Lucie Thorne - The Front - 24th February 2013
I had the pleasure, in between passing cells of heavy rain, to see Lucie Thorne perform at my local pub/gallery/cafe The Front yesterday afternoon. Lucie sings finely crafted stories of longing with aching melody and feeling. The Front provides an intimate setting to see performers and Lucie did not disappoint.
Apparently she's become quite famous!
You can visit her here.
Lucie Thorne - The Front - 24th February 2013
Poised
as I ride the wave
the rush and churn of new over old
I am still.
centered and reflecting a blue sky
I love gerberas.
Towards The Within
On a monochrome kick.
Step into the white mist at the foot of the stairs ...
Sometimes I find colour distracting. When I feel like this I like to strip the colour out ... bring the photograph back to basics so speak. Let tone and contrast and form tell their stories of how they work together to create something your eye can interpret as clouds, as stairs ... as a face ... as light and dark. Strip off the gloss and the patina ... return to an essence.
2012 PlusOne Collection
Found out yesterday that my photograph Feel the Wind was selected for the print edition of the 2012 PlusOne Collection.
It's exciting and it seems I'm in esteemed company ... the 299 other images selected are all fantastic. I've pre-ordered my copy and I'm looking forward to seeing it in April :-)
Great collection, great cause. Check it out.
Elsewhere
Time spent elsewhere. If I start to type will the words flow?
I honestly don't know...
It's been three months and now it's the last day of 2012. It's been an intense period for me and I'm looking forward to what 2013 will bring. As some of you will know, my partner and I decided to split amicably in August. We'd been together for over thirteen years and while I'm not going to go into the details here suffice to say that we both want different things in life and neither of us can see it happening if we stay together. Things are friendly and all but it's still tricky at times. So I've been busy renovating my flat and moved in two weeks ago. The renovations took much longer than planned, thanks largely to an oft-times absent builder, but it's worked out well with end of the school year and Christmas holidays. The flat's turned out very nicely and I'll do a whole post on that soonly. It doesn't feel quite so much like a hotel suite anymore ;-)
Astute readers of this blog will have noticed I've been very quiet creatively and while I've been taking some pictures I've not had a workstation to process them on until I moved in. That said, I have done a couple of commissions for Living Magazine;
pimped a friends Cadillac
got flown to Adelaide for a weekend of following two gorgeous musicians around the Adelaide Hills (the images are beautiful but awaiting my workflow mojo to return ;-) )
On the way there, I stuffed around in the airport;
I did go outside ... to Sydney even;
Wirestorm, one of the large pictures from last year's exhibition sold for $2,000 at a local gallery ... I was quite pleased about that :-)
Two of my photographs were selected for book covers;
Canberra by Paul Daly
and a dragon-fantasy book in Canada ... the title of which I am unable to currently recall
![...dragon tail... [REDUX]](http://geoffreydunn.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/20080609_NIKON_D80__DSC8667-Edit.jpg)
The Australian National Botanic Gardens featured my work when I photographed their AfterDark night garden experiences
I finally entered the smartphone fraternity and spend many, many hours playing with it. It takes decent pictures too. I've spent a good deal of the past three months drooling over the new Nikon bodies but came to the realisation that if I'd bought one then it would pretty much sit in its box... the time is approaching though!
On the way I lost track of some friends and I honestly don't know what happened with some of them ... things went quiet and just nothing ... I didn't have the energy to follow through and all and chase things that seemingly held no return ... my mind really was elsewhere.
Looking back I've been busy and I would oft look at my neglected blog and read through my feeds but have not commented when I felt I had nothing to share back ... it's been kinda like that ... a lot of feeling I had nothing to share back ... not publicly anyways.
If you've read all the way down here ... thank you ... and I wish you the very best of the season and a spectacular 2013. I'm going to be there and I'd love to see you there too.
Geoff
Fade
Fade I had no words today I thought to set words to this image to say what I thought when I created it or it created me ... I never can tell then I realised I remember standing there ... holding the trigger the roar of the ocean the bright dawn light I recall the click of the exposure ending after, I guess, the minutes I asked for that in between I went somewhere to where I do not know but it was peaceful there were no words
Let Me Count the Ways
As you may have guessed by now I'm in love with refraction ... the bending of light through water or glass. This picture is one from a couple of years ago when I was right into refracting patterns through droplets of water. My setup for these consisted of a sheet of glass suspended above the pattern, in this case a frangipani blossom, with droplets placed onto the glass. I adjusted the height of the glass until the pattern was contained within the drop. I particularly liked blurring the background so that it gave the viewer the knowledge that the drop was refracting something much larger behind it. This picture, Let Me Count the Ways, represents the culmination of those efforts and attempts (and failures!) to create something ... an idea ... an essence.
On another note: I'm going away on a family holiday for a week or so and am leaving the internet behind. I won't be visiting your beautiful blogs in that time but I promise to look when I return.
Geoffrey x
Fernland
Fernland
Damp, earthy - a faint musk
Cool, verdant
quiet ... still
Fractal patterns stretch
Unfolding gently, chaos becomes ordinary
repeated
and repeated
and repeated - seeming endlessly
easy to dismiss, to overlook as all alike
they're copies to a point
each unique - new and ancient both
Reaching for the light
As I to you
unfurling in hope that the light will come
Do you see me here in the fernland?
beneath the trees
striving for the dappled
When I find it I thrive
Without it a piece of me dies
(June 2012)
----
I'm not a religious person, let me just state that up front. Sometimes when I look over what I've written, I can see how some of the writing could be viewed that way ... all this striving and longing for light stuff. What I am striving for is a completeness that I don't find in my day-to-day life. A feeling that I glimpse every now and again of a natural patterning (and I emphatically do not refer to design) at once simple and mind-bendingly complex. I see it in the sky, in the forming of clouds or the way light refracts through a freshly rained droplet. Or in this case the fiddle-head of a fernlet reaching through the dark. I see them as beautiful but I also have the rationality to know that it's me who's labeling them that way. That they, in all likelihood would exist and go on without my observations ... or would they? Sounds like a discussion over a glass of wine (or three)! Anyways, enough rambling. Enjoy!
Autumnal Fire
Canberra has had one of the most spectacular autumn displays in years. A combination of the drought breaking last year and a very mild, wet summer. The oaks and maples are still running yellows but the main show met the icy winter blasts that heralded the beginning of winter's grip ... great cold fronts dragging up air from the antarctic. Where there were streets transformed into riotous displays of colour, trees now reach for the sky with branches bare save a few hardy splashes of colour clinging on.
The first picture was taken of a golden ash in full flight using a Lensbaby 3G ... a quirky little lens that can produce outstanding results. The second picture, below, is the back deck after a recent rainshower. You could likely guess what kind of trees we have in the back yard...
For a lot of you it will be late spring or early summer. Canberra, although known as the 'Bush Capital', has many exotic tree species and plantings ... which I find kind of nice as the Euclaypts, being evergreen, aren't renowned for their spectacular seasonal shows. Autumn in Canberra is gorgeous. Do you have native flora where you live? A mix? Is the landscape around you so modified by people as to form a new kind of 'natural' or native?
Chasing Rainbows
At the end of 2011 I had an exhibition of my work showing with a fellow artist at a local gallery. Part of the deal was that we had to 'sit' the gallery during the weekend opening hours. I took the Saturday shift and also took the opportunity to photographically document the show. I was putting the final touches to shutting up the gallery when I heard a clap of loud thunder and the afternoon sun disappeared. I had ridden my bicycle across town to the gallery and was literally about to step out the door when the heavens opened. You could just make out the car park through the rain and hail ... a little supercell ... after all of fifteen minutes it was past and the sun was shining brightly though the rain still falling lightly. I thought "there's got to be a rainbow following that" and I finished locking up, jumped on my bicycle and set off in the sunshiny rain ... I adore sunshiny rain. I love rainbows. Chasing rainbows? Oh yes, let's go!
Steam was beginning to rise from the freshly washed hot roads. A little way down the street and I could see the forming rainbow and quickly thought of places I could go where there wouldn't be any powerlines or buildings. I headed down to the eastern end of Lake Burley Griffin, the lake that runs through the center of Canberra. It's a ten-minute ride from where I am so I ride quickly ... the rainbow's in full blaze when I arrive at my site. I have pretty much all my photogear in the Chariot bike trailer because I had been documenting the show. I put on my Sigma 10-20mm and could see both ends of the rainbow easily within the frame ... (one of the reasons I wanted such a super-wide lens was so I could see both ends of the rainbow) ... not only that but the reflection of the arc in the water at each end. The small island in foreground is bathed in that brilliant storm-light. This picture won me first prize at this year's Royal Canberra Photographic Competition.
I talk often on this blog about those times when a picture simply seems to assemble itself before my eyes ... this was definitely the case here. It was a beautiful day.
Turning the camera around, I shot the scene behind me with my bicycle and trailer, sun behind the building being constructed, pavement shiny wet.
Do you chase rainbows, or storms or clouds or frosts? Have you ever seen a picture forming 'just over there' and raced to capture it?
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
