Following on from my last post, I'll say a little bit about what I
enjoy with photography. As described before, I haven't actually
developed a picture that I've taken on film (which equates to
pretty much all of those that I take for pleasure) in years, so
it's clearly not primarily driven by a desire to see or share the
results. In fact it hasn't escaped me that I could save a lot of
trouble by not having any film in the camera at all, but I guess
that's like writing this Gopher phlog without putting it online - I
need a core purpose.
At its best I think I enjoy trying to capture something intangible
about a place, or how I see it at that moment. The ordered disorder
of a city and the people within, the overbearing force of an
approaching storm, the isolation of an abandoned farm house. I
don't know how well I achieve this, but in any case while taking
the pictures that's something to contemplate later, the fun is
simply in trying.
Very windy weather is often fun, when trees start to bend sideways
and you have to brace yourself against the gusts while trying to
keep steady for a shot, wiping spits of rain off the lens. A place
normally still and tranquil is transformed into somewhere full of
loud, uncertain noises and wild movement as structures of man and
nature are both put to an uncompromising test. Exposed places
become deserted (where they weren't already), the few forced to
venture through them running for the nearest cover. But you stand
against it, cold, wet, but with a purpose: to capture the scene. To
_see_ the scene.
I also make a yearly trip into Melbourne and often get through
three or four films over the day. I hate Melbourne, probably all
large cities but my experience is mainly with Melbourne and I don't
care much to expand it. Cities are the ultimate concentration of
people and their individual achievement (as well as corresponding
conflict), I hate people so I hate cities. But going back to one of
my philosophies already covered here, I love what I hate and hate
what I love, and it's no more true than on one of these day trips
where an old country train takes me into the heart of this feared
city to roam until the return service departs in the early hours of
the winter night. To exist there daily would send me mad, I mean
propper machette-wielding phycho mad, but for a day I can just
appreciate it, marvel at it, at the people living within it, and
those lost in its cracks. I don't carry a phone, just an old pocket
street map from the mid 90s (I once almost missed the landmark I
was looking for because it was in the process of being demolished)
and maybe some selected print-outs of maps from the web for areas
out of the CBD, so I'm always lost. But that's often the way to
find the stranger places, and the scenes that go with them. No I
haven't been mugged yet.
So that's photography for me. Besides the Melbourne trips (I don't
do city driving, or try really hard not to in any case) it's
usually also an excuse to go for a drive in my Jag. That's a
pleasure all of its own, and also done GPS-less with a selection of
old map books and a pre-planned route, jotted down on paper, which
keeps off highways and into the back roads as much as physically
possible. Along deserted roads you find the old farmhouses, rivers
and gullies, and quiet country towns, all prime candidates for
photos in anybody's book. Plus with usually nobody else about you
can cruse along at your own pace, slowing up as you decide whether
to pull over and take a shot of whatever pretty sight just revealed
itself.
Finally I'll comment on one other pleasure which is looking at
other people's photos. I don't go for Flicker, or any of those
popular platforms. What I really like is finding some old personal
website, probably by pursuing some completely unrelated enquiry and
discovering a photos section. Odds are that it was set up in the
late 90s or early 2000s when the tech-savvy author got a digital
camera, or a scanner to scan in their old film photos, and they've
since got bored with it or moved on to social media. It might just
be a raw directory of barely-organised image file links, or have
thumbnails and written descriptions. The photos themselves might be
very good, or just accumulated shots from their own past with which
you can play a fun game of piece-together-the-life, or a random mix
of both. I might be the only one who really looks at them besides
friends and family of the individual, but whether it's in
appreciation their art, or just a creepy desire to peek into their
lives, I find it an addictive way to waste time online.
Better yet is looking through old family slides from old holidays,
mainly in the 50s and 60s. I'm lucky to have had very well traveled
grandparents on both sides, who also took the opportunity to catch
some remarkable scenes now long lost to time, from unrecognisable
outback towns to foreign countries since transformed by modern ways
and often also numerous wars. One wonders what people in sixty or
seventy years time will make of all the troves of images
documenting today's world? Will they even look? Will the photos
themselves actually be kept that long within cyberspace? And will
the important scenes that warranted capture in the film era be lost
amongst the noise resulting from a capacity to take pictures for no
cost and just a momentary social reward?
Well I think Gopher is actually well suited to my preferred way of
browsing photos. I don't mean embedded images, which it doesn't
really support. Nor thumbnails, which it really isn't good for. I
mean plain text for descriptions, and direct links to image files.
The mystery of browsing though barely-formatted file links in
semi-abandoned websites, or of pulling a slide out of a box and
having it reveal a long forgotten scene through 500 Watts of
incandescent light. Some time soon I'll set up a section here for
photos and give it a try. Of course all of my recent ones are still
sitting in the fridge waiting for the day that I can see them
myself, but there are some early ones from when I could get them
developed locally and cheaply, as well as the odd one that I've
taken around the farm when I happened to have a digital camera
handy while an irresistable scene presented itself. So watch this
space!
