Melbourne’s skyline seen from West Melbourne. 2024-01-20 11:53:39Melbourne’s north western edge from 8 stories up. 2024-01-20 10:53:38
Two views of Melbourne only made possible by our interest in real estate.
Some Saturdays my wife and I locate and list some properties that will give us an idea of what we could get for our money if we decide to change our lifestyle. This has the added benefit of getting to see parts of the skyline that we would not normally see.
These 2 views from Saturday just gone are from different properties in different parts of the western edge of the CBD.
This is probably as close as I can get to a true flâneur in my own home town of Melbourne.
I recently had the good fortune to stay overnight in a suburb called Frankston. While not that distant from where I live, it is far enough away to be out of the way. I haven’t walked the streets of this shopping precinct in Frankston for more years than I can remember. I in fact I may have never walked this part of Frankston. But I spent an hour or two wandering the CBD of this bayside suburb.
To say I was pleasantly surprised would be putting it mildly. I only have vague recollections of the shopping centre. It is now serviced by all the major food chains and there was lot s of pedestrian friendly “open” space.
I have to admit it’s rare that I feel a tourist in Melbourne, but here I was in Frankston feeling completely foreign; like the proverbial ‘fish out of water’. Nonetheless I could not help myself and wander about and grab a few images that caught my eye. As is often the case I found the small laneways and backstreets the most compelling.
Here’s a series of pictures I thought looked interesting.
a collection of dumped or abandoned chairs in a laneway in FrankstonBacks of older buildings often have more interesting things to see.Murals everywhere, is it street art though?The train station precinct in Frankston, surprisingly quiet for 8:00am on a Tuesday.A red sign indicating the direction of the beach amongst the pedestrianised area south of the Train station.
The iphone turned 15 recently, it has had a profound impact on my practice as an artist, but my experience clearly differs from many photojournalists use of the device.
Two articles dropped in my inbox recently, that demonstrate this. One from the AP News the other The Guardian. Mostly written by photojournalists, they seem either to venerate or denigrate this device. There is some shade of nuance between each extremes, to be fair. Many talk about using the viewfinder as a kind of extension to their seeing. Clearly none have worked with a medium format film camera, or large format film camera which requires the user to step back and take in the whole scene or think about a back to front and or upside down view on ground glass. In the 1950s these were common cameras for the press of the day. The iPhone actually mimics the ground glass of a 5×4 monorail or studio camera in terms of physically moving your face away from the device to compose the picture. This seems to have escaped most of the interviewees in both articles.
A blurred image of a moving car only made possible by a smartphone, in this case an iPhone, caused by shutter roll
This then raises some issues about a professional versus an amateur. I myself have never sold or made an image for a client for money. Yet I have used film cameras of many types and sizes for more than 30 years. I have been an educator specialising in photography in all its forms since 1993. Taking the time to consider what is in the frame forms a large part of what I do all the time, regardless of camera used.
Also, I use a third party app to make pictures with my iPhone, this alone has impacted on my picture making experiences, with this device. Yet I sense none of the professionals in the articles think this way? This third party app allows me to capture RAW DNG files and process them as I would any other digital capture.
In the early days of phone cameras prior to the iPhone my own experience with phone cameras, was one of being highly experimental . I had no preconceived ideas about what the device could achieve and no expectation that it would replicate the real world in any way shape or form. As I experienced it. So why should a device with better optics and more resolution, interchangeable lenses amongst other things ever be expected to do this?
These days, having a camera in my pocket at all times is both liberating and exciting. As of todays date I have over 147 thousand iPhone images alone. Are they all earth shattering works of art? No! Is it possible to look back over this archive draw conclusions about what the images can “say”. Yes. The pandemic alone has prompted me to consider photo opportunities themselves. Some may see some light at a future date. Could I have done this without an iPhone? No. Would I ever have contemplated it? No.
Eight years after I began making the same picture on each day I was at work. Always at 8:30. Always from the same position. The project has now ended.
The changes in the scene that were most notable, were the weather. Others included the tree.
Often the picture made at 8:30 in no way reflected the weather for that day either before or after 8:30. Which isn’t reflected in the imagery itself.
The linchpin, that helped me decide to end it was the removal the tree. The tree had suffered some damage in the storms we had 10 days or so prior, and in the interim someone decided it needed to be removed entirely.
Eight years after I began making the same picture on each day I was at work. Always at 8:30. Always from the same position. 
