Photography Expedition – Landscape
This week I finally got off my butt and drove out of the city for some fresh air in the countryside. A moody sky, a Nikon D90 DSLR with a 50mm (nifty fifty) prime lens and a a ball head tripod. And I plan to make this a weekly expedition around Southern Tasmania.
My primary destination this week was Clifton Beach to see if I could achieve dramatic black and white shots of the lifeguard tower and possibly the house on top of the cliff. Ideally, dawn would be when I’d like to be over there but first I have to drop the girls at school before I can get out onto the highway and photographic freedom. I’ve always loved those American photographic essays about highways and towns and meeting strangers.
So I’m beginning this adventure with some little steps… Clifton Beach, the Sandford Causeway and some shots taken from Cornelian Bay in Hobart.
I’ve taken to carrying the D90 almost permanently attached to the tripod, too. It’s not street photography so there’s not that need to hurry up the moment… landscape is more about taking in the geometry and the mood of place to interpret it’s sculptural potential. That’s where dramatic black and whites come into their own. What’s more powerful than the voice of the land manifest through the photographer’s fingertips?
Which begs the question… am I a photographer or am I somebody who takes photographs? That’s a difficult one to answer in the post-Internet era. For me, a photographer has that 20,000 hours of expertise under their belt… and I’m definately lacking a photographer’s experience. I would probably describe myself as a collector of images… some of them reasonable… no more and no less. Am I phased by the commoditisation of photography? Nope. On a hyper-networked planet of 6+ billion you’ve got to accept anything you’re truely interested in will involve hypercompetitive markets. These landscape expeditions aren’t about that… they’re about experience and hands-on traction with the camera.
And that brings me to another point – I don’t post my photography onto Flickr for a reason. I post onto my photoblog Walk a Mile in my Shoes and have another website called Steven Clark Studio. I’m not looking for a conformist view of photography, I don’t want to be one of a billion people aiming to create the same images in the same way, and I don’t give a damn about standing inside the crowd trying to get some attention. They’re my photographs… they go onto my blog… with very limited exposure time of perhaps a week at the most. Flickr is great for most people but not for me.
This year I have a few things in the air… I’m working on the beginnings of the King Island Project – about my grandfather Kittles and his camera and glass negatives on permanent display in the King Island Museum. I’m also doing some work on self-portraiture because I’m getting older and I was lucky enough to survive a malignant melanoma experience early in 2010. And I’ll be going on these weekly landscape exhibitions to force myself away from Twitter.
