I love the shapes in this image. I’d been wandering around Arthur Square for a while, looking at all the buildings and foot traffic that was passing by. I thought the shape of this building was simply brilliant and there was also an art sculpture that was also very funky. I wanted to see if I could combine the two shapes so as people passed by, I’d adjust my camera small amounts at a time.
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When I came up with the idea of visiting Wānaka for a few days between Christmas and New Years, I prepared myself for many things. I was prepared for a lack of parking, a crowded lake front, youths gathering in public places with large amounts of alcohol, expensive jet skis populating the lake, crowded restaurants and take away outlets and loud base thumping music late into the night. In fact, I would have been a little disappointed if all these things weren’t present.
What I discovered was the best way to tackle Wānaka was to do any shopping that was required while the youth population were still in bed (pre midday), have a large lunch and then enjoy the afternoon and evening sunshine. This proved to be a successful tactic, until I decided to eat at Subway at 6:00pm!
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I’m not sure Central Otago and the Lakes District have a bad season. Summer and Winter are seasons of extremes and are completely unique while autumn is full of colour. There are so many great reasons to visit Arrowtown and the colour of autumn is definitely one of them. If you get a chance to explore the Chinese Village by the Arrow River then the autumn leaves, trees and colours will astound you. I was lucky when I took this photo as it was a fairly still day, meaning the only blur I had to worry about was from other visitors. Sometimes blur and movement is okay in photos but on this particular occasion I wanted everything completely still.
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This is what a $63 million (AU) hybrid tensegrity bridge looks like at night. It’s official name is the Kurilpa Bridge, opened in 2009 and it connects Kurilpa Point in South Brisbane to Tank Street in the Brisbane CBD. I’ve included all this information to try and disguise the fact I can’t explain what a tensegrity bridge is. I could have Googled it and included the definition (written in my own words), however there were two reasons why I didn’t. One, I didn’t want to sound condescending and assume other’s didn’t know what it might either. Two, I was more interested in finding out that the aboriginal word Kurilpa means ‘place of water rats.’
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I love the colours in this image. A lot of people ask if the Lake really is that blue and the answer is yes due to it being formed and fed from glaciers and the presences of fine dust in the water from the Dart Valley that refracts light. It can also be extremely moody like here as a storm front bring wind and rain passes over the head of Lake Wakatipu, Pigeon and Pig Island in the Queenstown Lakes District, Otago.
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I wanted to test the video function here on my blog. It’s something I’ve been meaning to try out, that’s loading a video from my phone, straight to my blog. So, here’s a wee video I took while in Belfast at the beginning of 2020. We were at Fibber Magees on Great Victoria Street in Belfast. It was a Monday night and just when it looked like the place was going to close a band started up. After that the crowd steady grew and grew.
The Whiskey Hut & The Mackenzie Backcountry
A Bad Decision / The Whiskey Hut
There are two ways to get to this point in the Mackenzie background, one is walk and the other is fly. Walking takes you up to three days while flying was less than an hour. Which ever way you choose, you end up at 7000ft at this little hut called A Bad Decision Hut/The Whiskey Hut with outstanding views of the surrounding peaks, valley’s and everything in between.
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Isn’t this floor just outstanding! I find it hard to believe there would be a better floor anywhere in Melbourne. This is in the Victorian National Gallery in Melbourne. I was originally aiming to photograph the stain-glass ceiling they have there , but an event was on (held by Christian Dior I think) so I searched out the best possible vantage point to capture the floor instead. I ended up on the second floor, because the view from the second floor gave me the interplay between the brick walls and the coloured floor that I wanted.
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Hong Kong really is an interesting place, particularly you’ve never been there before. Just wondering the streets can be an overload for the senses with all the sights and sounds that greet you. This is one of t he images I took while exploring Woosung Street which was close to where we were staying, however, it only recently occurred to me that I have no idea what these signs say. Until now I’d simply like the photo for all the different textures, colours and shapes that it contained. However, now I’m wondering what the signs say. I’m wondering if someone can help me out?
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It recently occurred to me that I have no idea what the name of this mountain range is. I’m sure I found out at the time I took this picture however for now, the name escapes me. I took this on an early morning stroll around the Glenorchy village when most normal people are asleep. The sun was creeping up between the mountains and it must have struck a gap in the clouds because this spectacular band of light lit up across the mountains above the lake.
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Venturing through a new city while it is raining is a very frustrating exercise due to the fact that knowing where you are requires you to observe your surroundings. This is something that is very difficult to do if you’re trying to duck and weave around rain drops at the same time. This was just the case when I arrived at the former Harland & Wolf shipyard, otherwise known as the Titanic Quarter in Belfast.
Upon arrival, shaking the rain off like a wet dog and noticing the rather large puddle of water I had created, I was suddenly startled with a cheerful ‘good morning.’ Having moved through the entrance way, I was now aware of the sizable water obstacle I had made right in the doorway of Belfast’s popular ‘Titanic Experience.’ Replying to the ‘good morning’ with a sheepish ‘sorry’ I moved towards the direction of the ticket booths. It was at this point that it struck me how appropriate it seemed to be drenched in rain, visiting a museum about a ship that sunk. It also struck me how empty the place was, this was partially by design and partially by hope.
With my ticket in hand and the clock sitting just before 10am, I made my way through the near deserted foyer. The plan had been to arrive early and thus avoid long lines and lots of slow moving crowds. Adding to this plan was the fact that the school holidays had finished and people had returned to work after the December/January festive season. Pleased with the success of this planning and having paid the entry fee while watching people avoid the water jump I had created, I headed for the escalator with a head full of Titanic excitement.
I have to admit I fall into the group of people who find the Titanic fascinating. I also have to admit that I agree with James Cameron. I agree that the Titanic is a love story. I’m not sure it’s the epic, romantic disaster tale that James Cameron showed us in 1997, but it is a love story nonetheless. My visit to Belfast showed me that it’s not a romantic story between two people, it’s much more complicated than that. It’s a story of a love affair, about hopes and dreams, death and survival, of passion, of lust, of beauty, greed, wealth, vision and a promise of a golden age yet to come. It’s a tale of love between a ship, the city it was built in, the people that built her and the families that watched it grow into the sky at the Harland & Wolf shipyard. It’s a Belfast love story.
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Speaking of the Titanic, let’s talk about acts of heroism. Let’s talk about John Jacob Astor IV. In the early hours of April 15th, 1912, just after 1:55am on a clear, star light night Astor stood smoking a cigarette. Having just kissed his darling wife and helped her into lifeboat Number 4, he watched the lifeboat get lowered into the water, having given his own place to two scared and frightened children. You can only imagine what would have been going through his mind as he watched the boat lower without him. Seven days later Astor’s body was found and identified by the initials sewn on the label of his jacket. Found on him was a gold pocket watch which his son Vincent wore for the rest of his life. Some time later, while his wife and unborn child sat in a lifeboat, a survivor claimed to have seen Astor in the water clinging to a raft with supposedly frozen feet. At some point the coldness forced him to release his hold.
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I wanted to create an image where the eye moved across it in one single and deliberate direction. My first thought was of the fence line and the different wires and textures that ran across the scene. The closer I looked the more I noticed how they seemed to break the foreground up into tiny sections, each with their own unique characteristic.
From there I wanted the eye to slowly move up the image having to refocus and adjust on what was there until they reached the top. It’s an image where I wanted to encourage the viewer to have a long stare and ask their own questions about the different textures and shape formations they could see.
I saw all these selves and displays lined with antique car and sign memorabilia. They had been quite deliberately organised and setout. So when I looked at what was on display my eye travelled along the shelf, focusing on different objects and thinking how all the items were related. So, I wanted to take a photo that what’s just like what I was seeing.
The other day I showed this image to someone and they thought I’d lost my mind. I think their words were something like ‘that’s one of the worst photos I’ve seen you take!’
I then explained that it’s a photo about thinking. During the Level 4 Lockdown I would go out walking in the afternoons, generally in the same place but sometimes my routes would vary. On these walks one thing I noticed was the lack of rubbish and it really stuck with me how much cleaner the world seemed. When we moved down to Level 3, I continued my walks when one day I came across a recently discarded McDonalds Cup lying in the grass. I realised how long it had been since I’d seen litter and how ironic it seemed that it was from a recently opened fast food outlet.
As I wanted to create a photo that reflected my thinking and asked the questions I had, the only way I could do this was to create a photo that reflected these thoughts and questions.
Recently, I’ve found myself thinking much more about the structure of a photograph than I used to. Instead of following themes and ideas based around capturing scenes when the light was doing something interesting over a dramatic landscape, I find myself more interested in seeing beauty in everyday objects and creating photographs that ask and answer the questions I have. This train of thought isn’t something new, nor a sudden epiphany but a sudden slow growth of thought that has grown over time.
I began becoming more aware of the space and shape between objects in a photograph some time ago. It was born out of a desire to think about my photographs in a new way, partially out of questions I had about what I was seeing and partially out of wanting to view something differently.
I had been looking at the vernacular uses of photography from the 1960’s and 1970’s and there was something in what I saw that simply made sense. I’ve found that by thinking and looking in terms of snapshots capturing everyday life and subjects that I’ve become much more conscious about the experience of seeing.
Take this photograph I took this afternoon. While some might view this as very boring, personally I found it very interesting the way all the lines, shapes and spaces interconnected with each other and the resulting patterns they made. So, I went about taking a photograph the way I was thinking and seeing.
This image is all about empty space and shapes. The theme of space and silence is one I keep coming back to time and again. Often I’m looking at empty space and silence out in the country however the recent Level 4 lockdown was a wonderful opportunity to explore the theme. I find it fascinating to see all the lines and shapes that can included into the frame when you remove human activity.
I’ve spent the last few days wandering aimlessly around some of Dunedin’s suburbs. I had stuck pretty close to home during the week and come Saturday morning I found myself in need of a decent stretch of the legs. So, the next few days were spent casually strolling through Dunedin streets with no real goal, no real purpose and no real direction apart from to make it back home again.
I ambled down streets that were near empty and casually gazed into shop windows that were filled with novelty cups and t-shirts that were probably once a Christmas gift. There were restaurants, bookstores, furniture stores, car yards and bespoke gift shops, all of which were closed. I stopped outside a hairdresser and for a moment considered starting a new career as a hair model. I imagined myself on some far distant island, drenched in sunlight effortlessly flicking long locks of hair out of my eyes and over my shoulder like they do on the ads for one those TV programmes featuring celebrities I’ve never heard of. After a moment’s day dreaming I continued on my way occasionally stopping to photograph the empty roads, streets and avenues that I seemed to have all to myself.
… from a Small City. My daily musings from Ōtepoti to get you inspired. Read the blog, view the photos, embrace the creativity.
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Arthur Square, Belfast
