I know I’ve said in the past that I’m not a great fan of MONA but just lately I’ve been going up there a bit because I’ve signed up to study a unit in Art Theory at University of Tasmania (UTas). I got up extra early to see an installation by American artist James Turrell called Amarna. There’s not a lot I can say about this work except that it is gob smackingly beautiful and very serene.
Here are a few stills.
Wim Delvoye’s Seventeenth Century Flemish Baroque style.Truck and James Turrell’s Amarna at dawn. MONA, Hobart, Tasmania.Amarna At DawnJames Turrell’s Amarna at dawn. MONA, Hobart, Tasmania.
Technical notes: the time-lapse sequence was made with a Sony ActionCam HDR AS20. The stills were shot using an Olympus OMD EM-10 with either an Olympus mZuiko 17mm f2.8 or an Olympus mZuiko 25mm f1.8 lens.
“What?” cried the Rat, open-mouthed: “Never been in a—you never—well I—what have you been doing, then?””Is it so nice as all that?” asked the Mole shyly, though he was quite prepared to believe it as he leant back in his seat and surveyed the cushions, the oars, the rowlocks, and all the fascinating fittings, and felt the boat sway lightly under him.
“Nice? It’s the only thing,” said the Water Rat solemnly as he leant forward for his stroke. “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolute nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing,” he went on dreamily: “messing—about—in—boats; messing—”
“Look ahead, Rat!” cried the Mole suddenly.
It was too late. The boat struck the bank full tilt. The dreamer, the joyous oarsman, lay on his back at the bottom of the boat, his heels in the air.
“—about in boats—or with boats,” the Rat went on composedly, picking himself up with a pleasant laugh. “In or out of ’em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you’d much better not. Look here! If you’ve really nothing else on hand this morning, supposing we drop down the river together, and have a long day of it?”
The MyState Australian Wooden Boat Festival is held every two years and Hobart’s historic waterfront comes alive with the colour and excitement of Australia’s rich maritime culture and history.There were hundreds of wooden boats, from magnificent tall ships to classic sailboats, rugged working boats to superbly detailed models.The Madoc is a Fenwick Williams “Annie”. The MyState Australian Wooden Boat Festival is the largest wooden boat festival in the Southern Hemisphere .2015 Australian Wooden Boat Festival HobartHop The Wag is an old English saying which means to play truant.Captain Jack Sparrow has docked and gone walkabout at 2015 Australian Wooden Boat Festival in Hobart.Hanging From The Yard Arm. The captain of the Lahara deals with pirates very seriously as pirate Ted found out.The Tasmanian Gilbert and Sulivan Society get all swash buckling at The Elizabeth Street Pier.A Member of the Tasmanian Gilbert & Sulivan Society at the Elizabeth Street Jetty.The much-loved 1880 Steam Carousel was whirling all weekend in the Princes Wharf Forecourt.Single-oar sculling is the process of propelling a watercraft by moving a single, stern-mounted oar from side to side while changing the angle of the blade so as to generate forward thrust on both strokes.
The “blood moon” or the red lunar eclipse brought out the apocalyptic in me.
According to Wikipedia…”A lunar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes directly behind the Earth into its umbra (shadow). This can occur only when the Sun, Earth, and Moon are aligned exactly, or very closely so, with the Earth in the middle. Hence, a lunar eclipse can only occur the night of a full moon… the red colouring arises because sunlight reaching the Moon must pass through a long and dense layer of the Earth’s atmosphere, where it is scattered…Several cultures allude to the lunar eclipse as being a good or bad omen. For example, in some Chinese cultures, people would ring bells to remove wild animals that bit the moon. During the Zhou Dynasty in the Book of Songs, the sight of a red moon engulfed in darkness led them to believe the sign as a foreshadowing of famine or disease.” SPOOKY!
Thankfully we all woke up happy and well the next morning.
The weather conspired against me. I had planned my shoot using The Photographer’s Ephemeris, got my angles and location sorted out and then just half an hour before heading out I stuck my head outside and we have thick cloud cover. Bugger! What to do? I didn’t want to drive out to my location, walk to the point and stand in cold wind coming straight off of the Antarctic for nearly 3 hours with the chance of getting nothing. So I decided to set up my cameras on my deck and only start filming when there was a break in the cloud cover. So out of 3 hours and 20 minutes of potential eclipse action I got in total about 30 minutes. Ah well I shall wait until the next one on the 04/04/2015.
Filmed using the time-lapse movie function on the Olympus OMd EM-10 with a 75mm f2.5 Color-Heliar and a Zuiko 40-150mm f4-5.6 lens. Additional footage filmed on a Canon 550d with 70-200mm f2.8 L IS lens
It’s been a busy time at Paul Amyes Photography (PAP) Towers. I attended the Hobart, Tasmania Climate Change rally at MOMA this afternoon and then rushed back to the secret bunker “toute suite” to process and upload the images to be part of the global event that will culminate in United Nations Climate Summit in New York, where it is hoped that United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon can talk some sense into our numskull leaders that the time to do something is now. Although Australia’s PM is in New York he has stated that he will not be attending as he has gone on public record as declaring climate change as “bullshit”, but this is probably because Rupert Murdoch, large multi-national mining companies and several prominent Australian billionaires have made up his mind for him. Hopefully the summit will be a success and the current government will have external pressure brought to bear.
It was a good turn out and everyone was in a happy and positive frame of mind despite the seriousness of the issue. It certainly wasn’t a “rent a crowd” gathering as our politicians and the Murdoch controlled media so often choose to call such gatherings. There was a broad range of social groups represented from kids to pensioners who were united in their concern at what is happening to the Earth that we live on.
Looking out over the Tasman Bridge over the Derwent River from the top of Rosny Hill.
Nothing of earth shattering importance this week. I took the faithful hound up to Rosny Hill for a walk. It was a beautiful saturday afternoon, and the track was quiet enough so she could run off the lead. All I had to do was just walk and look. I had my Panasonic LX5 with me so I just took some quick and dirty HDR panoramas.
Looking across the Derwent from Rosny Hill at Mount Wellington.
When I got home I just dropped them into Adobe Lightroom. First I did the HDR conversions using HDR Efex Pro2, and then I did the panoramic stitching in Photoshop CS5. Nothing complicated, just a few minutes on each.
Looking across Kangaroo Bay at Bellerive and Clarence Yacht Club. from Rosny Hill.
The dog enjoyed herself, I could tell for when we got home she went to bed. As the great canine philosopher, Snoopy, said “A tired puppy is a happy puppy”.
The Olympus 25mm f1.8 standard lens. Small but beautifully formed. Olympus even give you a lenshood!
The other day I was sitting at my desk just idly surfing the net when a courier van pulls up and leaves a small box. Once unwrapped it revealed an even smaller box containing the Olympus m.Zuiko Digital 25mm f1.8 lens. Now for a long time I’ve always believed that every photographer should own a fastish standard lens. In fact I also believe that if should ever find yourself in the photographic doldrums then just committing to use a standard lens for a period of 12 months will see your photography improve no end. I had one for my OM film system (and still have and use it) and I have one for my Canon EOS digital kit, but a little while back I had a dalliance with film range finder cameras and I eschewed the fast 50mm in favour of a pancake 35mm moderate wide-angle. In fact I was so smitten with the focal length that when I adopted the m4/3 system the Olympus 17mm f2.8 pancake was a must have, and if I look through my Lightroom catalogue over half the picture I’ve taken with my Pen and OMD have been with that lens. So now I’m in possession of a fast standard again.
No obvious lens distortion.
My initial impressions are that although it has a plastic body it is well made, although not as well made as say the 60mm f2.8 macro. It continues with the clean modern lines that Olympus adopted with the launch of the EM-5 and it feels well-balanced on both my EP-2 and EM-10. The other small thing that makes feel very positive about the lens is that Olympus have finally stopped being tight and are including lens hoods. The hood is hard plastic and bayonets securely on to the lens after the front cosmetic rim of the lens has been removed. Nice – a good lens should have a lens hood to get the best out of it. After a couple of days of shooting stills out and about I found that the focal length took a little adjusting to, it is a bit narrow for my tastes, but I quickly adapted and started looking for subjects that would play into its strengths.
DOF comparison 1 Olympus Zuiko 25mm f1.8 lens wide open at f1.8DOF comparison 2 Olympus Zuiko 25mm f1.8 lens at f8DOF comparison 3 Olympus Zuiko 25mm f1.8 lens at f22
So optically how did it fare? Very well. There is no distortion worth talking about and although shooting wide open there is some slight chromatic aberration but this disappears very quickly and by f4 it is gone. Sharpness is good with the centre of the lens performing very well wide open with some softening towards the corners again things improve quickly as you stop down, but get down past f11 and things start to soften up again as diffraction rears its ugly head. Diffraction isn’t a fault of the lens it is a problem with the size of the sensor, and all sensor and film sizes suffer from it. The lens isn’t what I would call “clinically” sharp in the way a lot of modern lenses are, it renders nicely and has a nice fall off from sharp edges to the out of focus areas. I’m not by any means a bokeh slut but this lens does render out of focus specular highlights in a very pleasing way. It made me want to go out and look for images that would give me those velvety smooth transitions.
Decentering test on the Olympus 25mm f1.8 at f1.8.Decentering test on the Olympus 25mm f1.8 at f5.6.Beachside Bully Run. The autofocus is quick and accurate and was able to track my dog running erratically on the beach.
The lens focuses insanely quickly on the EM-10, which is as it should be on the latest generation of m4/3 cameras and is no slouch on my first generation EP-2. The worrier of DPReview now obsess over centring and on the micro four thirds forum the hysteria regarding the Olympus 25mm is something to behold. A few people there are expecting lens perfection from this lens and unfortunately no lens is perfect. Does the lens suffer excessively from being de-centred – well according my exhaustive testing of just one sample lens the answer is no. The lens is well within acceptable and I have seen much worse on lenses that cost ten times the amount this one does. My advice is that if you spend all day shooting pictures of brick walls and sheets of newspaper right way up and upside down then blow the resulting shots up to 3 or 400 % and then worry continually that you have a bad copy, or your rate of return rate of “faulty” products is so high that the customer service people know who is on the line just from the sound of your voice then you need a new hobby, therapy or both. Life is short, hobbies are supposed to bring enjoyment and fulfilment not create endless gear angst.
White flowers with bokeh balls. Dodges Ferry, Tasmania.Tea StrainersBanoffee pie Banjo’s Bakery, Hobart, Tasmania.Liberal Party Hobart, Tasmania.Coffee Lovers Hobart, Tasmania.On location filming at the Bellerive Yacht Club with the Olympus EM-10 and 25mm f1.8 lens.
For video the lens is a very good choice. I shot the video clip below to test the lens’ resistance to flare, how it coped with continuous focus in video, close focusing and bokeh rendition.
Now there are some lenses which are so good that people buy into the system just to have a copy of that lens. Is the Olympus 25mm one of those? The short answer is no, but that is a disservice to this lens. It is a very capable performer and I think it should be given serious consideration by anyone who is already invested in the micro four thirds system. I really must say I was pleasantly surprised at how well the 25mm performed. It’s not the fastest lens, it’s not the most expensive, nor is it the cheapest. There are other m4/3 lens that are optically superlative and there are those whose performance is less than stellar to put it mildly. The Olympus m.Zuiko Digital 25mm f1.8 lens is a “Goldilocks” lens – just right.
Ouch! Don’t headbutt the buildings – it hurts.Blowing in the Wind Bellerive Yacht Club, Tasmania.The SS Kosciusko part of the facade of the Waterfront Hotel in Bellerive.Looking out over the marina at Bellerive Yacht Club.Stool Samples Hobart, Tasmania.
Just back from another visit to Tasmania – our third in just over a year.
In The Pink. Salamanca Market, Hobart Tasmania. Olympus EM-10 with 17mm f2.8 lens. 1/250, f4 at ISO 400.Pink and Yellow, Salamanca Market, Hobart, Tasmania. Olympus EM-10 with 17mm f2.8 lens. 1/400 sec, f4, ISO 400.
Despite being cold and wet Salamanca Markets was its usual funky self and pink fairy floss and strange fury hats were the order of the day.
Clothes Tree. Salamanca Markets, Hobart, Tasmania. Olympus EM-10 with 17mm f2.8 lens. 1/160, f4, ISO 400.
As usual the scenery didn’t fail to disappoint, and like always I just wish that I’d had more time and better range of equipment than I had on hand.
Baranjay, Franklin, Tasmania. Olympus EM-10 with 40-150mm F4.0-5.6 lens.
Sea Shells By The Sea Shore, Primrose Sands, Tasmania. Olympus EM-10 with 17mm F2.8 lens. 1/50 sec, f22, ISO 200.No One Home, Randalls Bay. Olympus EM-10 with 12-50mm F3.5-6.3 lens. 1/100 sec, f6.3, ISO 400.
Then there was the usual close encounter of the animal kind. The wildlife in Tassie is amazing and thankfully not all of it lies dead on the side of the road.
The eastern quoll (Dasyurus viverrinus), also known as the eastern native cat, is a medium-sized carnivorous marsupial native to Australia. Olympus EM-10 with 40-150mm F4.0-5.6 lens. 1/15 sec, f5.1 at ISO 12800!!
Well I guess there’s only one thing for it – the global photographic juggernaut that is Paul Amyes Photography (PAP) is now relocating to the southern beaches of Tasmania. We apologise profusely in advance for the break in our regular programming schedule and hope to get everything back online Telstra permitting.
“Fun? Ah yes, the employment of time in a profitless and non-practical way.”
– Arnold J Rimmer, The Last Day, Red Dwarf, Series 3
I absolutely adore photographing Tasmania. It is not just the gob smacking beauty of the natural environment, although that is a huge plus, it is also the quirky sense of fun that is often displayed in the everyday mundane things.Take traffic light control boxes for instance. In most places they are boring grey metal boxes about 1.5m tall, a metre wide and 0.5 metre deep that sit on pavements by intersections controlled by traffic lights. You’ve probably not noticed them, they just sit there being dull, boring, and virtually invisible. In the state capital of Tasmania, Hobart, they are individual works of art. Some are satirical political commentary, some just abstract designs, but the thing is someone made a decision to allow these boring items to be made into something fun. Does it make them more efficient? No. What it does do is allow the community to express its humanity on a bit of space that otherwise wouldn’t be doing anything other than being a grey metal box. Our present day prime minister ever on the drive to improve the efficiency and profitability of the nation would see them as a frivolous waste of time. Time that could have spent making multi-millionaires even richer. But then he sees people as mere economic units rather than as human beings, and economic units don’t express themselves creatively nor have fun.
Safe With Us Now. A control box for traffic lights painted with Tasmanian Tigers the extinct emblem of the state.
Dreamtime Fish Traffic light control box, Hobart, Tasmania.
Movies Traffic light control box, Hobart, Tasmania.
On our last trip to Tassie just a few weeks ago we encountered another example of this expression of fun or “joie de vivre” as the French would say. We drove from Coles Bay on the north-east coast up to St Mary’s via Elephants Pass. It was a hair-raising drive with steep drops at the roads edge, warnings signs about rock falls and logging trucks, the switch back corners and narrowness of the road. Often our speed drop down to 25 Km per hour which on one particular corner seemed excessively fast. Our camper van certainly felt ponderously elephantine as it awkwardly worked its way to the top and to St Mary’s. St Mary’s is an attractive little town of just over 500 people and it sits beneath St Patrick’s Head, an impressive rocky outcrop standing at 694 metres or 2277 feet in the old money. We had the obligatory coffee stop at the Purple Possum and then took a stroll up and down the two main streets. It was in many ways nothing remarkable, just a small Australian country town. Then I noticed that one of the businesses had a small windmill attached to the facade that depicted what it did, and as I continued to walk my eye was now in so to speak and I noticed that virtually all the shop fronts had a small custom-built windmill. Apparently talking to one of the shop owners a local artist had been making them. They serve no function, they are just a small piece of gratuitous fun.
Australia Post. The Windmills Of St Mary’s
The Windmills Of St Mary’s
Laundromat. The Windmills Of St Mary’s.
The Windmills Of St Mary’s
The Pharmacy. The Windmills Of St Mary’s.
The Windmills Of St Mary’s
As an aside I like doing this type of dead pan photography, because it allows me to become a collector without actually buying or physically owning something. It allows me to group things together and organise them. In the field of archaeology this known as a typography which is where you group things according to their physical characteristics. Photography embraced the term in the early Twentieth Century when the German Photographer August Sander shot a series of portraits of people called “People of the 20th Century” a monumental work that looked to document every profession, trade and social start of the German people living in the Weimar Republic. Sander’s photographs however were shot in such a way as to express the individuality of each subject. Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typography of the industrial landscape looked to capture each subject in the same dead pan manner and the photos were often displayed in grids like scientific specimens. I’m not that anally retentive, but I do enjoy the process and have applied to things that take my fancy as I travel about – sign posts, mail boxes, shop fronts. I’d been doing this sort of stuff long before I’d heard of the term typography. I also like the work of Stephen Shore who combined this methodology with colour and road trips. Shore endlessly catalogues the things he sees. Both the Bechers and Shore were grouped together in an exhibition with some other photographers called “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” in 1975. Although no longer ‘new’, after all 1975 was a long time ago, the exhibition has had a far-reaching impact upon photography and as late as 2011 it was still being shown in venues. The resulting book from the exhibition was recently republished by Steidl and is definitely worth looking at if you are interested in landscape photography that falls outside the typical tree and rock photos most people think of when they hear the word landscape.
Bad Parking Or Work Of Art.Swiss artist Roman Signer slammed a car into converging concrete walls in the MONA Car Park.
Hello everyone, I’ve just got back from a very enjoyable trip to “The Apple Isle” or Tasmania as it is properly known. The trip wasn’t all beer and skittles as we had some business to attend to in Hobart, but while we were there we did manage to slip in some fine eating and a visit to MONA.
Gothic Truck. Wim Delvoye creates oversized laser-cut steel sculptures of objects typically found in construction in seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque style. MONA, Hobart, Tasmania.
The Museum of Old and New Art, to give it its full name is the largest privately funded museum in Australia and houses David Walsh’s art collection. Like MONA, Walsh is a polarizing figure – you either like him or you don’t there is no middle ground. Even his bio on the MONA website describes as being “a prick because he like it”. According to The Age he is Hobart’s most infamous son making his fortune off of gambling systems and card counting in casinos, and then apart from the paltry $32 million AUD owed to the Australia Tax Office used it to build the museum ($75 million) and buy his art collection ($100 million). To get an idea of what he is about Walsh recently MC’d his own wedding and out dressed the bride and his parking space at MONA is labelled “God’s”. The words vanity and control certainly spring to mind.
Heading towards the entrance of MONA. Hobart, Tasmania.
MONA is much hyped in Tasmania and indeed Australia, in fact so much so you’d be forgiven for thinking that there is nothing else. When you arrive there you realise that it is much, much more than just an art museum. It is a vineyard, a micro brewery (I’m very partial to the Moo Brew Pils so I’m not all anti Walsh), an upmarket resort, restaurant, event space and gallery. As you go through the mirrored entrance and descend into its deep dark depths it feels like you are entering a Bond villain’s secret lair. When I got to the bottom I fully expected to be met by a pudgy bald man in a grey Mao suit sitting in a swivel chair and fondling a siamese cat. It was a bit of an anti-climax not to be. There are some nice pieces of art in Walsh’s collection, I’m particularly drawn to the works by Australian artist Tracy Moffatt and South African Roger Ballen, but (and there always is a BUT) the overall the impression given is that a huge wedge of cash was given to an adolescent with which to indulge his puerile imagination. The central theme is that of sex and death and the collection relies heavily on shock value rather than other form of merit. Walsh obviously sees himself as a provocateur and impresario in the mould of Malcolm McLaren, but all that was done over thirty years ago and so Walsh’s attempt seems like a limp lettuce sitting in a supermarket cool shelf after a long hot day – in other words past its expiry date.
Interacting with the exhibits. MONA, Hobart, Tasmania.
Perhaps I’m being a little disingenuous and a tad cynical, but I came away thinking that perhaps the real art at MONA is the marketing and relieving the punters of their cash, which would make all rather ingenious. Maybe Walsh is a Bond villain after all. For me the most enjoyable part of the whole MONA experience was watching how the visitors interacted with the exhibits.
Sand Buddha.
Hold That Pose. Wim Delvoye’s gothic chapel, MONA, Hobart, Tasmania.
Looking Up. Interacting with the exhibits. Wim Delvoye’s gothic chapel, MONA, Hobart, Tasmania.
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