neighbourhood Archives - Poodle Walks

August 20, 2017

Rosetta Head

This is the coastal landscape that I walk with Kayla and Maleko on our afternoon poodlewalks. We weave amongst the rocks on the foreshore whilst making our way to Petrel Cove and Rosetta Head:

It is where a lot of my exploratory abstract snaps and those for the modest Littoral Zone project are done whilst I am making my slowly through the slippery rocks. Sometimes the tide is so high and the seas so wild that we are unable to walk amongst the rocks to Petrel Cove.

Suzanne’s favourite walk in the morning is going from Encounter Bay, up Rosetta Head, down to Petrel Cove, then return to Encounter Bay. This is the view of Encounter Bay from the side of Rosetta Head on one of the walks with Ari from the car park:

We live just outside the left of the frame of the picture. We are a few minutes walk to the beach. It took us a while to adjust to living the coast after a decade or more of being in Adelaide’s CBD.

August 15, 2017

between the rains

Recently we had a couple of fine days between the winter rains and the stormy conditions. I’d recovered enough from the flu to be able to take advantage of the fine weather to go exploring with Kayla and Maleko along the coastal rocks between Petrel Cove and Kings Head on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. This was on the late afternoon walk and I was well enough to take my digital camera to take some snaps and even to do a few scoping studies.

One such snap:

This abstract is an example of what I was scoping for my film cameras when I had more strength.
Continue reading “between the rains”

April 19, 2014

historic Adelaide

On Sunday mornings when we are in Adelaide Ari and I generally walk the CBD. It’s reasonably quiet and safe to wander the streets and this allows me to concentrate on photographic scoping with my digital camera.

This particular building–Sir Samuel Way Building, which was formerly Moore’s Department Store –is at the end of the street in which we live. It fronts onto Victoria Square and it was transformed from a department store into a comprehensive law courts building in the early 1980s.

Whilst walking the streets that morning I kept on thinking how the photographic culture has changed as a result of the digital revolution. Its not just the steady improvement in digital cameras or the existence of community-based photo sites like Flickr; it is also the emergence of online galleries and photography magazines, such as Refractions which are sifting and winnowing the published work that is a core part of the culture of 21st century image-making.

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March 24, 2014

coastal architecture

I’ve started re-engaging with the local beachside architecture on the early morning poodle walks with Ari given my inability to represent ‘summer on the coast’ this year.

Some of the older coastal architecture is not going to last. A lot of the weekenders built in the 1940s -70s period are shoddier pseudo crap boxes on large blocks of land. The land is more important than the buildings and the latter will be no loss when they are eventually pulled down.

March 6, 2013

stones

The heatwave continue due to the blocking high-pressure system that has set in over the Tasman Sea. This is steering hot continental winds over south-eastern Australia.

The daytime temperature is consistently around 35 degrees C, whilst the night time temperature stays around 21 degrees. There is very little by way of a cooling wind and its mostly bright blue skies. These conditions makes the daily poodlewalks difficult, especially at lunchtime and in the early afternoon. We move slowly, staying in the shade as much as is possible.

This pile of stones has been sitting in the parklands for some time now. I’ve kept on looking at them as we walk past. Yesterday I decided to start photographing them. I did a few snaps in the morning with the Leica with black and white film, then I made some colour snaps with a digital Sony NEX-7 camera on the afternoon walk.

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February 14, 2013

hidden treasures

We are experiencing a week of high temperatures in the mid-to high 30’s C in Adelaide at the moment.

That means the buildings and pavement in the city retain their heat in the early evening, we live and work in the buildings with the airconditioners running most of the time, and we avoid walking around the city during the heat of the day.

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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.

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June 14, 2012

on a carpark rooftop

I’m back to exploring Adelaide skylines from the rooftop of carparks for future large format shoots. Ari was quite happy tagging along on his afternoon poodlewalk on this one –ie., riding in lifts and hanging out on the rooftops.

There is a bit of a construction boom taking place in the CBD—an urban renewal now that the money is beginning to flow to the developers from the banks. The views that existed before I left for Tasmania have changed. What were buildings that were having their foundations laid before I left now rise above the Pitt Street carpark roof.

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October 16, 2011

8 x 10 photography: scouting and scoping

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.

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September 8, 2011

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.

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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