Christmas in the Alpine National Park

 

This year was a total bypass of Christmas in the traditional sense; no tree, no presents, no turkey, no bon-bons (this probably the hardest loss...no bad jokes to memorise) and no staying at home. Instead camping on top of the world near the Howqua River south of Mount Buller. A week of no mobile reception, minimal fuss, and no christmas stress.

The Bluff. Looking North towards Mount Buller across burnt alpine plains.

The Bluff. Looking Sourth towards Eildon with stunted Alpine Snowgums.

Howqua River Tree Branch. River flooding breaks limbs off trees near the highwater-line.

The Bluff. View across to Mount Stirling.

Square.

 

Reflection in the Shop Window. April 2010. I'm in there somewhere.

Liquid Skies. December 2010. This summer it has of course rained a lot. This from my backyard!

Wide.

 

Storm Over Great Western Vineyards. February 2010. 

Shark Shielded Pier. Brighton. April 2010

Wet Day on Winter Branches. Moyson. June 2010.

Succulents in Abondoned Goldfields. Rhymney. June 2010. 

Sydney Love Affair Four: the final chapter.

 

 

About Sydney.

Dover Heights meets Pacific Ocean. I was so very lucky to have stayed with an amazing friend in an amazing place perched right on these cliffs. The roar of the ocean and the cool breeze was a nice change from inland Carlton!

Tangled Powerline Interchange. Part of my continued fascination with powerlines. This is great, so many jumps and crossovers on the one pole.

Worn Bluestone Steps. Bennelong. Good old durable stone, but multiply 200 years of foot traffic and you have an eternal physical record of those journeys before you.

Sydney Love Affair Three: Panoramas.

Calm on Bondi Beach before Iron-Man race. 2010

Arrival of Night on Sydney City. 2010

Panoramas dont really go to well on the web, and i'm yet to even print one of mine out, but it is nice to see a huge perspective in one image, and despite Sydney's poor weather in my week there, I still found some time to take ok photos.

Sydney Love Affair Two.

 

Sydney Harbour Bridge Walk.

I have never previously been able to find the place where you can just walk across the bridge for free: this time I found it and loved it. Besides the natural beautiful vantage of the Opera House and all that alluring touristy Sydney stuff, i finally had a chance to look at the immensity of the engineering on the bridge and the complexity of all the spans and rivets holding it together. For me, great stuff!

Sydney Love Affair One.

Architectural Sydney.

Brewers Store. The Rocks. Circa 1800.

British Medical Association Building. 1930.

Sirius Public Housing Apartments. The Rocks. Circa 1960's. My favourite Sydney building and a fantastic example of brutalist Architecture from the period.

Melbourne Rooftop Skyline

Melbourne Skyline Circa 2007, from Rooftop Bar. There are some crazy distortions in this image and that is to be expected for such a wide format. I have tried to maintain vertical perspective and warp the horizontal. This is a huge image file on my computer, measuring 2.8 meters wide, made up from 9 portrait images. Was a fairly flat image, there are now three image layers with different blend modes in each, adjusted curves for better contrast in the midtones, put on a low and high overlay gradient, black and white conversion, adjusted levels and finished with a red/orange colour filter over the top to warm the highlights a bit. I usually dont write about how I choose to manipulate my images to get to the end product, but suffice to say most get around an hour of editing to boost it from a flat RAW image file into something quite different, and abstracted from the original.

Marysville Fire Series

 

Bark Peels From Burnt Messmate, 2010. 

Mountain Ash Avenue, 2010.

Burnt Trunks Washed in Winter Snowmelt, 2010 

The scale of the decimated forests is inconcievable until you drive and walk through it, and the completeness of the death of the tall trees is stunning. But the forest now acts in other ways as the tall trees break open in the weather, decay, and pass their space onto the saplings growing below. I chanced upon this road when all the rest were blocked for ski season. This was the road that revealed the true extents of the fires path, and of a new way of looking at the landscape here.

Victorian Winter Coastline

Cape Conran, 2010. Managed to pull up to the campsite at just that right time where evening light gets all warm and soft and beautiful, and the remnants of a mildly wintery day washes across the sky.
Point Hicks, Thurra Camp, 2010. Heavily desaturated to amplify the contrast within the rocks and the sky, the dark rich water of a small river swoops out to meet the sea.

Tectonic Activity

 

Ben Boyd National Park, NSW, August 2010 Amazing geomorphic rock structures all along the Vic/NSW coastline.

Three Organic, Three Archi-textural

Random collection. A focus on my observed details photography. A sampling of fleeting moments recorded and documented through my lens; just one of an infinite number of possible views. These were my moments on the continuum of change which I chose to freeze and record the event, my version of seeing site.
From Top;

Strangler Fig reches its aerial roots to the ground. Brisbane Parkland. 2009
Skyscraper pushes high toward storm clouds. Brisbane 2009.
Red hydrant taps on grey pre-cast concrete wall. Melbourne Museum. 2010
Ancient seabed cracks on top of mountain. Glass House Mountains, Queensland. 2009
Shadows before the leaves started to grow. Melbourne Museum. 2010
Veiny leaf reaches for morning light. Gold Coast. 2009

Winter Beach 6AM

A moody cool morning shot from the beach in Cape Conran in East Gippsland. Low enough light for slow shutter speed to capture the ebb of the waves in frosted movement. I personally love the simplicity and abscence of large features from this scene, so it relies on the geometry in stacking of lines from beach to horizon and the small details within the sand in the foreground.

Flock of Cockatoo's

I once proposed this flock of birds represented the mood I was in.... What sort of mood does it take on for you? I am always trying to capture a few elements of the 'living', as most of my photographs focus on the static around me. It is such a dynamic sight to see the spatial rearrangement within the flock and the amalgamous entity that the flock takes on. Unfortunately the combined sound of these Sulphur Crested Cockys is about the most gratingly horrid aural experience known to man. Enjoy the photo here without the need to suffer the sound.

Beautiful Sand....

The more photographs i take the more I am becoming confident of my style, or at least my interests. Sand and powerlines rate up there pretty high....! This epic landscape (though its hard to guage the landscape as such, as i havent provided it...this abstractive view asks you to visualise the rest) spanned around 50 acres, or maybe 10 MCG's sized expanse. It was a collossal coastal dune system. But the details within...I have never been so amazed at the patterns within these shifting sands, and the record of life left from the night before in the tiny tracks made by beatles and birds scampering across.

Industriality

 

Most of my recent attempts at invigorating my photography has seen me taking photos with a distinct industrial edge. I am awed by the extreme functionalist, operational nature of sites that aim to aggressively maximise production within spatial confines. I am an engineering functionalist at heart still and the beauty inherent in the order of a system trained in dedicated efficiencies is stunning. Top photo is of an Aldi rooftop carpark. Middle split-toned images are from a day exploring the outer western container port areas of Melbourne, its fair to say i had some stares from truckies... The last pic is of a more vintage warehouse in the slowly receding Williamstown/Newport industrial region. It makes me want to design a house that includes those gabled roofs.

Mallacoota Coastline

 

Ok. A return to my holiday a few weeks ago up the South-East Coast. Two different moods captured in the same locale, but the black and white around 30 minutes before sunrise, the other about 1 minute before. They are taken in a remote wilderness area around half an hour south of Mallacoota. I aimed to visually capture the gentle ebb of the washing sea that I had heard all night camping on the cliff above. I am overloaded with with photos from this holiday so more to come...!

Marysville Region Victoria. July 2010. A Belated Post of a winter weekend drive. Hadnt been to see the fire devastated region and i was simply blown away by the scale. Hundreds of kilometers of burnt forests and empty shells of burnt out houses. Yet a year on the forests are regenerating, and it gives a whole different perspective of our tall trees, even if dead.

 

Thurra Camp. Point Hicks, Far East Gippsland.  Sometimes I'm lucky. Thats what I thought when I tramped across this scene. Bleak skies to the horizon, clouds reflecting on still water, and a totally unique local artifact to the local riversystems and tides with lots of tannen in them, resulting in gorgeous banding upon the sand with changing water levels. Finding beauty like this is how i survive. More to come.