alvason’s Weblog

The chronic fatigue I have had for 11 years limits me in many ways. It is frustrating that I cannot get out to the places I would like to do a bit of photography.

We are not far from Sydney, for example, about 1 hour 45 minutes but that is beyond me for a day trip. Even Newcastle, about an hours or so, is a bit far at the moment.

So this makes me change my mind about what I photograph (the photography must go on!). I like making photographs so much. I noticed, for example, when last loading pics from my camera to the computer, that I had taken 5,000 shots on my present digital camera in about 18 months. That is a lot! But it has been a lot of fun. I like the process so much.

I have always liked the scrappy bits of our towns. On a recent expedition to a corner of Toukley (we are on the Central Coast of NSW), I had fun poking around a short length of the main street, down near where the bridge goes over the water to Gorokan. I found a lot of interest in the old bits of buildings in odd lanes and back-blocks.

It’s a subject I could get used to - “scraps of the town”. I am certainly going to do it again. And soon!

Here’s one of my shots from last time:

Sometimes I photograph the mundane. Ha ha - this is not the same as having mundane pictures of the not-mundane - I’ve got plenty of these! What I mean is that I find mundane objects, on reflection over their image in a photograph, not nearly as mundane as we think. Getting a bit tied in knots there, hope you get the drift. Here’s an example of a rather “mundane” house that makes, I think, a good picture:

(It’s a small image but you may see the rear end of a guy kneeling at the corner of the property - I did not notice him while taking the shot. No idea what he is up to.)

Driven to desperation because I have no recent pictures, I sometimes drive down a street or along a road, photographing houses that look interesting.

Now, what with one thing and another (chronic fatigue!) I have not been out much recently, so one day I drove along one (quite short) street and took a picture of every house on the right-hand side (there is parkland on the left), snapping each house as I went. I drove quietly along - call it slowly, I don’t want you to suspect any stealth in this activity - pulling into the left for a very brief stop and just snapping each house face on.

Not that the photographing of folks’ houses did not worry me for a bit. Then I found out that you can more-or-less photograph what you want from any public area, as long as you do not intend to make money out of it. Knowing that made me more at ease. Although I skip houses where there is bunch of the family outside … I can just imagine them phoning the police with my rego number, I can do without that sort of fuss, thanks very much.

[You really do have to be careful these days, especially, let's be clear, if you are an old guy like me. We were over in the Perth area in Western Australia over Christmas, paid a visit to Rockingham. A mother with two or three young girls were have a game of cricket on the foreshore and I thought that would look good with the Kwinana Power Station and heavy iondustry in the background. Of course I was prudent enough to ask the mother would she mind if I included their activities in the foreground. Well, as with hindsight you might expect, she was very suspiciuos, so I tried to explain but basically backed right off and left them to it. It would not have been surprising if she had phoned the police.]

Two things were coming together here - firstly, I like the banality of the houses in a country town - the older the better of course, don’t let me near these McMansions or my blood-pressure will sky-rocket. Do you see what the develeopers and builders are advertising seemingly as “first homes”? Back to J.K.Galbraith’s book about the creation of demand (The Affluent Society).

Anyway, to get to the point, here is a slideshow showing nearly all the houses in this short street in the town where we live - take time to savour the details of ordinary life (you’ve got to click the button that says “slideshow” at the top of the pictures).:

We live on the Central Coast of New South Wales, about 1 hour 45 minutes’ drive north of Sydney. We are lucky to have a farmer’s paddock across the fence and a lot of bush around us. We are blessed with a lot of different types of birds and it was not until we had some Eastern Rosellas looking for honey on a banksia plant just outside our back verandah this afternoon that I set to thinking of all the birds we have seen since we have been here. (We retired a few years ago and moved here to be close to family in Sydney. Of course we could not afford to live in Sydney, nor would we want to. But a good place to visit and we have family there.)

Here’s a picture of the Rosella:

The shot is a bit blurry as I was shooting through the insect wire that screens our verandah space. I have more shots of this rosella here and here.

Here is a quick off-the-top of my head list of the birds we see regularly:

Rosellas, pelicans, white ibis, black ibis, white faced heron, little egret, galah, cockatoo, black cockatoo (yellow tail), black swan, noisy miner, spur wing plover, ducks (not sure what kind - black duck?), Indian mynah, corella, crested pigeon, little cormorant, gull … I am sure there are more that do not come to mind at the moment.

I have lots of pics of pelicans, I might add some to this blog. Also some of other birds but not a lot. perhaps I should make a point of trying to photograph more …

What is the name of this flower, does anyone know? It is very common on the dunes along the coast where we live, 100 km or so north of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

It grows low to the ground and spreads by throwing out shoots along the ground, then taking root here and there, growing this flower at the spots.

Here’s a picture of it from the side.

I like daisies or daisy-looking flowers and I would really like to know the name of this one. I have searched through what lists I can find of coastal plants - some of them are just lists of names - this may help some, but not me!

Anybody know?

I spend a lot of time when out photographing down by the shore. Here’s another picture of the rock platforms that are so common on our bit of coast.

Looks like some sort of stylised form of a person - or a frog - flat on its face.

I found this languid pair in a shop window in Newtown, Sydney. She’s rather cute don’t you think? I’m not sure the gear he is wearing would suit me, I think I would find the vinyl a bit sticky and the spiked collar might be a bit off-putting.

I think the place was called Wild Things or some such name. That’s just not me any more. Sigh.

I have posted below about the success I have had with my old Ricoh 500G. Here’s another picture that pleases me a lot with the little old thing:

This now raises two issues:

• the exposure meter is ’sticky” - should I get this seen to (repaired)?
• the frame counter does not work (I did not mention this before, it is a comparatively trivial matter) - to get this fixed would restore the camera to near new condition (its age might make this surprising but I only used it for a few times a year for about ten years then it was replaced by my Yashica - so for 25 years it has hardly been used. There is an excellent repair/restoration shop in Dubbo, I know they could make a great job of bringing it back to near-new). But is it worth it?

I’m a bit of a stickler for having good equipment, by which I mean in good condition.

On the one hand, common sense tells me not to bother spending money on it, as my wife and I survive on the aged pension and I have enough cameras that do work. So I can hardly justify it from that point of view.

But then the other part of that is that photography is my hobby, I do feel that I can indulge myself a little in my retirement years and it would be so nice to get this back to a better condition. I have now seen the work it can do. And, surprising though it may seem, it is a faster, more convenient camera to use than these new digicams. It is light and compact. Quick on the draw.

Of course I want to get it fixed to the max. I will probably wait for the right time and send it to the guy in Dubbo for a quote.

A short time ago, I posted about my old Ricoh camera. Happy to say now, with one qualification which I will explain below, that the 35-year old little thing seems to be working just fine. I shot a trial roll of film down at the beach about a week ago and got the results today. (I send films off to a lab and they develop the film and return the images to me on disc.)

Here is one of the pictures I took:

I like black and white work. In this image I have used a denser black than normal. I think this adds to the drama of the shot and helps to extract my interpretation of some quite modest rocks, sand and water.

The only doubt that remains about the camera is its exposure meter. The needle seems “sticky” and not quickly responsive to different light conditions. As it happened, this was not an issue as, although the shot was taken late afternoon, the intensity required that I use the minimum aperture and the maximum speed for everything, which for this camera is 1/500 at f16.

All the images came out well. I was also able to have a close look at the images on computer and am pleased to say that the lens is a good one, the detail even at close inspection being good.

I am very pleased about all this!

I am about to start rebuilding a Web site. My ISP (the very good Exetel) gives each subscriber 200 MB of Web space that you can use or not as you wish.

Of ocurse, as a compulsive fiddler with things computer-based, especially software, photo-sharing Web sites and the like, I jumped to use some at least of my space (which reminds me, I keep away from the social Web sites such as MySpace). This was when we came down to New South Wales in 2005 and chose to find another ISP rather than Bigpond/Telstra.

In these five years, I have not done much with the site I laboured to set up. I say laboured, as I wanted control of the design, so set about learning as much HTML as I could. Even then, I used the format from one of the ones provided as examples in the fat book I acquired (excellent book, by the way - Web Publishing with HTML and XHTML, written so well by Laura Lemay). This dormant Web site is http://home.exetel.com.au/alvason - you can have a look there but I am not proud of the contents.

Now that I am determind to rebuild it, I run across a weird thing - when you retire you begin to find it difficult to find the tine to do things. Of course we all slow down when we retire, damn it, that frenetic pace at work was killing us. But when you retire, I think you find so many more interests that it is not all tall difficult to fill in the day. Quite the opposite - I want to do this Web site reconstruction from scratch but that means I have to learn so much to do it to look like something I would like and be proud of. Plus there is the overall design aspect - I would have to give consideration to the look, feel, layout, colours, images of the whole site. Wow. Not enough time.

So I am going the easy way and using a free template I downloaded frfom m some site - I have already forgotten which! At least then I am off to a flying start. Here is a screen shot of the one I have chosen in the Web editor I am going to try out - PageBreeze.

My downloaded template in PageBreeze Web editor.

(I used to use HTML Kit, but I think you have to pay for that now …) (Nah, HTML Kit is still free in its basic version. When I get this going, I will look more carefully at how to do it. I do think it best to get a flying start with a ready-made template, as long as I can understand how that template was used.

I will report progress.

Here’s a picture just for fun:

A greyscale image of a hibiscus.

This is the first of a series of blogs describing my cameras. Here is a list of them, in order of age (oldest first, and as near as I can guess):

• Ricoh 500G (film)
• Yashica FX-3 (film)
• Olympus XA2 (film)
• Olympus is1000 (film)
• Pentax Espio (film)
• “no-name” throwaway panorama camera (film)
• Fuji Finepix s5600 (digital)

Ricoh 500 G

This is a camera from the early 1970s. I bought it soon after our arrival as immigrants in Australia in 1973. So it is about 35 years old. Prior to that, in our 5 years in Africa, I used an increasingly dilapidated Konica. Eventually, with the lens held on with sticky tape (but still fully functional), I thought I should replace it and so bought this little Ricoh. (I don’t have the Konica any longer.)

Like many cameras of these days, the Ricoh is fully manual or shutter-priority automatic, you either set the aperture to A for auto or manually select the shutter speed/aperture combination. It performed very nicely, giving good sharp pictures, with good colour reproduction and accurate light reading.

I used it for many years, although I was not seriously into photography in these days. For a casual photographer, it had the advantages of versatility, compactness, ease of use, reliability. It was fun to use. I cannot remember what it cost, but I think it was good value. I bought it from one of my golfing partners, who had a photographic shop - he gave me a bit of a discount.

Been a bit of a pause here while I dug it out to have a look at it. Suspect the exposure meter is on the blink, so I will put a film in it and get it a fling. I would hate to have to throw it out but if it is not going to work for me that is the thing to do. No doubt I could send it to a camera repair shop but - why? Only for sentimental reasons and there is a limit.

Also the exposure counter no longer works, Not such a big problem as you can usually have a feeling of how much of the film you have used. Again, probably easily fixed, more so than the exposure meter, but …

So, I will test it out and report back.