Victor Harbor Archives - Page 15 of 21

November 4, 2012

picking up the pieces

I’ve recovered enough from my illness to start photographing again using more than a small hand held digital camera. I feel that I’ve lost most of this year and I’ve a deep sense of being wasted. There was so much that could have been done (especially with large format) and wasn’t. The momentum has been lost. It’s like starting all over again.

This was a picture of roadside vegetation I took just before things disintegrated around me:

It’s the road to the old Victor Harbor rubbish dump and one that the poodles and I would walk along if it was too windy along the coast. I kinda liked the view towards the southern ocean through the fields as we walked down the road through farmland towards Rosetta Head.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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September 18, 2012

on Jagger Rd, Victor Harbor

Ari and I came down to Victor Harbor today so that QuikFix Computers could install new digital backup technology for Encounter Studio. I’d been putting it off for ages. Silly me.

In the late afternoon Ari and I walked along Jagger Rd that runs parallel to the coastline.

I’ve photographed this tree along the roadside a number of times with different cameras from different perspectives and lighting conditions. I’ve never really taken a picture that I find satisfactory. I find tree studies are hard. You can get obsessional.

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September 2, 2012

Encounter Bay: 7am

Ari and I cruised the beach at Encounter Bay this morning at sunrise. It was a warm spring morning. The tide was low, the sun light was soft because of the cloud cover, and there was no wind. There was no one around and we had the beach to ourselves. The clouds disappeared and the wind came up after we’d finished our walk.

These rocks are along the foreshore. They are part of a large mass of rocks that had been put there by the council long ago to protect the footpath along Franklin Parade from the sea. They gleamed in the early morning light. I couldn’t resist taking a snap.

I’ve come down to Victor Harbor after hanging some pictures of the Fleuriu Peninsula in the Tin Shed Cafe in McLaren Vale as part of the Shimmer Photography Festival. It’s very low fi because I cannot afford to have a large exhibition with a substantial body of work. I have to work towards it.

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August 26, 2012

climate change + photography

Early last Thursday morning Ari and I walked along the beach near Franklin Parade at Encounter Bay in Victor Harbor. We had an hour or so of fine weather after sunrise before the big storm front was due to hit the coastline.

I was interested in seeing the erosion that is beginning to happen along this foreshore, due to the rising sea levels. These are impacting on the South Australian coastline as well as other parts of Australia’s coastline.

There had been more erosion along this part of the foreshore. The Victor Harbor Council is aware of what is happening, but it’s proactive policy response is to replace the sand, rather than protect the footpath with rocks. Rocks are too expensive. But they will have to do something more substantial than sand as the option of planned retreat is not feasible here.

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August 13, 2012

roadside vegetation

I’d recovered sufficiently from the torn ligament in my lower back to be able to walk with Ari on a back country road on Sunday afternoon, and to use the digital camera to explore the roadside vegetation for future photographic possibilities with a large format camera.

It was a back road that we’d walked with the dogs many years ago, but I’d forgotten about it until I started working on this project. I started it on the Saturday whilst at Encounter Studio in Victor Harbor, and it emerged out of this previous post on poodlewalks.

These back country roads that run between farmland (mostly dairy cattle) are roads connecting the main cross country across the Fleurieu Peninsula. There is no sense of the Romantic sublime here amongst the little pockets of remnant roadside bush.

This is agricultural land that has been mapped and subject to human intervention and there is little sense of aboriginal presence. It is what the English would call countryside, and it is all about property ownership with its various fences and gates.

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