An experiment using double exposure to layer the photo and to make the ordinary seem a bit strange through imperfections.
An experiment using double exposure to layer the photo and to make the ordinary seem a bit strange through imperfections.
As mentioned in this blog post in the Eye on the Mallee website I spent several days in mid-August at Kapunda with Suzanne's Lavender Trail friends. Whilst they walked the trail around the Kapunda region in the mid-north each day I photographed. I actually spend more time photographing in, and around, Kapunda than I did in the South Australian mallee. Well, I split my time between the two different regions.
This picture is of the Anglican church in Kapunda. It was designed by Edmund Wright, and built around 1857-8:
In February, just before going to Tasmania, I dashed over to Christchurch, New Zealand, to attend my mothers' funeral. She was 97.
I stayed in a motel in Papanui Rd, Merivale with my sister. In the early morning I would walk down to the local shops to have breakfast and I would take a few snaps along the way.
Merivale is one of Christchurch's more upmarket suburbs. In contrast, to say Sydenham, it is where the old money is. It didn't seem to have been that badly damaged by the 2011 earthquake. Or if it had, then the insurance money flowed in quickly to repair the damage to the buildings.
I have just returned to Victor Harbor after spending 2 weeks in Tasmania.
The first week was spent photographing on the south west coast of Tasmania whilst Suzanne walked in The Walls of Jerusalem National Park and the second week was spent being tourists primarily in the Tasman Peninsula, south-east of Hobart.
Our base was in Tunbridge in the Midlands which I briefly explored between weeks 1 and 2.
This building was in Campbelltown which is about 20 kilometres north of Tunbridge on the Midlands Highway.
This picture of the Tobin House, one of Adelaide's Art Deco buildings, made whilst I was wandering along North Terrace in Adelaide's CBD around 5pm. I was enjoying watching the winter light playing across the facades of the buildings along North Terrace.
I was on my way to the opening of Frédéric Mouchet's interesting exhibition at the State Library of South Australia. The exhibition centred around the South Australia of the French explorers in the 18th and 19th centuries in that Mouchet has retraced their journey around the unexplored coast of Nouvelle Hollande, including Kangaroo Island, Encounter Bay (Victor Harbor), Spencer Gulf and the Great Australian Bight.
When I started going through the archives looking for material for the Adelaide street portfolio on the website I came across some old images of Andamooka that were made just before the turn of the century. I had scanned them after buying the Epson V-700 scanner, but I'left some of them sitting in the archive because I lacked both the skills and the software to post-process them at the time.
A good example is the photograph of an old shack that I made using the Linhof Technika 70 and Kodak Portra 160NC film.
I decided to see what I could do with this image a couple of days ago. I converted the colour digital file to black and white and then worked on a black and white version using Silver Efex-Pro 2 . It looked okay--much better than I expected actually -- so I started to work on the original colour image using Colour Efex-Pro-4:
I'd forgotten I had this software on the studio's computers. It had came as part of the Nik Collection package that was a free upgrade when Google acquired the product--- I was eligible as I had previously bought Silver Efex-Pro-2. I'd forgotten about Colour Efex Prox-4 as I was only interested in Nik's black and white plug-in software at the time. I used the latter as I found that Adobe Lightroom was rather unsatisfactory for post-processing the digital files of my black and white negatives.
When I was in Melbourne recently, I continued my photographic exploration of the Southern Cross Railway Station and the inner suburb of Richmond. I hung around in the former and I continued with my walking the latter.
I had briefly visited Victoria Street, Richmond, with Stuart Murdoch after our Kodak shoot for a quick meal at the no frills Thy Thy restaurant. Whilst walking to the restaurant I noticed that the Victoria Street part of Richmond had radically changed from the one that I knew when when I lived in Melbourne in the late 1970s. I was working as a conductor on the trams and studying at Photographic Studies College.
There were no Vietnamese restaurants anywhere in Victoria Street, Richmond. The notable ethnicities were Turks and Greeks. Then Richmond was identified as Struggletown. It was a working class suburb with cottages, pubs and factories. Richmond, by all accounts, had started to become a little Saigon in the 1980s.
Richmond today is in the process of gentrification, as a result of the exodus of manufacturing to the outer suburbs thereby making the inner city a much more pleasant place to live. Victoria St is still a gritty street, and it has a vibrancy that Adelaide lacks, and what inner city Adelaideans long for and Sydneysiders now miss. The Gouger Street precinct near the Adelaide Central Market doesn't really cut it.
I only had time for a couple of quick, hand held snaps at dusk with the digital camera before the evening meal. When walking back to the car after the meal I decided to return to Richmond the next day and walk Victoria St. I wanted to see if it was a food strip or more akin to an urban village.
By all accounts Wellington has a number of good active art photographers, non-profit galleries, some small artist-run spaces and a photographic dealer gallery. The art photographic scene appears to be lively, the work interesting, with much of it is project based. There are more reflections on the Wellington photographic scene here.
An example of a project based body of work is the recent book by the poet /photographer Mary Macpherson. Old New World, consists of her photographs made over seven years about the changes in New Zealand society as seen in the small regional/rural towns throughout the country. The narrative is one of a shift from a traditional New Zealand, to places of prosperity and development that look very different to the 1960s and 70s. Peter Ireland interpreted the work "as a melancholy lament for the steady disappearance of the New Zealand of her childhood and youth, especially since the economic “reforms” of the 1980s."
Maybe not. There is a section that deals with places that have been changed or transformed through development. Ireland says that:
The road trip is a bit of a guy thing, and, formally, her imagery then tended to echo the style pioneered here by Robin Morrison and furthered by other male photographers such as John McDermott and Derek Henderson [ie., The Terrible Boredom of Paradise]
However, the photographic works that Macpherson says that she thought about before making her Old New World photographs were Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places (for his photographing of everyday streets and buildings with tremendous formal sophistication) Joel Sternfeld’s American Prospects (his restrained, yet socially charged images) and Walker Evan’s photographs of buildings.
Suzanne and I spent a week in the lower part of the North Island of New Zealand. This included Wellington, Tongariro National Park, parts of the the Waikato district and New Plymouth. It was a holiday built around us walking the Tongariro Alpine Crossing.
I was able to do some photography in and around Wellington as well as the standard tourist snaps of the Tongariro National Park. The picture below was made from our room at the Travel Lodge, which was where we were staying whilst in Wellington:
Due to the short time we had in New Zealand, I mainly photographed through the windows of the hotel and when I was walking the streets in the early morning and in the early evening. Walking the city was limited by being on holiday but I was able to build on my previous visit.
Wellington is a very visual city and I enjoy walking it and exploring it's nooks and crannies.These allow me to see beyond the obvious and to find things that are hidden away amongst the ever changing shade and light.
This image is an outtake from the 15 images that have been selected for my forthcoming Fleuriescapes exhibition at the Magpie Springs Gallery in 2016. Apart from me nobody thought much of this particular image:
The digital files (ie., scanned 5x4 and medium format negatives) for the exhibition are with Atkins Pro Lab and I will check the small test prints when I return from my New Zealand in the second week of December. The exhibition, which will be in January/February 2016, is from a body of work that has been made over the several years that we have been coming to Victor Harbor as weekenders, and then more recently, from when we started to live on the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula early in 2015.