possibilities at the foot of the granite cliffs for rock abstractions.
I was exploring these possibilities in order to use the 5×4 Linhof. I’m becoming increasingly comfortable with this style of photography and I want to devote more of my time and energy to it.
We had a 2-3 hour poodlewalk along the coast from Petrel Cove, Victor Harbor, yesterday afternoon. It was overcast and muggy, and I was looking for locations to shoot in black and white using the 8×10 Cambo monorail. I found one.
I also found this one on computer this morning, when I was writing on Landscapes, tourism, the picturesque for the Victor Harbor book.
Unfortunately, I have no idea where this rockface is on the coastline. I just don’t recognize it. It looks suitable–and just what I want– but because I cannot recall its location I don’t know if it is possible to both get the 8×10 down there and to set it up.
I’ve come down to Victor Harbor for a day or so to continue with the 8×10 large format seaside architectural photography series. I plan to photograph this heritage building tomorrow, weather permitting:
In the meantime I’m watching a live stream of the judging of the Epson Australian Institute of Professional Photography’s (AIPP) South Australian Professional Print Awards at the Orange Lane Studio in Norwood.
The commercial architectural shots in this competition are nothing like what I’m doing. Mine are very rough and ready compared to the smooth and carefully calibrated celebration of the architect’s work that the commercial photographers do for their clients. They go for the wow factor, but they do seem unreal in their perfection–almost iconic — compared to mine.
It is extremely windy on the south coast this weekend. It rained on Saturday morning and then a south westerly has being blowing hard. It is gale force strength along the clifftops. Though it is sunny,the windy conditions make it impossible to do any large format photography. I had planned to do an architectural shoot on Sunday morning.
This morning, whilst Suzanne was walking the poodles, I took the digital camera and went on a scouting and scoping trip for future work with an 8×10. There are two possibilities: this and this:
I’d been eyeing this building ever since they’d started building it a few months ago.It’s big and expensive, and it is turning out to be one of the better architectural examples of modern Victor Harbor. So I went and made a number of photographic studies of it to see what it would look like as a photograph on the computer screen.
The beaches at the foot of the cliffs west of Victor Harbor are mostly deserted outside of school holidays and public holidays so we can wander along them. When we are on a daily poodlewalk along the beaches around the cliffs west of Victor Harbor I’m usually looking out for interesting objects lying scattered on the beach. These are mostly seaweed, dead birds and shells.
Often I wonder what would these objects look like as a photograph.Sometimes I bring them back to Encounter Studio to do close ups. Other times I just photograph them on the beach and move on:
This particular one was constructed. I’d seen the crab on the walk up the beach in the late afternoon, then on the return, I wondered what it would look like sitting atop a cuttlefish bone.
My days of late have been taken up learning to scan 8×10 negatives into the computer with the Epson V700 and then working on refining the image in Photoshop. The aim is to make a 16×20 print for the Melbourne Silver Mine Inc’s forthcoming Unsensored11 exhibition at the Collingwood Gallery in Melbourne.
I’ve chosen to work on a rock abstraction that kinda links back to modernism and, more particularly, to the stone walls of Aaron Siskind at Martha’s Vineyard. Siskind’s abstractions emphasized the formal qualities of the image’s lines, colors, and textures.
I finally started scanning the 8×10 b+w pictures this afternoon, even though I have still to figure out how to use the Silverfast scanning software; or how to process the pictures in Photoshop.
The results are disappointing. Most of the negatives are way overexposed; some have light leaks; the old Schneider Symmar 210mm lens that I’m using cannot cover the extreme movements for architecture; whilst the Silver Efex Pro + Lightroom combination that I’ve been using is too crude for the subtle tones of an 8×10.
I’ve finally started scanning some of the 8×10 negatives that I’d exposed and then had developed by Blanco Negro earlier this year. This negative of this picture was overexposed–I’m having problems with getting the long exposures right– so I took the opportunity to play around with the digital file.
Since it was an old camera and it is an old style photography that is being undertaken by Encounter Studio I’ve tried to make the picture look like a nineteenth century photo–eg., the work of Captain Samuel Sweet in South Australia.
It was overcast with little wind at Victor Harbor early this morning. It looks as if a cool change is on the way with rain forecast.
So I was able to take the Cambo 8×10 out to take some black and white pictures of the local seaside architecture in my neighbourhood. It was something that I’d been planning to do for ages.
I have become interested in the old architecture of this seaside town in South Australia for heritage reasons and because they are a graceful form of regional architecture. The seaside residencies along the foreshore are rapidly being pulled down to make way for the McMansion reworking of the modernist style. So I’m documenting them before they are pulled down to make way for the new.
We are down at Victor Harbor for the long October weekend, and I decided that I needed a break from my rock studies. I needed another little project that I could work on with a large format camera now that I’m aware of what is required. I need something that would allow me to become comfortable using an 8×10 monorail using black and white film, but which didn’t require too much walking with the heavy equipment.
So I’ve been hunting around for a suitable subject. I started exploring the bushland along the Inman River today because it is protected from the coastal winds. But very little in the way of possibilities came of it. It was mostly an exercise in frustration:
I went there early this morning on my own and then returned late this afternoon with Suzanne and the poodles. The light was hard to handle and you only have a limited amount of time to take photos. So the scene has to be preselected and the exact time of the day: