I want a new camera. I am currently using a Panasonic Lumix DMX-FZ8 high zoom compact camera. I think that it is time to make the leap to a DSLR but I am not sure what sort of camera I want.
I know what I want my new camera to be able to do and so this is where you come in my dear internets. Give me some advice.
I am an opportunistic photographer, quite often I will be driving along and see a bird or an interesting cloud and I will pull over and snap away. I need a camera that is tough enough as well as light enough, to be carted everywhere, jammed into my handbag or gently tossed onto the car seat next to me. One that I can also use when my hands are dirty as I like to photograph my work as I make it.
I need to be able to photograph lizards, frogs, insects and spiders in situ. I want to be able to sneak up on a frog or lizard and photograph it from about two metres away, any closer and the little buggers hide. I want to photgraph spiders in their webs and be able to capture their features in detail.
This next unedited photo illustrates what I am talking about, this parasitic wasp had just caught this spider and was injecting it with a paralysing agent, so that she could carry the spider back to her nest. I was able to get up really close to the wasp and take about twenty shots before she flew away with the spider. I want more clarity. The lack of detail in this shot is very frustrating.
I was squatting down shooting through the foliage to get this shot of this frog. I had just zoomed past the optical zoom to the beginnings of digital zoom 14x and so this photo is very noisy. I am annoyed with the lack of detail around the frogs face. I want to see her eyes. I took about fifty shots and this is the best of a bad bunch.
This next photo of the Wedge Tail Eagle on the rock ledge is the sort of opportunistic shot that I am talking about. Robin and I were driving along the road and I spotted the eagle on the ledge. I was out of the car before it had stopped moving and I crept up to a large rock and poked my head around the corner.I was about fifty metres or so away from the eagle and I had about 45 seconds before the eagle noticed me and flew away. I am happy with this shot but again I want more clarity. I want to see more detail around the feathers and the curve of her beak. If I blow this photo up, trying to get more detail it becomes very pixellated very quickly.
I generally can’t be bothered messing about with a tripod and like to shoot freehand. If I had to set up a tripod I wouldn’t get half the shots that I do.
I like to photograph the moon, the sky, sunsets and sunrises. This next scene is one of my favourites and I have photographed the view down the valley hundreds of times. But in this shot I want the tops of the hills above the mist to be crisper.
I also don’t like to edit my photos,I generally just fiddle with the contrast a bit and sharpen up the image slightly and then press publish.
I could publish heaps more photos and pick them to bits but I have run out of time. So can you help me my dear internets? What sort of camera should I get to take the shots that I want? What sort of lenses will I need? Or should I investigate one of the newer high zoom compact cameras? What do you reckon?
Never again, Carnegie Gallery Hobart.
Angela Blakely & David Lloyd
26 February – 28 March 2010
In 1994 Angela Blakely and David Lloyd were commissioned by the History section of the Australian Army to accompany the first rotation of troops to Rwanda and photo document Australia’s involvement. In 2006 and 2008 they returned to Rwanda and discovered that for many survivors there is no life after the genocide. They have lost, and continue to lose, their health, their dignity, their security and their liberty. Justice remains elusive. Never Again makes visual the voice of the survivors of the Rwandan genocide.
In 1948 the world cried out “Never again!” In 1994 the world watched quietly and ultimately ignored the genocide in Rwanda.
Ten days have passed since I visited the exhibition, Never Again, and the impact of the images and the emotions I felt are fading. As I sit here and try and pull back the memories of my responses to the exhibition, I find myself thinking about the women whose images I saw, whose cries I heard and whose tissues were also there as a tangible reminder of their sorrow.
I felt a kinship with these women, a sisterhood of sorrow shared and it was important that I read their stories, that I pay homage to their grief. I was also very conscious of the need to protect myself, so as not to be swallowed by their grief. I was thankful that I could step back and have some respite from their pain and as I caught my breath, I was very conscious that there is no respite for these women, that the images they keep inside their heads and the emotions they felt will never fade.
I moved to a perspex box half filled with yellowing tissues and tentatively picked up the headphones provided. As I listened to the taped cries of the women in the crying room, I began to cry myself. I listened to their tears for as long as it took me to read the text assosciated with that part of the exhibition, text that I can not remember a single word of. I was thankful that I could stop listening to the sound of their pain and then wondered if they had anyone left to listen to them and so I listened again.
I was pleased that someone had thought to save the tissues, to save the women’s tears. Tissues are so easily discarded and they were a powerful symbol of how easily a human life can be discarded.
Photographs in subdued colours and muted sepia tones,of dead flowers and an empty chair in an empty room. Images of discarded prosthetics, a church where the villagers went for sanctuary and were slaughtered instead, as well as portraits of some of the survivors line this wall. Next to each photograph is a printed block of text that tells the story behind the photo. Each block of text starts the same way, I met a woman today. I met a man today and each story demands to be read. Each story needs to be re-told.
One of the stories accompanying the photographs was Marcella’s.
I met a woman today, Marcella told me what life was like for her during the genocide: watching her husband be killed; knowing her children were slaughtered; feeling the spear stab her pregnant abdomen. she related how “the neighbours, the militia and the soldiers came to kill us with guns,machetes and clubs”. what Marcella wouldn’t explain is how the women were killed. She simply said it was “inappropriate”.
And so the stories go on, each one as compelling as the next.
I met a woman today. she was sitting on a gravestone at the memorial museum, weeping quietly.She held a tissue in her hand and wiped her tears. Walking past, I didn’t want to interrupt her. She was sitting on one of the nine tombs that hold the bodies of 250,000 people – only some of those killed in Kigali during the genocide.
I wondered for whom she was crying?
On the other side of the room, I sit facing a long line of photographs on another wall. Large black photographs with small lines of text with a name and age in the centre. A powerful series of photographs, depicting a whole family decimated. The Mother, one of only four survivors left from a large, extended family is the centrepiece on this wall of death and her eyes are compelling.
A line from my journal, written as I tried to collect my thoughts and process my emotions.
As I sit opposite the wall and look at the Mother’s face I am compelled to reflect on what it means to be a woman, a mother, a daughter.
The pain of having nearly all of your extended family wiped out was reflected in the Mother’s eyes and I sat staring into her eyes for a long time thinking about how we are so vulnerable and how easily it could be any woman staring back at me. How women and children are generally the hidden, silent casualties in war,how women are viewed as legitimite spoils of war and being extremely grateful for the ability to do so I walked away from the woman’s pain.
There is a wildlife sanctuary just down the road from here and I have been mulling over an idea to have an exhibition down there for a while now.
My friend Dawn Oakford initially suggested the concept. Over the past four months I have gotten the idea out and poked at it, then I have put it away in the bottom drawer of my mind.
Next Sunday it is the annual open day at the sanctuary and I need to have a bit of a proposal drawn up for the committee. Typically I have left it to the last minute to put anything down on paper as I only have a vague idea of what I want to do.
I know that I want to make a series of bowls with questions written on them. I want to make people think about extinction. I want to appeal to the children that are there.I want my work to inspire the people that view it to start asking their own questions as they think about the the questions on the bowls.
So in order to get the ideas flowing I took three sample pieces of my work down to Chauncy Vale and photographed them in situ.
The dead albatross bowl looked really out of place on a nest of sticks. I need to make some dragon eggs for this spot. Some brightly decorated dragon eggs. Dragon eggs that have been inspired by Robin Hobb’s novels that I will enjoy making and that will be a bit of whimsy. I am sure that the children will think that they are dinosaur eggs and I am fine with that. Seeing a nest of giant eggs on the side of a bush track should inspire some questions.
There are plenty of places to stash some ceramic sculptures along the trail. Obvious spots like in a crack in this stone wall.
Or at the base of a tree.
There are also plenty of places to put my work that isn’t as obvious.
I have been making ceramic shells for a while now and I keep on covering these beautiful shells with graffiti. I decorate them with jarring colours and great black runny drops of glaze. As a species we seem to be hell bent on destroying beauty.Graffiti covered shells in a dry creek bed seems pretty apt to me.
The dead albatross bowls will feature prominently along with bowls like requiem for a tree and the useless residue bowls. So that is my idea in its rough draft format. What do you reckon?
Karen Andrews from Miscellaneous Adventures of an Aussie Mum is having a fundraiser on her blog to raise money for the earthquake victims in Haiti.
Karen writes
For the next twenty four hours I’ll be having a fundraiser: for every comment left here I will donate one dollar to the Australian Red Cross Haiti Appeal. This will run from 8.45am (time of posting) today until 8.45am tomorrow (Saturday, Eastern Australian Daylight Savings Time)
I have said that I will match what she raises up to $100.
So what are you waiting for? Go on over to Karen’s blog and leave a comment.
My grandmother is 87 today and Isaac will be one in a few days.
I successfully avoided getting together with my extended family at Christmas.Today we will all be together for the first time since Mum’s funeral. Combined with the fact that I handed the keys to Mum’s house over to the lawyers on Monday has made this past week very emotional.
Tears are never very far from the surface and my men are tiptoeing around me lest I rip their heads off.
Veronica has been busily disagreeing with a “hate blogger” which has provided me with a much needed distraction from myself. The comments section of that blog is a hoot. Accusations, sweeping assumptions,aspersions and arseholiness are the main themes.
It is all very amusing for about five minutes until you realise that it is real people they are ripping on. I am very proud of Vonnie for standing up for what she believes in and loudly saying that by our silence we are giving these stupid hate bloggers more power. Personally I believe in Karma and I cant be bothered with the small mindedness of chicken liver and her pathetic cronies but I will stand shoulder to shoulder with my daughter and say this crap shouldn’t be tolerated.
David is aghast at the ramming and subsequent sinking of the Ady Gil by the Japanese security ship the Shonnan Maru. The Japanese are killing whales in Australian territorial waters and our government is hoping that by ignoring the problem, it will just go away.
I have been very impressed by my son’s articulate and passionate response to the sinking of the Ady Gil. David would love to join the Sea Shepherd’s crew and be actively involved but the ships are vegan and my son is honest enough to admit that he isn’t quite that committed. Yet.
There is a rally to support Sea Shepherd at the Abel Tasman Memorial fountain at Salamanca at 11 am on Saturday the 16th of January.David is keen to attend his first environmental/political rally.
I am very proud of both my children for passionately standing up for what they believe in.
Thankyou for the response to my video of Harry and the pigs. Jientje and Barbara have asked me to make some more videos and so I will. What sort of things would the rest of you lovely people like to see?
I have had the camera out a bit this past week and I think that I might have enough decent shots to post a couple of photos later on this week.
Lastly I want to thank you all my dear internets. I really don’t know how I would have gotten through the last six months without your support. Thankyou.
