This seascape is Petrel Cove in the early morning. It is part of the Fleurieuscapes project that I have been working on since we shifted to living at Victor Harbor.
The picture was made when I had returned to the car after a poodle walk along Deps Beach with Ari and Kayla. I was taken by the softness and the quality of the light.
The sea is a big part of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula ---playing on the beach, fishing, surfing etc-- and I struggle to find a way to photograph it. How do you do it? It's a slow working it out and hoping that an opening will eventuate. The opening would be a photograph that's a doorway that is photographically interesting.
The classic seaside/beach photography project is Joel Meyerowitz's 1979 book Cape Light: a book of colour photographs of the seaside resort of Provincetown, Cape Cod and its soft natural light made in the summer of 1976 with an 8x10. It is considered a classic work of colour photography and the 8 x 10 camera meant that his stance towards summer cottages and ice cream shops was both one of patience and meditative. The images are in and around his house in Cape Cod and the mood is one of languid, forever-long summer days. These are not really colorised or pumped up.
The art photography background to Cape Light is that Joel Meyerowitz, and Stephen Shore, and William Eggleston,are widely acknowledged as the early masters of color photography in the United States. Their pioneering use of color in the 1970s was a bold departure from the long established tradition of black and white photography, which had dominated the medium from its inception, and their work ---the American vernacular of gas stations, motels, suburban backyards, diners and small towns--- laid the foundations for contemporary photography today. Serious art photographers held color in low esteem, seeing it as the language of the family snapshot, the tourist postcard or the consumer advertisement.