In June I got away on the first long road trip for several years. This one took me into the depths of South Australia.
The first image I took was of a window and fence opposite my motel in Murray Bridge. The setting sun added a level of light and colour that lasted only for a few minutes.
Several posts back, I mentioned that I had some work in progress, here. Over the course a a few eeks, OK, months, I worked on this until I got a look that was more in keeping with my first idea. The image in the work in progress post was too bland and dull for my liking.
I spent a little more time working on the background and getting more out of the details of the instruments.
When the look of the image was where I wanted it, I worked on 10 images of different instruments on slightly varied background. These became 10 8in x 8in prints for a folio.
A shipping container in a field, near Koroit, Victoria, Australia. The monochrome conversion was done using the Ilford HP5 400 film emulation in Nik Silver Efex
I have been working on a project that has involved learning some new techniques and equipment, both photographically and in post-process.
It has taken a while to begin on another body of work after my last exhibition, the pandemic and subsequent lock downs derailed me somewhat.
I have a box of the instruments and tools my father used during his apprenticeship in the 1940s. I plan to make a set of still life images for display. Currently trying to work out colours, backgrounds and textures.
I am very pleased to announce that I am a part of this year’s LOCAL exhibition at the Wyndham Art Gallery, 177 Watton Street, Werribee, Victoria, Australia. I am sharing this exhibition with local sculptor, Jonathan Mendez Baute.
I will be exhibiting large colour prints from Iceland and Coffin Bay National Park in South Australia; from my ‘Shifting Landscapes’ series. For the first time I have had the prints made for me, being too big for my printer. The prints were made by the fantastic team at Image Science, North Melbourne.
If you can make it, please come along to the opening at 6.30pm, Thurs 30 August. The exhibition runs from Friday 31st August 2018 until Monday 29th October 2018.
I have added a new set of photos under the Gallery menu. This set of images, titled Time & Ice, were taken early one morning on the black sand beach at Jokulsarlon, the ice lagoon in the south of Iceland.
A soft misty rain was falling which gave the images, along with the long exposures, a sense of time and movement.
While in Brighton (England, not Melbourne) earlier in the year, I noticed a number of large bins, or maybe dumpsters dotted about the foreshore and some of the streets.
These bins were often very artistically placed and made for some nice images.
Thanks Brighton council.
Dropping in on the Tates.
While in London I visited both the Tate Britain and the Tate Modern. The highlight of the Tate Britain for me was the Turner Collection. What can I say? I spent several hours in rooms full of Turner paintings.
The drawcard at the Tate Modern was the exhibition of modernist photography from the collection of Sir Elton John. Either Sir Elton has a fantastic eye or he has been very well advised, probably both. This was a major highlight of the trip, so many iconic images I have been seeing in books and online all my photography life; Brassai, Dorothea Lange, Kertesz, Rodchenko, Man Ray to name but a few.
Spending some time sitting in a quiet room of Rothko paintings wasn’t bad either.
During my few days in London, I walked around the streets of Soho. It still has character but is no longer full of bars, strip clubs, etc. The locals are complaining it is becoming gentrified and bland.
I dropped in to The Photographer’s Gallery at 16-18 Ramillies St, Soho to see the Roger Mayne exhibition. Mayne was known for his black and white images documenting life in the streets of the 1950s and 1960s.
Mayne died in 2014 and this was the first exhibition of his work since 1999. Once again, I learned the value of seeing original prints instead of images in books or on line. Unfortunately I couldn’t hang around long enough to see the exhibition of Gregory Crewdson’s work.
I am a member of the Point Cook Camera Club, a recent club competition had the set subject of “Panoramas”. It has been a while since I have tried to make a proper panorama. I have read the theory about tripods and nodal points and such, and all that hard brain work put me right off them, not to mention having to join them together yourself in the early days before Photoshop introduced its Photomerge function.
My first attempts were made with PTGui, a very clever program but one that was a little beyond my skills at the time. One of the issues for me at the time was trying to deal with lens distortion, never did manage to get that right.
Not long back I read an article on Luminous Landscape by Kevin Raber, explaining a simple method for taking the images needed for a successful panorama. It semed easy enough so I had a few tries at it.
For the camera club competition, I took two panormas, one at a favourite shooting place near Geelong; Dog Rocks. And another on the outskirts of Werribee. The Dog Rocks panorama has 7 images and the Werribee Badlands panorama is 9 images stitched together using the Photomerge function in Photoshop.
