My 2016 Calendar

Of Plants and Gardens is a selection of botanical and curious images that I have taken over the years.  The rest room at Windyridge, which appears on the front cover, is one of the most enchanting I have ever seen and echoes the garden’s inspiring design. In December’s dramatic image of a red succulent plant, Nature’s own design is hard to better.

Blown Away

Art in Glass by Aboriginal artist Jenni Kemarre Martinello

Jenni Kemarre Martinello is an Aboriginal writer, poet and visual artist. Jenni works in photography, textiles and glass but it is her interpretation in glass of traditional indigenous weaving that has caught my imagination. Fish traps and baskets are fantastically represented. She was recently awarded a prestigious fellowship at the Australia Council for the Arts’ National Indigenous Art Awards with which she plans to further her skills. Jenni has been working in hot blown and kiln formed glass since 2008 and has a studio at the Canberra Glassworks. Her story is told in the ABC’s Report: Blown Away

Global Warming?

“Take care of the earth and she will take care of you.”
Author unknown

In the Eastern staes of Australia we experienced a long, hot summer with extreme temperatures. The highest I recorded was 51degrees Celsius (123 Fahrenheit). Could this be Global Warming and perhaps a taste of things to come?

The common theme in my work is Man’s involvement in his environment.   I express my concerns by creating completely new and exciting images digitally. I find inspiration in a wealth of old photographs that I recycle, combining them with new images, and carefully arranging them in intricate layers. Just as in the origins of traditional patchwork, I create something beautiful from pre-loved items: in my case using photographs and Photoshop instead of fabric and a needle.

Dramatic Weather Images

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The weather calendar has been produced each year since 1985 by the bureau and the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. About 50,000 copies are sold each year, making it the most popular bureau publication. About 10,000 complimentary copies are sent to the bureau’s volunteer and co-operative weather observers, heads of emergency services, Australian Missions overseas, and heads of other national weather services. It is a not-for-profit publication.

More about the calendar at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

Congratulations to all the photographers – great work!

Life of Pi

Pi Patel and Richard Parker adrift together.

At home our average daily maximum temperature for January was a bit over 40 Celsius (with a top of 51) so last week I escaped to Sydney where I had 4 blissful days where it rained every day and the temperature never rose above 25!

The most memorable event for me was seeing Life of Pi and experiencing 3D cinema for the first time. I think when the credits rolled that they said a team of 4,000 had worked on the digital effects – I was absolutely fascinated by them and wanted to learn more:

Richard Parker was played by 4 real tigers and thousands of digital artists,

“The hardest [scenes to film] were when the tiger was in water and especially in the storm …”
“We used [real tigers] for single shots, where it was just the tiger in the frame, and they’re doing something that didn’t have to be all that specific in the action that we were after,” Westenhofer told The New York Times. “By doing that, it set our bar high for CGI. We couldn’t cheat at all. It pushed the artists to go and deliver something that’s never been done before, something as photo-real as anyone has ever done with an animal.”

Read more from this article about how Life of Pi caught a digital tiger by the tail and if you haven’t seen the movie there’s the official trailer to watch too.

Enhanced in Picasa

Enhanced

Picasa is a free download from Google. Once installed it takes just a few minutes to create a work of art from your original image, and it’s a lot of fun experimenting with the effects. These are the steps I took to enhance the sunset :

• Crop: In this photo the sky’s important: not the sea
• I’m Feeling Lucky: I always do this first. There may or may not be a dramatic difference but it usually confirms the direction I want to take.
• Saturation
• Fill Light
• Cinemascope: This is interesting!
• Focal Zoom: So’s this.
• Vignette: Be gentle. Usually “less is more”
• Boost
• Museum Matte: black outer , red inner
• Save: Your original is not lost, just stored away to be retrieved any time you want it.

The original

Heading home from Sydney recently, we couldn’t make it back across the mountains because both roads were closed by SNOW!!! For heaven’s sake it was nearly summer and before we’d left home it had been 37C. Snow??!!  Neither of us had seen any for over 30 years and the next morning we had a wondrous drive over the Blue Mountains where the snow still lay thick on the trees and hillsides.

I culled four photos of the event from the internet to make a composite and very traditional Christmassy image for you, that makes us feel cooler and comes with our hope for your health and happiness in 2013.

 

Easter Island Statue Project

We all recognise the iconic heads on Easter Island but are you aware that there are bodies beneath the heads and that they hare being excavated. To find out more go to the official Easter Island site.

Skillset’s Flannery Centre Art Prize, ‘Cypress: North West’

The Exhibition Winner, ‘Cypress: North West’

Skillset’s Flannery Centre Art Prize,  ‘Cypress: North West’  by Mary Dorahy was also my favourite. It very effectively represented the flickering light through the trees that you see when you are driving along a highway. The only sad thing is that Mary’s concept of cypress forests being Good is completely erroneous. Yes, cypress trees are native and yes, they do have a place in the landscape, but not as a forest where they form a monoculture and the land under them is almost a desert with little growth and few animals. I believe that before white man came to Australia the small marsupials ate the pine seedlings and kept their growth under control. We introduced dogs, foxes and, dare I say, cats, who  killed off the little marsupials. But we also introduced rabbits and they carried out the same control as the natives they replaced right until they succumbed to Mixymetosis in the 50s and 60s. Then the cypress pines, with no one to nibble the shoots, took off in a big way and took over vast swathes of land turning useful pasture into completely unproductive land. If you want to see just how bad they are for the environment you should visit the Pilliga Scrub!!

Skillset Art Exhibition

Evolutions in Time: Hope

“Evolutions in Time – Hope” was one of two photo entries in a total of about twenty exhibits at Skillset’s new Flannery Centre in Bathurst, so I was more than pleased with that result.Against the Dark background of Mankind’s ruined habitat, Hope is expressed by the figure of a young child making her first confident steps towards a bright future.

The Industrial Revolution brought fundamental changes to our health, wealth and way of living. Man multiplied and prospered. In my lifetime alone the Earth’s population has more than doubled. But, in the process of meeting Man’s ever increasing demand for food and manufactured goods, we are depleting Earth’s natural resources, polluting the rivers, oceans, and air that we breathe; we are blanketing, with vast towns and cities, the agricultural land that we need to grow the food. Prosperity and a healthy economy are not enough. Without food, water, clean air, without a healthy environment, the Earth will survive but Man might not. We recognise the dangers. It is now our responsibility to find the changes to the way we live and work in order to restore the balance. Our priorities must be to educate our children, provide centres of learning to stimulate curious and enquiring minds. We must impart to them the wisdom and understanding to recognise and learn from the mistakes we have already made and to apply the science yet to be discovered. Mankind is inventive, resourceful and adaptable. He will provide a healthy, sustainable lifestyle for future generations.

Take care of the earth and she will take care of you.  Author Unknown