Tuesday 13 September 2011

Personal Archive Mining: December 1st, 2005.

A bit of a random mix for this particular day, all photos taken with a Nikon D70s and Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 lens.

The first few shots in the folder were of this classic White 4000, parked at Bolivar, just off Port Wakefield Road. I'm not sure of the year, but it's rare to see any Whites on the road at all, and particularly as a randomly spotted working truck. I was driving my friend Prach's Mitsubishi Magna on the day, and I'm pretty sure I didn't actually get out of the car for this photo, just parked on the side of the road and zoomed in.


After snapping a couple of shots of the truck, I headed a few kilometres further up Port Wakefield Road, and turned off to St. Kilda, parking the Magna in the huge and empty carpark near the playground. Nothing exciting, but the lights and clouds were sort of interesting, and I played around with a few different focal lengths and angles.





I then headed back into Adelaide towards Glenelg, stopping briefly near the Torrens River to take a few photos of horses grazing on the banks.


Going through these photos for the blog post, it was clear that Nikon digital SLRs have come a long way in several regards, particularly in their automatic white balance metering. Many of my earlier daylight shots with the D70s will tend to look somewhat blue or green on overcast days, and with the horse above being brown, I don't think the camera did particularly well. I played around with the colour balance and warmth settings, but it still doesn't look right. At this stage I was still only shooting photos in JPEG format, not RAW, so there's only so much you can do to fix a JPEG file.

I took another shot of the Magna on the walk back to where it was parked, as well as a random tree stump which had an interesting pattern.



I then headed a few minutes down the road to Glenelg, where I snapped some photos of the buildings and expensive boats in the Holdfast Shores building and marina complex.



I'm no boat expert, but these bigger ones tend to cost a fair bit, I'm sure you could've bought a nice house for a similar price to one of these vessels. Just buying a 'parking space' in the Holdfast Shores Marina is rather expensive.






At the time, the Liberty Towers building complex was still under construction. Once it was finished in 2006, I photographed it for the architecture and design firm my dad works for, Woodhead.


 
I then walked across towards Jetty Road and the tram stop.

 
 
 


After spending a few hours wandering around the general Adelaide area taking these photos, I jumped back in the car and drove towards home, stopping at the Delfin Island duckpond on the way back.

It may have been due to me testing a newish lens, but another thing I noticed about my earlier work like this from 2005, is the lack of any real point, substance or visual style in the subject matter. I guess my eye for composition and visual storytelling has developed over the years, to the extent that I look at photos like these and wonder what I was doing.

That said, one of these shots in particular stands out as being different to the rest of the pictures in this post, which are largely just humdrum snapshots. Using a telephoto lens in a situation where I usually wouldn't, when reviewing the photos I was quite struck by the first image below, something quite bold and abstract in comparison to pretty much everything else that day. I think it's the kind of image that would work really well as a huge canvas print, but apart from making an 8x12 inch print a few years ago, nothing else has really happened with it.


A few of the other photos still look kind of cool, but for me the one above is the standout.




And since I was at a duck pond, here are a few duck photos.




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