Encounter Studio: experiments + journeys

brief notes on experimental photographic journeys

Posts for Tag: rockface

another image

I have found another possibility image for the proposed Victor Harbor exhibition. 

This is the scoping study made with a handheld digital camera --Sony NEX-7---earlier in the week whilst I was on a poodlewalk:

It is a section of a rock face at Kings Head, near Victor Harbor.

 I'll make a  medium format black and white photo this afternoon and then a colour one in 5x4 tomorrow.  There is no way that I can easily get the 8x10 Cambo monorail down to that location. 

next exhibition project

I'm starting to think of my  next exhibition project now that the project for the  Dark exhibition at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale  2013 is  over. 

What is forming is one of black and white landscapes and  abstractions  of rocks from the Fleurieu Peninsula around Victor Harbor and some  landscapes from Kangaroo Island

This would be a mixture of medium and large format work. I already have about six or so printed and framed. That's a good start. 

Maybe some muted  5x4 colour of rocks--high tone--- as well, as these would be mostly great.  

scoping for 8x10

Whilst my 8x10 black and white negatives are being developed by Chris Reid at  Blanco Negro in Sydney I've have been  looking out for, and scoping, more subject matter.

This picture is one possibility. The form is okay and it is  reasonably easily accessable  from the car park at Petrel Cove:

I  pre-visioned the picture  in black and white:

It looks okay. The rock face works better in black and white.

The problem  I have is that I don't have many other pictures  lined up  for the 8x10   apart from a  studio picture.

reconnecting

I've just returned to Encounter Studio in Victor Harbor, South Australia today after a month's phototrip in Tasmania. Suzanne is in Paris,  I'm looking after Ari, and the digitial suite has a new modem. The old one died during an electrical storm whilst we were in Tasmania.

I've linked up with an Adelaide-based  Art Photographers Facebook group that is quite lively and free wheeling and I've ordered a new digital camera to replace the old Sony  that was stolen in Melbourne last November. 

I've been  trying to reconnect with the  work that I was doing in Victor Harbor before the Tasmanian phototrip. To my dismay I've lost any sense of what I was working on or trying to do.  So I looked at the negatives that I had scanned just before I left for Tasmania:

I have to face it. I'm not sure that I had a particular project with the Victor Harbor book.  What was I trying to do with it I asked myself? I didn't have an answer. So what was I doing then? There has been a workflow but I've just been been taking snaps around several themes.

So where do I go from here?

Port Elliot

This part of Port Elliot is a much desired location. Big expensive architecturally designed housing is being built right on tops of the sandstone cliffs.  The houses have a commanding view of Encounter Bay. That's the way people like it. 

The sea around the rocks  is a  favourite spot for surfers and photographers. 

I'm more interested in the housing meets the coastline theme. I've had several goes at this, none of them satisfactory. It can only be done when the tide is very low. The sand is slowly going from the beach, exposing the rocks. 

rockface: abstract 1

This is pretty much how I see the rockface in the coastal landscape just west of  Victor Harbor and around Kings Head.

It is  the constantly changing play of light on the rock forms along the coastline that caught my eye and intrigued me. I tend to see the rockface in terms of abstractions---organic abstractions, as it were. Abstract modernism in this  form makes sense to me as a photogrpaher. 

More here

three rocks

The South Australian  modernist painter thst I have the greatest affinity to is Dorrit Black. She used the unique forms of the  Fleurieu Peninsula landscape  as the basis for  her modernist works, such as Coast Road (1942) and Cliffs at Second Valley (1949). The latter is not online.

The pallette in Black's   work of the 1940s is sombre, the approach is cubist, the forms sculptural, and there is a gesture towards the sublime.