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.
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.
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.
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.