Thoughtfactory: abstractions

Whilst on the early  morning poodlewalk with Maya  along the littoral zone of the coastal rocks on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula I started scoping for a possible 5x4 photo session. As  Maya is now starting to hang around me whilist  I spend time photographing I reckoned it would be possible to use a 5x4 with a dark cloth. 

This is what I came up with today --- a close up, or macro view,  of an isolated rock with a quartz vein:

I had photographed the rock a few days earlier from a broader perspective.  

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This is an abstraction of the  old,  wooden Granite Island causeway at Victor Harbor in South Australia.  

The causeway  was in such a bad condition that it could not be repaired.  It  has been dismantled and replaced by a concrete one.  There are just a few pieces left at both the Victor Harbor and Granite Island ends. They -- the heritage remnants -- appear to function as viewing platforms. 

No doubt, many  photographers would say this  picture is not  an abstraction.  Others would point to the formal design of the picture and say that it is formalist but not even a weak abstraction. So I wrote a brief post on abstraction on the thoughtfactory website in an effort to open up a space for the possibility of contemporary photographic abstractions.

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I cannot remember the exact location of this macro photo of quartz and lichen that I constructed as an abstraction. It was made in  the late summer -- the digital file says  early February 2022. 

Looking at the surrounding files I can see that I would have been walking from Dep's Beach back to the car that would have been parked at Kings Beach lookout. It was made whilst on an afternoon poodlewalk as it was around 7pm. 

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 Made whilst  wandering in the local Waitpinga bushland on a poodlewalk in  the late summer of 2022.  

 It was a branch of a pink gum, but I  can no longer remember where it was exactly. 

These colours in the local bushland in Waitpinga caught my eye whilst I was walking through it:

This macro  of the  bark of  pink gum was made whilst I was on a poodlewalk with Kayla. This was  in  late February. It is a continuation of the kind of abstraction from nature series here and here. 

This abstraction from  a snapped pink gum branch in the local Waitpinga bushland   is from an early morning walk with Kayla  between Xmas and New Year.   It was made a bit latter on the same morning  as   this one. 

Several of the  branches of the pink gums in the bushland had cracked and snapped over the Xmas period. I wondered why as it had been a wet spring and the early summer months had been cool.   I had assumed that it was a period of extended dryness that caused the branches to snap or splinter. 

This is a bit of iron that I saw  lying on the ground when I was on a recent early morning  poodlewalk with Kayla. The iron was laying on the beach amongst the seagrass, and it was  from  the rebuilding of the causeway to Granite Island that had been happening  during 2021.

 It had been raining that morning. The sky was still heavily overcast and so I did not need to take account of the early morning sunlight shining directly onto the iron.  

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This quartz abstraction was made recently on  an afternoon poodlewalk with Maleko. The walk was along  the coast in Waitpinga, on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula South Australia.  

During early autumn it has  been cloudy in the morning and , clearing around midday and sunny in the afternoon. It has been a while since  we have done this  pm walk as the afternoon light has been too bright around 5-6pm. I was fortunate on this occasion. There  was afternoon cloud. 

I was taken by the soft colours of the quartz vein amongst the coastal granite rocks  in the soft afternoon light:

Wirth summer just around the corner this part of the coast is still in sunlight between 5-6pm when I am on a poodlewalk. It is only rarely that there is cloud cover at this time of the day. This was one of those occasions.  

The trunk of a  pink gum in the local bushland in Waitpinga:

This was  made  on my  last visit to this bushland in the early morning.  The grass seeds were everywhere and it was well nigh impossible  to walk with the poodles in the bushland. Kayla  ended up being  covered with grass seeds in the legs, ears and body.  It took me ages to pick them off her body.