Suburban....

...Zeitgesit? Tweaked using Photoshop, and Lobster

Facing East

Once again, captured that lovely late afternoon light that Melbourne is so capable of producing, then of course needed to be emphasised using Lobster and Photoshop, which by the way went swimmingly, thank you to all particpants, I hope you gained something form the whole experience as I know I did, don't be shy keep in touch, and share your images with me and the world at large.

Drive-by shoot

One of my secret hobbies is to do this — dangerous as it is! Sometimes this approach yields interesting results. Even without the Photoshop tweaks, minor as they are.

Elizabeth St. corner Latrobe....

Looking up, resized in Photoshop.

Nick Cave at Festival Hall

Last night saw myself and Nik at the Nick Cave concert, at what was my only Festival Hall concert in 20 odd years. Festival Hall in Melbourne was the place to be seen and the venue of many a sell out sports or entertainment event for decades.Probably best known for staging professional wrestling and boxing matches, many a riot started at The Hall, and some even spilled into the street and parking lot, none last night thank god, but as always a couple of idiots nearly spoiled it for others.
Festival Hall was built by John Wren in 1915. Rebuilt in 1956 after being burnt down the year before, it was the Olympic Games venue for gymnastics and wrestling. In the 1950s and 1960s it became an entertainment centre, with famous appearances including Bill Haley, Frank Sinatra and the Beatles. By the 1990s it had been overtaken by more spectacular venues, but the Wren family remained in ownership. The last time I was there, was to see Billy Joel, probabaly in the early 80's. Lots of things have changed since then, the most obvious being the licensing laws, see the two beers in my hand. (Two because I knew I would never find Nikki again if I wandered off later to get another beer.)

(Teaked in Photoshop of course)

Some of the other less obvious things were the technological ones, and no Nick Cave wasn't using a radio mike. Mobile phones. Yes folks people were snapping away madly at the concert, with their phones, I had a go at one stage, but the light levels were too low and by the time Nick Cave came on I was too taken away by the moment to bother pulling mine out again. Digital cameras were out and about too. I didn't take mine in as I wasn't sure about security, and had no intention of having mine cloaked or being generally hassled by the folks on the doors. At one stage I was convinced that I saw someone videoing a couple of songs with a small digital still camera!

I can't for the life of me, remember the song listing, but I do remember being impressed by the level and quality of sound, you know you're at a Rock 'n Roll gig, when you can feel bass drum in your shins and in the floor - awesome! The crowd didn't seem to me to be THAT up to speed with Nick's repertoire as the crowd reacted the most to some of the earleir stuff, one of which was so old I didn't know at all, Nik my wife who's been a ‘Cave fan’ longer than I've known her, went off with the crowd, but all the other songs I knew and enjoyed. The crowd while it seemed large to me wasn't overwhelming and if I really HAD to I could have found the bar and bought a beer or two. Boy though by the end of the night my feet were killing me!

As we left we caught up with the lovely Ed 'n Cindy, who, even though we knew were going to be at the concert, didn't manage to locate till the end, and as it turns out, were a mere 3 or 4 meters away from us at the front of the stage, the whole time! Nik grabbed a bottle of water at the nearest Kebab van on the way to the cars then it it was off home, I'd come straight from work. Driving home I played the ‘The Lyre of Orpheus’ and when it came to the track ‘O Children’ I had to wave an arm out the car, the way Nikki had been waveing her arms to the song at the concert. All up a great night was had, by all concerned especially my gorgeous wife Nikki!

Blue?

To some the camera has an albeit mistaken belief that it holds some form of objective power, to reveal more than it can hide, if this is the case, what does this image reveal?
A colour one we call blue and a light squiggle in the on the bottom right. Not much else.
The colour is what draws me to this image, and even though it has been tweaked slighhtly in Photoshop, this is pretty much the colour it was when I downloaded from my Nikon Coolpix 5400.

Autumn Light

Despite Autumn's alleged onslaught, we are still having gorgeous days.

Image manipulated with Photoshop and Lobster

Daylesford Fotobiennale 2005

I'm pretty excited about the upcoming Daylesford Fotobiennale, running from the 3rd of June to the 3rd of July 2005, in particular I may even add some work to the ‘Little pictures, Big Ideas’, show as well, stay tuned for that one?

The Magic hour

Possibly one of the last times this term/semester I'll get a chance to go out and shoot as my fancy takes me. Thankfully the light was awesome all day, and as I was out and about during the magic hour I captured this shot, hand held I might add.

3~4

Over the weekend managed to capture that beautiful late afternoon light, tweaked in Photoshop of coure, using Lobster as well

New Photography book

I just received my latest Amazon purchase, Frederick Sommers' most recent publication, Photography, Drawing, Collage.

I was fortunate on a recent trip to the United States we stopped in at the CCP in Arizona, they have an extensive collection of his prints there. And I spent a lot of time there looking at his wonderful images that are meticloulsy printed. The reproductions in this book are some of the best I've ever seen, and of course the book is peppered with gems of quotes like this one

“ …The value of a work of art or scientific formulation lies in the precision of positional relationships”
From a talk given at the Art Institute of Chicago, October 1970, revised June 1983

Sunrise 05.05.04

Most mornings, I'm up before the sun comes up, this morning it looked like this

Don't call me a Geek!

Are these guys geeks or what, a software install party!

DILO - a flickr game

Recently participated in a mini DILO (Day in the Life of) over at flickr. Normally these fall on the summer and winter solstices, but the admins of this group decided on a mini DILO as the past couple had occured during a week day. Needless to say it sounded easy at first but by about 4:00pm I was struggling.

My day got off to it's usual start, light breakfast, checked out flickr and off we went for a not so typical brunch with my Mother who just happened to be in town. Brunch was at Southbank and we decided to park in North Melbourne, and walk the 6 or so kilometres there. I shot from the hip on the way, and got a couple of nice surprises but took my time on the way back where I got a couple of good ones too. The saving grace was the couple of junk/antique shops we hit towards the end as well, which in some ways in not THAT different for us on a Sunday.

Here's my favourite image from the day.

All up I shot 180 plus frames, and managed to edit this down to about 36 or so shots for my DILO submission.

As an aside, flickr is real slow this morning, hmmm popularity has it's price?

Fed Square, night shoot, 2005.04.28

Instead of images of/from China, here's an image from a recent visit to my favourite Arcitechtural site in Melbourne, Federation Square. More images of course over at flickr, in my Fed Sqaure set

No manipulation in Photoshop at all, other than resizing for this page.

Ripper of a week...

This week is shaping up to be a ripper of a week. I am spending today out and about with my students doing a gallery crawl, a good friend is returning to Oz, for a short holiday, today, and I'll be having a lovely Sunday brunch with my family, and the I'll be involved in a flickr dilo on Sunday as well, so all in all plenty to look forward too.

The NGV has several shows on at the moment of note.

The gallery crawl is one of the few perks in an other wise poorly paid (but rewarding) job, here's what we are seeing.

• Bill Henson's 30 year photographic retrospective
• Metroplis, a screen based exhibition based on "The City"
• Japanese Studio Photography
• Several smaller galleries around town

I actually got a chance to see the Henson show on a recent trip to Sydney, and was suitably impressed. His early work was I suspect presented for the first time the way he envisaged it. A mss of images displayed Salon style, overwhelming the visitor in it's density of human faces, moving out from the darkness. In Sydney the work was presented chronologically in several rooms each room being used to represent a ‘period’ in his work. This will be one show that will require several revisits I'm sure and thankfully they are selling multi-visit tickets.

Sunday's dilo, or Day in the Life of is a small game that many folks on flickr get involved with, it simply involves shooting all day and uploading the pics to flickr with the tag, dilo. It's an interesting way to get an insight into other people's lives. You post five of your best on the actual dilo page and the rest are set up in your own personal stream for folks to find and look at.

Kodak slips further in the Photography business

This snippet of info from my nifty little app called Net Newsreader, I have simply cut and pasted but it sdoes all the hard work reads all my RSS subscriptions for me and all I do is skim the headlines and pick and choose what I explore furhter, no more surfin' for me.

Kodak reports first quarter losses

Despite a growth in the digital arena, Kodak has reported a net loss of $142 million, or 50 cents per share, compared with net income of $21 million, or 7 cents per share, in the first quarter of 2004. Sales also fell by 3% to $2.83bn from $2.92bn in the same period last year. Kodak Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Daniel Carp says, "While the first quarter's performance was disappointing, such short-term volatility is to be expected as we transform Kodak into a digital company."

Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com) 23/04/05 dpreview

Mobile Phone camera and shopping trolleys

Finally have sorted my mobile phone camera image transfer woes, using my new Sony Ericsson K700i, cameraphone, in conjunction with my new bluetooth enabled G4 iBook, I can wirelessly move the files across to the HD and from there edit and or upload to anywhere I like.

Currently I have a couple of sets of images made using these kinds of cameras, shopping trolleys, and portraits.

This kind of camera may well allow me to consider an image a day approach now perhaps a second blog?

Here's a sample of what I'm doing, for the odd occasion flickr is down.

I love the way these cameras so easily distort what is presented to them, the resulting images from this lo-fi camera, conjure up all sorts of ideas about photography and veracity

Hong Kong street Photo

Continuing my series of images from our recent trip to Hong Kong

Tram boy arrested at gunpoint: witness

From the Age newspaper

A motorist has told of the "pretty brutal" arrest of a 15-year-old boy who allegedly took a tram for a joy ride last night.

David Iliff told theage.com.au about eight police cars surrounded the tram, which was at the intersection of Glenferrie Road and Wellington Street, and carrying about 10 passengers.

"A number of police officers had guns drawn and were yelling at the boy inside the tram to open the doors," he said.

Mr Iliff said a female passenger protested when the boy was pushed against a seat and handcuffed.

"She pointed at them (the police) and yelled something ... but the police were pretty angry as well and sort of pushed her aside," he said.

"Once things settled down, they talked to the witnesses, but first of all it was pretty brutal."

Mr Iliff said he was initially shocked by the police's actions."From their point of view I'm sure they didn't know if he had a gun or whether he was trying to kill people, so I guess it was appropriate, but at the same time, it did seem excessive."

Victoria Police were not immediately available for comment.

The boy allegedly drove the new low-floor Citadis tram from its depot in South Melbourne up to 30 kilometres, police said.

Detective Senior Constable Barry Hills, of the police transit division, said the boy admitted his obsession with trams during a police interview.

"He's a nice lad, he's a good lad. I think his obsession just got the better of him," he said.

Senior Constable Hills said the boy went on a test run on Friday night, stealing a tram from the South Melbourne depot and driving it to Port Melbourne, back to South Melbourne, then back again.

It was an escapade reminiscent of Nadia Tass' 1986 film Malcolm, in which an eccentric inventor played by Colin Friels loses his job as a tram driver after a joy ride on the tram tracks.

Last night, the boy allegedly drove out of the depot about 8.50pm and went to Port Melbourne. He then used the tram's directional rod to change the tracks and divert the tram towards Clarendon Street in South Melbourne.

Police said he altered the tracks again to travel down Glenferrie Road, where he picked up passengers.

Constable Hills said police were alerted to the theft by staff at Yarra Trams' control room about 9.20pm. No passengers called police.Senior Constable Hills said passengers only became suspicious of the boy, who was wearing a jacket similar to a tram driver's, just before his arrest.

"There was a couple of moments when the driver overshot the stops and was confronted by a couple of passengers, and that's when they've become a little wary."

Three sets of keys are needed to operate the Citadis trams.

Senior Constable Hills said the keys were believed to have been stolen three weeks ago from the Box Hill depot, but said the theft was not reported. "It does take considerable effort, time and concentration to drive these trams." Senior Constable Hills said the 15-year-old used the test run on Friday night to work out how to use the complicated braking system.He rejected suggestions the boy may have been taught about trams by well-meaning drivers, believing he learned simply by observing the drivers at work.

Although he stressed the potential serious consequences of the theft, Senior Constable Hills said the boy should not abandon his dream of being a tram driver. "I believe that if he stays on the straight and narrow then it's certainly not going to affect his future," he said.

The boy, from Sunshine, was taken to Boroondara police station and charged with nine offences, including two counts each of theft of trams and conduct endangering life.

He was bailed to appear before the Melbourne Children's Court on June 20.