This photo was made in the summer of 2024. The location is around the western corner of Petrel Cove on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. It was the late afternoon to avoid the bright light of the summer sun.
The dried out salt depends on high tides, no sand cover, and the summer heat to evaporate the seawater in the rock pools during the day. Outside of summer there are the various rock pools that do not evaporate.
A section of the sandstone cliffs in the Great Otway National Park in Victoria:
The area is between Point Franklin and Parker Inlet, and it is only accessible in low tide.
The abstraction below was made whilst I was on a poodlewalk with Maya, our young standard poodle, in the local bushland in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia early in the morning.
From memory it had been raining overnight. It was in the mid-winter of 2023. Maya would have been about 6 months old then, and it would have been a training walk. She was learning to stay with me whilst we walked through the bushland.
This black and white version of an abstract rock formation near Petrel Cove is from the archives in 2019.
A colour version, which was posted in 2019, is here.
I have been starting to research and write about photographic abstraction that moves beyond the modernist idea of abstraction as non-figuration of the mid-twentieth century. Whilst doing so I have been working my way through the archives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I recently needed to fill in 3 or 4 more hours walking with the standard poodles around the Adelaide parklands. This was in mid-January 2022.
It was a warm day and we walked amongst the trees in and around Veale Gardens. We moved slowly through the shady areas beneath the trees to fill in the time. As we did so I made a series of photos of the trunks of the trees.
It was a return to what I used to do when I lived in the CBD prior to 2015 -- walking the poodles in the parklands and making photos. Only this time I wore a mask and kept my distance from everyone because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic is a game changer.