Tag Archives: Photography

Photo Portraiture

08 Sunday Mar 2015

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For Christmas, my mum gave me a ‘voucher’ for a photography course. She made it herself and it accompanied some money with which to pay for said course. My mum does good presents.

I took some time looking around for a course that would suit my skill level, more experienced than a beginner but not a super whiz (especially with the technical side of things). After speaking to a few photographer friends and having a look at the photos available on each course’s website, I decided to go with Creative Photo Workshop‘s Natural Light Portraits course. It was a bit on the expensive side compared to the other courses out there, but ran for six hours, and, it turns out, they pay for a model, which was really great for practising. I decided that the longer duration (other courses run for three hours) justified my spending more on it.

Model - Brock, with window light.

Model – Brock, with window light.

Model - Brock, with carpark fluorescent lighting.

Model – Brock, with carpark fluorescent lighting.

Both of these shots were set up by the teacher in order to demonstrate what he wanted us to learn, as well as the many others I took.

I’m really glad that I attended the class. Before yesterday, I wasn’t confident to use the manual setting on my camera, although now I feel like I have a better idea of what the individual functions do and how to get them to do what I want them to.

Glynn’s photographic style is distinctive and strong, and while not completely in tune with my own style, produces some awesome effects that I’m glad to be able to replicate. He is extremely knowledgeable and he’s able to convey technical information and tips without making it seem like hard work, which is great for someone still learning. Glynn also focuses on in-camera technique, rather than post production or photoshop, which reflects my own preference. His style is a bit blokey, and though it’s not my favourite,  in the end, didn’t affect my enjoyment of the class.

So thanks Mum, and thanks Creative Photography for opening up my experience and for instilling a sense of confidence in my technical ability which should result in a better translation of my creative vision to the finished shot. Woo!! I look forward to shooting more portraits in the near future!

The day after the night before

22 Sunday Feb 2015

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I didn’t manage to get to White Night in Melbourne last night, for various dull reasons that I don’t need to go into. So today I thought I would head into the city and see if there were any remnants, or things I could still see.

Two by two, hands of blue.

Two by two, hands of blue.

Some interesting chalk graf outside the State Library

Some interesting chalk graf outside the State Library

Inside the 'Bohemian Melbourne' exhibition in the State Library

Inside the ‘Bohemian Melbourne’ exhibition in the State Library

Inside the State Library Dome

Inside the State Library Dome

There wasn’t much left, and there wasn’t that much mess, but then it was hours after the end of the event, so maybe it had been cleaned already.

Meandering Update Post

20 Tuesday Jan 2015

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Bah. I’ve been wanting to post something for a while but I just haven’t had the time or energy to really do it justice, so this is just a sort of spur of the moment brain purge.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been working a lot – doing full time hours for the first time in years and I’m finding myself feeling tired, lazy, uninspired and generally unproductive. I get that we all need money, and I do particularly because I can’t really work much while I’m studying and the government, in all their collective wisdom, don’t think I need welfare payments to stop me from starving while studying, but seriously. Full time work and I are not friends, but we have to just get along for the moment.

I’ve been working on my novel, slowly knocking out a thousand words a week or so, it’s coming along, I think it’s just about to climax and then there will just be the resolution and the first draft will be done. It will be nice to have it finished and I think I’m on track to have that by the time I go back to uni.

I’ve been practising my bass and jamming with my dudes. We recorded some of the songs we jammed last Saturday and they sound way less awesome played back than they do at the time, although perhaps that’s just how recording yourself works. But it’s still really early days for that so it’s all good. It totally sounds like, y’know, music, so that’s a bonus! I think they’re also on board for the performing in front of other people goal that I set myself for this year, so that’s amazing.

I was given some money at Christmas to put towards a photography course which I’m hoping get done before uni goes back, although I’ve hit a bit of a roadblock in the sense where I don’t really know what I want to focus on or what skill level the courses are pitched at. I suspect I’m just procrastinating the decision – I should get onto that. Other photography capers have included taking my camera to see some bands and then having an excuse to talk to the bands after to say ‘Hey I was that person with my lens in your face, would you like me to send you photos?’. It works quite well actually, I get to chat to some lovely people, they get a couple of cool shots of them on stage, everyone wins!

And of course on top of all of that I’ve been trying to keep in touch with my friends and y’know be sociable and stuff. So all in all I’m pretty busy, pretty happy, and while not being as productive creatively as I would like to be, still getting a fair amount of stuff done.

After starting this post feeling like I’m not getting anything done, I’m now feeling more like I’m getting bits of a lot of different things done a bit at a time and so, while I might feel like time is slipping away (how is it 2015?!) I’m not idle and it will all work out in the end.

How it got to be December

02 Tuesday Dec 2014

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On the first day of November, I started to write my third novel. It was an ambitious and very different project for me, both in scope and in content/tone. If you’ve read my last entry, Feeding the darkness, you’ll know that mid way through the month I started to have doubts about myself as a result of the stuff that was coming out of my writing.

It’s now 2 December and NaNoWriMo is officially over. My total wordcount for the month was just under 55,000 words, which is a fantastic effort I think for my third year running of the challenge. Disappointingly I haven’t finished the story, the characters are just heading towards the climax now. I expect it will need another few thousand words, I might even make it to 70k, which would be a personal best for me. The problem is that since Saturday I haven’t felt any motivation at all to write. I have used up a lot of my energy for writing by binging for NaNoWriMo and I’m starting to worry that I won’t finish the project. I look at other NaNoWriMoers and some of them have done truly ridiculous (and impressive) word counts, up to 200k words, and I think that I should be able to just push through to the finish. I’m sure I will because the completionist in me won’t let it rest, but it’s hard to remember to be nice to myself – it was a big effort, at times it felt like an insurmountable obstacle to churn out my words every day, but I reached the goal and learned a lot about myself and my writing in the process.

I finished my last university assignment for the year on 3 November, so over the last month I’ve also been applying for jobs. So many jobs. All the jobs. I’ve been using a scatter technique in which I apply for just about anything and hope for the best, I figure if I get offered a job and it sounds like it would suck, I’ll turn it down. As anyone who’s been a jobseeker will know, it’s a hard slog. I find it difficult mentally, because each time I get an interview, I spend quite a lot of brain time fitting in the potential position into the stuff I’ve got going on at the moment and working out whether I’ll have to squeeze or move things, and when I don’t get the job, or don’t hear back, it takes a toll. It’s exhausting. Soon, all things going well, I’ll be able to stop doing the mental gymnastics that are involved with job hunting and settle into something for which I get paid!

For the rest of the summer, I hope to get more out of this blog. I’ve had it for three years now – the anniversary slipped past a couple of weeks ago – and I feel like it’s been a fantastic source of inspiration for me. It’s been a space to explore different media, styles, and challenges, and it’s been a space for me to develop my own unique voice. I hope to spend some more time working on my photography, particularly I’m going to take my camera to a few more gigs around the place so I plan to put up some thoughts here on that too.

The weather is beautiful today, as it has been in Melbourne for the last week or so. I’m sure it’s just the city’s way of lulling us into a false sense of security and hopefulness but that’s one of the joys of living here. I’m heading off to the markets shortly to get vegetables and other stuff to make into home made preserves for Christmas gifts so I’m feeling good. It’s a bit annoying that the job situation is still up in the air, but overall I think summer is going to kick butt and I’m really looking forward to getting out and about, meeting new people and generally being awesome!

forward to getting out and about, meeting new people and generally being awesome!

Lost and Found

24 Tuesday Jun 2014

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During my adventure on Sunday in the laneways of Melbourne, I came across something that looked like discarded drawings. In a laneway near the law district which was a weird combination of old and new, on the cobbled street next to a big blue skip, was a large, forlorn looking piece of paper. When I first saw it, I thought it was just rubbish, but then I realised it was very white.

As I walked up to the paper I saw, in the fold, a half-hidden charcoal sketch of a nude figure. I wanted to know why someone would have thrown it away, and looked around for other clues. Further down the laneway, where I assume the wind had taken them, were other pages of drawings. I couldn’t have told you exactly why, but these pages, lying dead in an alley, filled me with an intense feeling of melancholy. Someone out there had hated their own work so much that they’d discarded it. They had hated themselves so much that they couldn’t bear the reminder of what they saw as their own inadequacy.

Flanigan Lane - discarded art

Flanigan Lane – discarded art

Perhaps I’m being overly dramatic. It’s just as likely that this artist didn’t care about the drawings. Maybe they were doing a life drawing class with their partner, or a friend, and didn’t have any room in their heart for the scribblings that they made. It’s almost as sad to think of people who don’t have room for art – people who are too busy, or who just aren’t paying attention. I suppose it reminds me of the person I used to be when I didn’t have time to work on my art, at time when I discarded my work, didn’t value it, or nurture it. I remember how sad I was, how there was a deep wound inside me that I didn’t even realise was there. Occasionally I look at my life now and think about how stressful it is, or how far away from my goals I am, or how I’m a bit lonely, or sad, or whatever, but sometimes I remember where I came from. How distant that person who started on this path seems. Now when I’m sad I know it. When I feel something I can really feel it. Before I didn’t even know I was unhappy, I thought that this was as good as it gets.

There is no way that an artist can keep everything that they produce, of course there will always be a selection process going on, there must be in order to grow. I do it with my writing all the time, get half way through some ill-formed concept and decide it’s never going to work, but it really reminded me that sometimes you can’t see the value in your own work and we have to be gentler with ourselves sometimes.

Street Art on Sunday

23 Monday Jun 2014

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This is a quick post of a photography adventure I went on yesterday. For more photos check out my Facebook album.

Duckboard Place

Duckboard Place

Flinders Lane

Flinders Lane

Flanigan Lane

Flanigan Lane

Flanigan Lane

Flanigan Lane

Union Lane

Union Lane

The Evil Corporate Takeover

21 Saturday Jun 2014

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Or “The Importance of Paying for It”

Today’s prompt it to write about an event that is about to be taken over by an evil corporate, or shut down. Please note that the opening scenario is completely hypothetical – don’t panic!

 

Avid followers of this blog will be aware that I’m in love with the Astor Theatre. It is beautiful, unique, and full of love for cinema and for nostalgic art forms like actual printed film. So when I heard that they were signing a merger with one of the big cinema chains, my heart broke.

My heart broke, not just because the Astor as I know it would be gone, but because of the fact that an amazing, independent business was not able to support itself. In a culture that seems to be obsessed with being ‘anti-corporate’ and supporting the local up-and-coming businesses, in a city were artisan and craft markets are flourishing and where everything is about mason jars and mismatched antique crockery, one business that is actually providing something culturally valuable just can’t survive.

I mean what the fuck people? We can all sit in our armchairs and talk about supporting local businesses, but how many of us actually do it? When was the last time you went to a farmers market instead of Coles or Wollies? When was the last time you visited your local library? Or bought a book from an actual bookshop instead of from Amazon? How often do you buy products owned by Coca-Cola Amatil? Or Unilever? Or supermarket ownbrands that try to undercut anything new? It’s so easy to go through life not thinking about the choices you make and how they shape our world.

These choices don’t require you to be bold, they just require you to be mindful, and I know that requires a lot more energy than just buying shit on autopilot, but please try. Worse than our supermarket behaviour though is our complete devaluation of cultural artefacts – live theatre, independent cinema, poetry, writing, music, photography, the list goes on. We live in a world where we expect this stuff to be accessible for free. We expect there to be a never-ending stream of new stuff available for consumption and yet, we as a society are losing sight of what it takes to produce it. Every new novel is a struggling writer trying to pay their rent. Every new album is an artist sitting in their bedroom in the middle of the night trying to record because they have to get up in the morning and go to work in a cafe. Every amazing photo of the night sky, or the city at dusk, or a glittering beach that you ‘borrow’ and share on your Facebook feed without giving proper credit, was taken by someone trying to make a living from their art.

I guess what I’m trying to say, in a long winded slightly ranty sort of way, is that if we value art, if we value entertainment and new creative voices, we have to start showing our support in real dollars. When you see an exhibition advertised, go see it! When you know someone who’s launching a book, go buy it! When you hear of a new band performing, go hear them! I get that our society is changing with the digital age and the accessibility of free stuff, but I think it’s important to keep in mind what that means. Nothing comes for free, and in Australia with the Coalition government trying to change the budget in a fundamentally-terrible-for-the-arts way, now more than ever before we have to support local talent with our own money and time.

Week Four – Photo a day Challenge

01 Sunday Jun 2014

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Week four is the last week for the photo a day challenge I signed up for. I’ve had a lot of fun trying to find something everyday to photograph in line with the daily theme. I admit some days I didn’t get very close, some days the connection was tenuous to say the least, but other days I think I really nailed it.

As with the others in this series, these are all photos taken with my smart phone and posted on my Instagram @Dragongirlau. I also had to get a new phone part way through this week because the old one died (as in proper died, won’t turn on and won’t charge) and I’m still getting the hang of the new one!

Day 23 - Black and white pencil artwork by my friend Woland, it's called 'Weight Watcher'

Day 23 – Black and white pencil artwork by my friend Woland, it’s called ‘Weight Watcher’

Day 24 - Chicken noodle soup in Preston with Louise. It was supposed to be sunrise but I wasn't up for getting up for that...

Day 24 – Chicken noodle soup in Preston with Louise. It was supposed to be sunrise but I wasn’t up for getting up for that…

Day 25 - just outside my door this guy must have been dropped by a neighbourhood kid. Poor abandoned kinda egg guy.

Day 25 – just outside my door this guy must have been dropped by a neighbourhood kid. Poor abandoned kinder egg guy.

Day 26 - I nearly forgot to post a photo today. I don't have a pet but will this little guy do?

Day 26 – I nearly forgot to post a photo today. I don’t have a pet but will this little guy do?

Day 27 - Beans and rice, a meal I will probably be eating a lot more of next semester when I go back to being a full time student!

Day 27 – Beans and rice, a meal I will probably be eating a lot more of next semester when I go back to being a full time student!

Day 28 - Apparently I have the unique ability in my office to change the toilet roll in the downstairs ladies toilet. Only me and the cleaners.

Day 28 – Apparently I have the unique ability in my office to change the toilet roll in the downstairs ladies toilet. Only me and the cleaners.

Day 29 - I tried to do that thing where you make a heart shape in the negative space but with my feet... It doesn't really work though.

Day 29 – I tried to do that thing where you make a heart shape in the negative space but with my feet… It doesn’t really work though.

Day 30 - side view of the famous MCG in my way home. I can't believe the challenge will be over tomorrow!

Day 30 – side view of the famous MCG on my way home. I can’t believe the challenge will be over tomorrow!

Day 31 - the last day of the challenge. I missed the sunset today because I was at the gym after my writing group, but the light fitting in my bedroom looks a bit like the sun, if you squint really hard...

Day 31 – the last day of the challenge. I missed the sunset today because I was at the gym after my writing group, but the light fitting in my bedroom looks a bit like the sun, if you squint really hard…

 

For June, I’ve decided to sign up to WordPress’s Writing101 blog a day challenge. For this they supply a prompt and encourage you to post something every weekday for the month of June. You can publish on the weekends if you like, and you don’t have to publish everyday, especially is the quality is not what you’d hoped for sometimes (and with these challenges you can’t get it right every time).

Women of Rock

31 Saturday May 2014

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The world of rock doesn’t have a great history of women fronting bands, and an even worse record with women in bands doing other stuff – guitar, bass, keys, drums, etc. The best way I can think of to try to address this is to support bands with awesome rock women in them.

Last night I went to a gig at the fabulously grungy Cherry Bar, in AC/DC Lane in the Melbourne CBD. Each of the nights three bands were fronted by women who fucking rock.

Hayley and the Fugitives

Hayley and the Fugitives

First up were Hayley and the Fugitives, as the opening act they played to an underpopulated dance floor, something they certainly don’t deserve. Hayley’s vocals are solid and engaging, she leads the boys in her band with style and power and struts her stuff across the stage with excellent rock presence. Playing mostly original songs they’re definitely worth checking out.

Peta Evans Taylor Band

Peta Evans Taylor Band

Next up were Peta Evans Taylor and her band. Peta’s voice combines power and beauty in a way that is both unique and haunting. She can move from straight up rock to beautiful ballads, like ‘Amy’, which such ease that you don’t realise how hard it must be. Her band are all fantastic, be it the guitarist with his Hendrix-esque behind the head solos, the drummer who keeps it all together (and they never get the credit they’re due), or the new bassist who makes the fiddly licks look easy, and I know they’re not because I pretend to play bass and I’ve tried them. This band are consistently awesome, and well worth supporting.

Last Mistress

Last Mistress

Finally we come to the closer, the driving force behind the Women of Rock nights at the Cherry Bar, Last Mistress. Front woman Brihony Dawson is rock. She has a voice that will vibrate through your chest, she has a stage presence that would make any of the greats proud, she is undeniably in charge of an audience, and as you can see from the picture, she definitely draws the crowds. Whether it’s original songs or covers Last Mistress are epic. I should also give a mention to the lead guitarist who not only pulled out some kick ass solos, but also did so while riding on Brihony’s shoulder. Yes, that happened, and it was so, so great.

For the full photo set, have a look at my facebook album. And support our local artists like these guys! Keep live music alive and get more women in it!

Week 3 – Photo a day Challenge

23 Friday May 2014

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I have managed to get this post up less late than the last one, which is good, but it also means that there are less photos, so yknow, swings and round abouts. As with the others in this series, these are all photos taken with my (kind of crappy) smart phone and posted on my Instagram @Dragongirlau.

Day 18 - Collage entitled 'Sup Boney?', something I drew (on).

Day 18 – Collage entitled ‘Sup Boney?’, something I drew (on).

Day 19 - Woman sits hunched in the cold evening air waiting for a tram. She is alone.

Day 19 – Woman sits hunched in the cold evening air waiting for a tram. She is alone.

Day 20 - Waiting for the Miracle to Come wearing Fraulein Sally Bowles' nail polish

Day 20 – Waiting for the Miracle to Come wearing Fraulein Sally Bowles’ nail polish

Day 21 - probably more paper than card these prayer flags watch over me as I sleep

Day 21 – probably more paper than card these prayer flags watch over me as I sleep

Day 22 - Got into Velvet Tongue II for free because I was performing in the open mic section

Day 22 – Got into Velvet Tongue II for free because I was performing in the open mic section

 

That last picture was taken just as I was about to crawl into bed, still buzzing from performing erotic poetry at Little Raven‘s event Velvet Tongue, if you’re interest to see more of that and a picture of me head to their gallery.

My heartfelt thanks go to Van, Dionne, Skye and the Little Raven team for putting on such a fantastic night, and for giving me the opportunity to perform for a receptive, beautiful audience. It also gave me the opportunity to meet a number of other writers/poets/performers and all round amazing people. Well done everyone!