Found Stones
One
Round and thin ground - not polished – sheens from within
colour the light grey of clouds that promise but bring no rain
Pale orange flecks spittle across its face
But these come after
My first thought?
That it would go far
skipped across the smooth surface of a dam or creek
maybe to the other side
maybe to be held again
maybe
The Other
A rough kite shape, smaller
Quartz intrusion speaking of a violent past
struck by the cross formed
I don’t believe in the crucifix
But I believe in space and time intersecting
A singularity we call the present
Both
Seen amongst millions
Pondered, chosen
Carried up from the sea and
Placed atop a wooden table,
Talked about - discussed and played with
Then one forms a circle around the other
Yes, that works
They’re together again
Found stones
(Ness, May 2011)
12 Minutes with a Super Moon
I am always struck by the saturation quality of moonlight. The colours have a rich and understated vibrancy.
This is a small bay on the far south coast of New South Wales captured using only the light of the moon ... the Super Moon of 6th may 2012 to be exact. The exposure time is 12 minutes @f/9 and you can see there was plenty of light ... and colour! Our eyes simply don't see the colours of moonlight ... they're physically incapable of doing so. In fact seeing by moonlight is perhaps the closest we will ever come to naturally viewing a scene in monochrome. (In brief, it's to do with the rods and cones that lie in our retinas and something I will do a separate post about.) It was close to midnight and although the surf was pounding in on a king tide (presumably to do with the perigee of the moon) with waves reaching to a couple of meters from the tripod ... the long exposure has effectively smoothed everything out.
About the 'Super Moon'
The Moon’s distance from the Earth is not always the same due to the elliptical shape of the orbit and variations in the gravitational attraction between the Moon, Earth and Sun. When a full moon occurs close to the perigee of the Moon (the point of its closest approach to the Earth) we observe a “super moon” phenomenon.There are anywhere from 4 to 6 super moons every year, not all appear as intense or last as long in their 'super' effect. The perigee of the Moon on the 6th of May was the most powerful in years and caused many discussions in scientific circles. There was even a claim circulating that a Super Moon contributed to the 'sinking of Titanic' (wtf!) occurring as it did 100 years after the sinking in April 1912 ... my mind boggles when I reflect that some people believe this!
What about you? Did you see the Super Moon? Did you watch the moonrise or do anything special other than perhaps go outside and look and think 'hey, it does look a little bigger'?
Perfume
Finding the Spot
A couple of weeks ago I attended an artists retreat down on the far south coast of New South Wales. I had my oculus, my glass sphere with me and I was down at the beach before dawn each morning looking for that time when light and landscape come together to create something breathtaking.
Sometimes a picture seems to assemble itself before my eyes. I get this feeling as a scene unfolds, like a premonition, that right this moment or very soon after something beautiful is happening in front of me or 'just over there'. Perhaps it is simply my mind opening itself to the possibility of beauty ... that I am allowing myself to be open to what is unfolding in front of me. Other times I can be surrounded by a terrific scene and light but I'm oblivious to it as I search for something within it ... something beyond it. Those times I'm looking to scratch an itch I can't reach ... I know there's something there but I can't see it ... yet! This picture is a rare one of me doing just that.
This is a picture of me taken by my friend Helga as I walked across the wave platform in the light just after dawn holding my oculus out in front of looking for the spot ... in my left hand I'm cradling my camera and my back pocket holds my cable release and intervalometer. I have an obsessive gleam in my eye that speaks of concentration and an early start. I am surrounded by superb golden dawnlight that the ocean spray is carrying in foggy curtains around me ... beautiful!
About five minutes after this picture was taken I was taking the photograph below (which blogged about here) ... I had found the spot ... I had seen beyond and now I'm sharing it with you.
How about you? Do you search, often surrounded by beauty but oblivious to it? Maybe you find yourself standing inside a tree heavy with spring blossom and buzzing loudly with bees looking for that bloom that speaks for the tree ... that speaks for all of spring? The leaf that speaks for Autumn... do you find yourself finding the spot?
I'd like to know :-)
The Beauty of Film
I recently attended an artists retreat with some lovely people. There were photographers, sculptors, painters, poets and writers and some great cooks amongst them! We spent three nights at an old house on the far south coast of New South Wales. It's there that many of the photographs featured in recent posts were taken. When I get around to it I'll even publish them all in the same place when I can get my head around all the great things that went on there.
For this post though I wanted to talk about the beauty of film. I took two cameras to the retreat; my Nikon digital and my Mamiya medium format camera. I got the medium format negatives and scans back from the lab this week. When I first started out in photography there was none of this digital business. I learned to develop my own negatives and darkroom techniques for turning those negatives into photographic prints ... the smell of acetic acid still holds a dear place in my heart as does the smell of a freshly opened pack of film. It's a wonderfully analog process - layers of light sensitive emulsions on a clear base change chemically when exposed to light. I like to think that my post-processing of my digital pictures for the most part mimics what I could do in the darkroom albeit on a much compressed time scale. I rarely manipulate my images much beyond tonal controls and cropping anyways. While I have embraced the digital revolution and all the whizzbangery it offers the modern photographer ... there's something about shooting film (apart from its smell).
The saturation and dynamic range surpasses that of my digital camera (a D80) and the rendering of detail is a wonderful thing to look at. In the photo of friend Greer presented above I had a roll of (very out of date) Fujichrome NPC160 film ... we're talking EXP:2007(!) which was given to me by another friend who'd had the film in his fridge since then. The negs came back beautifully. I took a similar shot with the Nikon but it doesn't have anywhere near the presence that this one has. Another consequence of shooting film is how much you value each frame. I get between 12-15 frames from a roll of medium format. I have to remind myself that it's both not very many and ample! That and how spoiled I have become with auto-focus, adjustable ISO and instant preview. When shooting 35mm I still find myself instantly checking the back of the camera to see how the shot came out ;-)
How about you? Are you purely digital? Did you transition from film to digital or have you only ever known digital? Have you returned to the beauty of film or picked it up anew? I'm interested in this ... do tell!
Space and Spirit Both
Faint breeze and sunshine
cricket chirp and flycatcher calls overlay the oceans rhythmic white roar
occasional slap
unexpected silences - an absence
I stare until the scene turns white - sound painting abstracted spikes and swirls
I think of you then, distant
in space and spirit both
yet in that instant - that void
I am connected by more than I know
(Written at Ness 6 May 2012)
Turning the World Upside Down
I carry a beautiful thing around in my camera bag. An oculus. It's a clear glass sphere and it changes the way I look at the world. It doesn't look amazing on it's own ... in fact it can appear quite dull but sometimes I hold it up in front my face and it takes my breath away. Through the properties of refraction, it renders any scene into a tiny world ... a tiny, totally in-focus world. An upside-down, totally in focus world. In the image above taken just after dawn on the far south coast of New South Wales, I rested the sphere atop a rock looking out toward the waves. The fine bedding of the Ordovician mudstones of this part of the coast have been buckled and twisted and rent vertically in places. I brought the sphere (and it's refractive contents) into focus and rendered the background blurred. It looks great right way up but I like to rotate my oculus images through 180 degrees to aid the viewer's appreciation of the scene. The little sun flare off the edge of the sphere is one of my favourite parts of the image.
In the image below, I'm holding the sphere with my left hand and shooting with my right. It was taken in coastal forest. This image reminds me that the world is a fragile place and one that we literally hold in our hands as a place to nourish and feed ourselves.
I'm fascinated with different ways of looking at ordinary things. Refraction and refraction images are just two.
What about you? Do you carry anything special in your bag? Something that turns your world upside-down or causes you to look at the world in a different way?
Pictures with Words
A quick post to confirm that I have changed the title of this blog to 'Pictures with Words' to better encapsulate what I'm doing with this blog. After 51 posts covering all sorts of things I feel I'm moving toward pictures and the way I feel about them ... how they move me and increasingly, short pieces of prose or poetry bringing forth my thoughts involved in their creation. I reckon the new title reflects this idea and direction better than 'The Lushpup Blog' ;-)
My sincere apologies if this change means you temporarily lose me - I'm sure we'll find each other again!
I think it's a step in the right direction don't you?
Sincerely,
Geoffrey
The Monaro Plains
THE MONARO PLAINS - Anthony Lawrence (May 2012) Wooden crosses a vanishing point wired for talk a watercolour bleed of low clouds, windbroken pines a charcoal rubbing of lost connections ~ you are here passing through uncoupled is a state of rhyme what the eye reveals the mouth extends in clipped syllables depth of field a black rain squall of starlings on a hill Words: Anthony Lawrence (Used with author's permission) Picture: Geoffrey Dunn
I love light - I really do
I love light - I really do ... especially in Autumn as the leaves turn and the light takes on a crisper feel. I love that moment each year when you step outside and realise that the light has changed ... that it's now striking at a different angle, it's quality altered ... that the season has moved on - even if you haven't. Soon that crispness in the air will become deeper bone-chilling cold and the light will become weaker yet somehow clearer. In south-eastern Australia we have four definite seasons though the local indigenous peoples recognised six. They were a little more in tune with their natural world than I think we are.
Here in Australia, we have amazing light. Light that illuminates with a clarity and intensity I've seen in very few other places ... South Africa is one. They have the endless sky too.
What about you? What is the light like where you live?
Motionless
Sometimes, when I feel like I'm not going anywhere ... not being creative ... that I'm somehow fixed in a defined space, I remember the first time I lay on the ground as a child and imagined the world turning. How as it spun about its axis or hurtled through space I had to dig a little deeper with my fingers to stop from flying off ... that crazy tilting cartwheel feeling. I remember then that stillness is an illusion, that we are never motionless ... never perfectly still ... that we are all moving even if it's a slow drift on an unseen tide.
Petroleum
Petroleum
windswept leafy autumn chill
fuel that warmed machine's internals
now drained
tanks vapour filled
hollow booming - signage an empty promise
abandoned a day and already unkempt
fenced, dug up and replaced
the land given a new life
and on future warm summer evenings
when myriad people sip and gaze
from fresh balconies
a faint waft of petroleum
hangs sweetly in the air
-May 2012
Our local service station has finally closed. It marks the end of an era for this little suburb. One of the last small servos to go. The bicycle shop - it was handy having one just down the road - closed up months ago. I was on my way back from a family shoot on Sunday and saw that the place had finally closed ... so I stopped and took some photographs. The signage came down yesterday morning. I know all things must change and the world moves on but I was sad to see it go. Soon it will be as though nothing was there. Units will be up in a year. Nothing will remain except the faint waft of petroleum hanging sweetly in the air.
What about you? Do you document the things that change before they change?
AfterDARK at the Gardens
On Saturday evening I went along with the family to a special members event at the Australian National Botanic Gardens (ANBG). The rainforest gully walk has been kitted out with low wattage LED lighting funded by the 'Friends of the Botanic Gardens' and Saturday night was the first time they were showing it off. There were deleicious canapes and a glass of wine at the Visitors Centre before we were split into small groups of ten or twelve. Wind-up torches were handed out by our guides and, dressed warmly, we set off.
Being a regular visitor to the Gardens I was loving being in there at night. Familiar paths and trees took on new life as they illuminated only by our torch beams. Our guide Marion took us on a walk through the eucalypts before we entered the rainforest gully .
Wow!
The place was literally transformed. The mist jets which keep the gully moist and assist in maintaining an ambient temperature above freezing came on periodically and it was like walking through cloud ... really thick cloud. Lights have been set into both sides of the boardwalk so you know where the path goes and coloured lights have been placed in the garden beds as well. I had brought my tripod and camera with me ... I decided on a single lens for the night: my Nikkor 20mm f/2.8D ... a little jewel of a lens. I wanted something quite fast and wide and my tripod enabled the longer exposures you see here.
The display looked fantastic and hats off to the 'Friends' program who both envisaged and funded the lighting program through subscription and donation.
There are plans to make this a regular event called the AfterDARK Firefly Tour begins officially in June. I suggest you get yourself along for a unique experience.
When: Sat 2 June I Sat 7 July I Sat 4 Aug
Time: 6pm and 7pm Tours
Cost: $19 adults; $14 concession (+booking fee) | Bookings essential 6250 9540 | Online bookings available from 8th May
This post has also been blogged over at The RiotACT
Canberra in Autumn
This is what happens when you put your fisheye on the ground looking up and carefully balance a circular polarising filter (that's too small for the lens) on top. Taken in the grounds of the Australian National University down near Sullivan's Creek. Astute viewers will score a bonus Telstrayama (the telecommunications tower atop Black Mountain in the center of Canberra) at the the three o'clock position.
Yes, the sky really is that blue in Canberra in Autumn and Spring ... they would both have to be my most favourite seasons.
Tell me, what's your favourite season?