Victoria – Thought Factory

walking/photography

April 10, 2022

Whilst walking for 7 days on the various trails at Wilsons Promontory National Park in Victoria with the Retire Active SA Bushwalkers group I tried to link walking with photography. It had been 20 years since this group had been to Wilsons Promontory, so it was a big occasion for them. About 65-70 people went and they walked in the 4 different grades of walking in terms distance and difficulty. I was in the C grade to allow myself time to do photography whilst bush walking.

It had been about 10 years since I’d been to Wilsons Promontory and I didn’t remember that much as I was a day tourist then, rather than a bushwalker /photographer We stayed in a farm cottage just outside the park’s entrance and made day trips into the park. I remember going to Tidal River and Squeaky Beach and photographing the rocks along the side of the road up to Mt Oberon.

The inspiration is Eleanor Dark’s bushwalking in the Blue Mountains as well as Manning Clark walking almost every line in his A History of Australia. So is the historian Tom Griffiths, a keen bush walker, who like Clark, is keenly aware that the past is alive and shifting in the present. Their quest for historical understanding helps to inform a contemporary photography.

It is difficult to successfully combine walking and photography with a bushwalking group because their emphasis is on walking, rather than a creative walking art project. So the photography is necessarily limited to digital snaps whilst walking or making photos (digital and film) before and after the daily walks. My photographic emphasis was on the latter.

archives, landscape, Victoria

Otways: Archival

March 30, 2021

I have arranged to go on a large format field trip with the Melbourne based Friends of Photography Group (FOPG) in the Great Otway National Park in and around Lorne. Whilst preparing for this field trip by looking at Google maps I remembered that I had photographed in the western edge of the Otway National Park in 2016. This was on an earlier roadtrip that included Canberra, Ballarat and Melbourne.

We were on the return leg of the roadtrip and stayed a couple of nights with the standard poodles at some upmarket seaside cottages near Johanna Beach that overlooked a farm. It was a short walk through the campsite and the sand dunes to the surfing beach, and a small drive across the Great Ocean Road to the edge of the forest along the Old Ocean Rd.

large format, trees, Victoria

Feature: large format #1

March 10, 2021

I have just spent a lot of money on buying film from B+H in New York. It arrived within a week of ordering, which rather surprised me. I thought that it would take at least twice as long with the international border restrictions due to the Covid -19 pandemic. However, film photography, and especially large format colour photography, is becoming increasingly expensive. The costs, such as the ever rising price of film, the various customs/transport/GST charges, and the post processing at a commercial lab such as Atkins in Adelaide, certainly add up over a year. The cost is probably around, or even over, $A2000 a year.

So I have to do something with the large format images, since many of those that are not part of an exhibition, just sit on my computer’s hard drive, and never see the light of the day. I did think of starting a large format blog to justify the expense, time and difficulty in using large format cameras. As I have far too many blogs–and there is the wonderful Australian based view camera blog run by David Tatnall — I have decided to post some of the large format images here on a regular basis.

I plan to post them every now and again and to do so as a feature of the blog. This initial post reaches back into the archives circa 2015. I am not sure if I ever posted these images before. I didn’t really know what to do with them. For some reason I haven’t posted them on my low profile tree or Rhizomes blog.

Ballan Forest, Victoria, Australia, 2015

The picture above was made with a 5×4 Linhof Technika IV several years ago. I was staying at Creswick in Victoria to check out the Ballarat International Foto Biennale in 2015. Though I don’t remember much about the various exhibitions in the biennale, I do remember photographing in the Ballan eucalyptus forest. Or maybe it was the Bungal State Forest near Ballan.

nature, rocks, Victoria

Mt Arapiles: 2 photos

January 16, 2020

In this post I mentioned my weekend trip to Mt Arapiles in Victoria with the Melbourne-based Friends of Photography Group (FoPG) in September 2019. Since then I have developed and scanned the 5×4 colour negatives and post-processed them in Lightroom. I have yet to develop and scan the black and white photos that I made on the trip. The Adelaide Art Photographers 1970-2000 book and the Mallee Routes exhibition have taken up all my time.

One of the areas that I did explore that weekend was Mitre Rock, which is an isolated outcrop to the north of Mt Arapiles that looks out onto farmland:

Though I walked around Mitre Rock and went back several times I only made a couple of photos of this western wall of the outcrop. I didn’t make many 5×4 photos that weekend. I was finding my feet, as it were, as I didn’t know the area at all and I was more focused on continuing on to Murtoa in the Wimmera to make 5×4 photos for the Mallee Routes exhibition in December.

critical writing, landscape, Victoria

Nature photography at Mt Arapiles

September 12, 2019

As mentioned in this post on the Mallee Routes blog I recently linked up with the Melbourne-based Friends of Photography Group (FoPG) for a weekend photo trip to Mt Arapiles in western Victoria. As mentioned in this post on the Encounter Studio photoblog the FoPG are primarily large format photographers of the natural landscape. In Australia landscape photographers have traditionally understood landscape photography in terms of the tradition of unpeopled or wilderness photography, no doubt due to the historical significance of the Tasmanian wilderness photographers.

It appears that the contemporary impetus and centre of the landscape genre of photography has shifted from Tasmania to Melbourne, Victoria. This is largely due to David Tatnall’s influence on nature conservation in Victoria through his landscape photography and Ellie Young at Gold Street Studios in Trentham East, Victoria hosting the annual get together of large format photographers and offering the alternative process workshops.

Have the conceptual underpinnings of wilderness photography in Australia changed with this shift? In the Tasmanian version (eg., Olegas Truchanas, Peter Dombrovskis and others) of this tradition of wilderness photography was associated with Romanticism, nature as redeeming force, uninhabited places worthy of pilgrimage that are also difficult to access, the European aesthetic tradition of the picturesque and anti-development. Their ethos was that if people could see the beauty of Australia’s wild places then they may be moved to protect them: to save a valuable environment under threat.