Kia ora tatou:

The books are on the water.

Out There South will be here in Aotearoa in a couple of weeks.

Chris Morton and I are going to have a launch in Auckland on August 26, at his place on the North Shore.

You are ALL invited!

So, if you have time, do come along, have a drink, see/buy some prints and get a signed, discounted copy of the book.

Most of the guys will be there.

And for those of you wondering what it is like, here is some teaser text….

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Kia ora tatou:

I am happy to admit it: I am anal about the technical quality of my landscape photographs. Come to think of it, I am anal about the technical quality in all of my photographs. The end result of what is probably an unnatural preoccupation with technical quality has led to a restless and relentless urge to make pictures of ever better quality. I suppose at this point I should be rather apologetic, but I have no intention of doing so.

In the last few weeks I have returned to the landscape and expressing what I feel about my own country. It has led to revisiting my artist statement and thinking about whether that really holds true for me. It does.

Living in the country should make it easy to develop a vision of the landscape, and I suppose the way it does. However, living beyond the city limits and living in a pristine and beautiful environment can lead one to becoming a little blasé about what is around one and, worse still, perhaps not acknowledging the blessing and the way that I should. It is too easy to take things for granted. Fortunately, my obsessive preoccupation with technical quality ensures that I try to keep pushing the boundaries.

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Kia ora tatou:

11,000 photographs, 6724 kilometres, 17 days, eight guys.

And now it is done.

Last  April Chris Morton from Auckland and I, along with six other guys, set out on a big adventure. We drove some of the fiercest four-wheel drive tracks in the South Island, got lost, got stuck, and saw places most people never will.

Now we have written a book about it. Published by Craig Potton Publishing, it will be out in bookshops in time for Father’s Day. Chris and I shared the photography while I wrote the narrative.

If you love the mountains and being out there, grab a copy.

We hope to do  few launches here and there, including Auckland…

Ka kite ano

Kia ora tatou:

In keeping with my policy of trying to vary what I write, and include images which have little or nothing to do with the post in question, some things I need to share:

1. Practice what you preach. For ages I have blogged on about backing up data to avoid the nasty event when your hard drive crashes. Last Sunday my copy of Hard Disk Sentinel shrieked at me that unless I did something about it, the 1TB drive with my landscape photographs on it was about to fail. (I wondered what the weird clicking sound was….) The drive in question contained all my landscape photographs, 150 000 of them. In a panic, I shut down, removed the drive and sent it away to be replaced ( hopefully, along with all my data). It turns out that it was a glitch in the system and the drive is fine. Yes, before you say anything, all the files are on MyBooks in my safe. But it would have taken me a week (at least) to put them all back.  Strikes me the $NZ49 which HDS cost me was well spent…. (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

Of late I have begun to think about format and its significance again. One format which has always fascinated me is the panorama and its practice. It is a topic I discuss at the Winterlight Workshops, one which is, of course, devoted to the question of landscape photography. Contrary to popular opinion, there is madness in my method, and method in my madness.

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Frozen Narratives 102

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

I have watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.

Roy Batty (Blade Runner)

In many ways, at certain times, I suppose I feel like the rat Ratatouille in the movie. Sometimes I really feel as if I am running backwards and forwards along the shelf, while the enraged chef aims his throwing knives at me. At one end of the shelf, I am a classic documentary photographer, trained in the old ways which are nearly 2 centuries old, in love with a medium for its own sake. On the other hand, at the other end of the shelf, somewhere past the knives quivering in the wall, is a space where Photography as we know it is undergoing a metamorphosis, where tradition has little relevance and a new paradigm is being born. Where everything has been altered by the power of PhotoShop.

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Turn to Jesus, Willowmore

Well she walked up to my quarterlight
and she bent down real slow…
She said “Son, what are you doing here?
On your journey ‘cross the wilderness
from the desert to the well
you have strayed upon the motorway to Hell

Chris Rea- The Road to Hell Part 1

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

Albert Camus

It seems to me that towns fall into one of three categories.

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African Gospel Church, Langa

Crone: Two things, my lord, must thee know of the Wisewoman. First, she is … a woman! …and second, she is …
Edmund: Wise?
Crone: You do know her then?
Edmund: No, just a wild stab in the dark which is incidentally what you’ll be getting if you don’t start being a bit more helpful. Do you know where she lives?
Crone: Of course.

-Blackadder

In ancient lore it is said the Goddess has 3 faces. The first is that of the Mother, who nurtures and protects, who lovingly raises her children and cares for them. The second face is that of the Maiden, the lover, the partner and companion. And the third face is that of the Crone, the hag, the wise woman who shows things as they are, who is beyond Illusion, who knows who she is and offers the plain, unvarnished truth.

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Kia ora tatou:

Some more thoughts from last weekend’s workshop…

Alan

I enjoyed the weekend at Hanmer immensely, and as a bonus I learned a lot. Both technically, thank you Tony, and about myself. It was great to be with a bunch of similarly inclined people, all probably far more talented than me, wanting to take a step further into creating images of meaning.

Tony, in his usual way, encouraged & cajoled us to take that leap out of our comfort zone into the shark-infested water boots and all. Let go! Then he told us to make a self-portrait, so on the basis that he told us that all the pictures we make are about us, and say something about us, here is mine.

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In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

Leonardo da Vinci

Kia ora tatou:

Last weekend I had the joy of working with a number of photographers here in Hanmer Springs, spending time on the creative process and new ways of making images.

We talked about the continuum which has photography at one end and digital art at the other end. We talked about  the fact that photography , whatever we do to it, has a documentary aesthetic and no matter how we tweak it, we are working within a convention, within a tradition which has established mores. In  this part of the continuum, the photograph is a document. At the other end we have the possibility to fabricate.

We talked about giving ourselves permission to fabricate our own narratives, rather than restate one before us. In the same way that a sculptor releases an image from a piece of stone or wood or whatever, so we can release whatever we need to; we can collect, assemble and regenerate from our mind’s eye.

And our greatest resource is ourselves.

As usual, I tallekd too much and allowed too little time for practice. But a few of the crew have out fingers to keyboard and allowed me to share their experience.

John wrote this:

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Kia ora tatou:

I guess a number of you early adopters will be wondering about paying the PhotoShop CS5 Tax… I know I am…

For those of you wondering whether to or not…some features from the new version… ( lifted from Rob Galbraith’s site)

What’s new for photographers in Photoshop CS5

Sunday, April 11, 2010 | by Rob Galbraith

Content-Aware Fill and Puppet Warp are the attention grabbers of Photoshop CS5 and, as the recent online sneak peeks have shown, these new features will enable users of Adobe’s flagship image editor to bend pixels in novel and creative ways. But if you’re a news photographer, or any other kind of shooter trying to keep it real in your photographs, then neither feature is going to see much use – or shouldn’t.

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Kia ora tatou:

Last week I posted one of Jenny’s assignments as part of the mentoring programme.

This was another piece submitted as  one of the assignments. There are others, but they are hidden away in a section of my website accessible only to myself and the mentorees.

Some time ago, I wrote a post about seven pictures on a coffin lid, a topic I bring up at workshops. I have included this as one of the assignments, since I feel that thinking of our work  in this way offers us the opportunity to further consider our work in context.

Again, the scholarship is outstanding…

MENTORING A2:

7 PHOTOS FOR MY FUNERAL

March 2010

Choosing – a painful experience at the best of times, and when it comes to finding a selection of best work to tell about where I am as a photographer at the moment, many times more difficult.

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Alan and I, Willis Street

I never liked photography. Not for the sake of photography. I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand.

-Robert Mapplethorpe

I think a photography class should be a requirement in all educational programs because it makes you see the world rather than just look at it.

~Author Unknown

Kia ora tatou:

About  15 years ago, after being a B&W photographer for a …long time…, I realised I knew nothing about colour, although my photographs were often coloured. It was time to establish a dialogue with it, so I began to study whatever I could lay my hand upon; books on colour theory, books on colour psychology, and anything I could find that would allow me to use colour in a more informed way. Colour, I realised, adds such a complex layer of meaning to any image in which it is present and the relationships between colours present is a lifetime’s study in itself. to photograph in colour you need to be present to the colours in an image.

Yesterday, while searching for a response to a question emailed to me, I came across this article which outlines some of the emotional properties of colour, which is of course, a form of energy, and therefore impacts upon us..I include it verbatim…

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Kia ora tatou:

As part of my mentoring programme, students are asked to carry out three assignments in which they look at their place in the pantheon of the medium. Jenny has submitted this essay , and an amazing piece of scholarship it is…

Pour a glass of whatever you fancy, sit back, and read….

MENTORING: FINDING ONESELF 101                     March 2010

“Chart your own journey through photography… see which marker peg you are standing next to”

• Connections
• Expression
• Recording
• Technical knowledge
• Camera Club
• The gospel according to Camera Club judging
• Breaking Free
• Expression
• Connections

It could be seen as a circle, but someone wiser than myself refers to it as a spiral, this journey that drives me.  And drive me it does, whether one believes in predestiny or other philosophical concepts, there is a growing sense that my journey is not a dusty, rock strewn path, but a river winding and looping around and over itself, sometimes rushing headlong into narrow ravines deep and swift, others tumbling headfirst at breakneck speed over bold rapids, others sluggishly drifting seawards, wide and slow with the odd eddy to provide some light relief, and then there’s the boundary with the ocean, the mixing and dispersion into another vast body.  Again and again I come across a familiar landscape although at each point the wind is from a different quarter and the light is illuminating scenes that had passed unnoticed before.

“Lets start at the very beginning; it’s a very good place to start…”

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Purgatory/antechamber/waiting room

It really began with a chance comment, with an unexpected conversation.

What are we doing this afternoon? Would you like to go out to Riverton? I hadn’t been there in nearly 15 years, so the opportunity to wander around a town which often attracts derision because of its out-of-the-way location, because of a perception that it is, in some way, Deliverance country, New Zealand-style. Of course towns like this never are. Once we get out of our own way, take our preconceptions and prejudices and put them away in the cupboard, there is always much to be seen, much to be learned. It was going to mean a change of gears, moving from the natural landscape to a human-manufactured one. It was going to mean switching from thinking like a landscape photographer to moving into a more documentary mode. I was fine with that, comfortable with making the switch, and excited about what I might find.

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