Who Needs a Camera?

When I was a small boy, I lived in the South West of England, and like most small boys who were lucky to live on the edge of a small country town, I played in the fields, climbed trees, made "bridges" over (actually in) the local stream, and looked for pirates at the local pond.
I also used to "help" Farmer Steele harvest his mowing grass. 

As a result, before the days of Health and Safety Officers, I almost stepped on a harmless but large Grass Snake (which has given me a phobia for the last sixty-odd years),  I fell out of trees, I got "shoefulls" of stream water, and several times I fell into the pond.  Mr Steele taught me swearing, and I discovered quote marks.  "Mr Steele said that he wanted the bloody wire on the bloody fence not across the bloody field" But I didn't say that, Mum, Mr Steele did! 

By play and adventures, I got to know about the natural history of the area.  Yes, I took birds eggs, and fried small fish out of the stream (disgusting) and a gypsy boy showed me how to cook a hedgehog, which was surprisingly good.  Thanks to Farmer Steele, I also learnt about flowers.  I can hear him now, saying to me, "Now that's not a bloody buttercup 'cos it loves damp ground.  It's a bloody celandine"

And then a catastrophe occurred.  My father's job took us all to Bournemouth, a seaside resort almost forty times bigger than Tewkesbury.  At the start, I knew no-one, I felt homesick, there was no Farmer bloody Steele  to verbally perfume the countryside.

So, I used to go for walks by myself, but there were few trees, no streams or ponds, and a large river, the Stour, which was way too wide to even think about bridging it using branches of willow.  I wandered along the path through the mowing grass, and picked dozens of wild flowers, many of which I already knew, and some that were knew to me.  (Incidentally, it is now illegal to pick wild flowers in the UK!).  Besides buttercups and celandines, there were purple loosestrife and St John's wort, Ladies' slippers, Jack-go-to-bed at noon, parson-in-the pulpit, vipers' bugloss, butterfly orchids and lesser spotted orchids, dog roses in the hedge, hips and haws and elderflowers, and many many more, with butterflies to feed on this rich flora.

I used to pick a bunch and take them home, where I carefully put them between folded blotting paper, arranged the "parcel" inside the pages of a book which was weighted down with a brick or two.  After a week, I would reverse the process, and put the pressed flowers somewhere safe.  I still have those flowers, almost sixty years later.  Their rich colours have faded, but I see them as they were.  I can't name many of them anymore, but I'm amazed that they all came from two adjoining fields.  It was before the days of monoculture, when the milk that we drank changed subtly through the year as the cows ate different plants.

But enough of this old man's reverie into his boyhood.  Let's talk photography.  How can you get recognisable pictures of objects without using a camera.  There are probably several ways using digital means, but I have only tried one.  If you have a scanner, and flat objects, you have potential pictures (but please, PLEASE, don't sit on a photocopier and press the button!)  The pressed wild flowers gave me the clue, and my first picture  was of a piece of flat parsley.

Later, I graduated to a cockatoo feather.

 

It is advisable not to try and use a whole cockatoo, as you will experience difficulty in flattening it sufficiently, and you may not get the photo that you wanted.

If only I had been able to use a scanner on all those wild flowers.  They would never have faded in my pictures.  Of course, anything flat can be scanned, and the second picture is of airline luggage labels that I have acquired over the years.

 

 

You will notice that almost without exception, I only have to travel with an airline for it to close or be taken over.  Ansett Australia; Pan American; Canadian Pacific International.  All gone now, like many of the wild flowers of long ago, which possibly have only been scanned by a few.

 

If you have a "wet lab" or dark room, the possibilities of image making without a camera increase considerably.

 

Such as, if you have a negative, a fun thing to try is leaf photography.  For this you will need a live tree.  Chlorophyll is the stuff that makes leaves green.  When the sun shines, the chlorophyll breaks down the starch into sugars which feed the plant.  So, if you fix a 35 mm negative to a growing leaf, and leave it outside in the sunshine for several days, the clear part of the negative allows the sunshine to get the chlorophyll in the leaf to convert the starch into sugar.  The black part of the negative blocks the sunshine so that the chlorophyll can't convert starch into sugar.  Now comes the interesting part.  You put the leaf into alcohol. ALCOHOL IS INFLAMMABLE, but fortunately it boils at 79C.  Water boils at 100C.  Therefore if you heat the water to boiling and then add the alcohol and leaf in a smaller container, the chlorophyll gets leached out of the leaf, so that you end up with a white leaf.  Tincture of iodine (if weak enough) makes the areas where the starch is to turn blackish blue.  There is no colour change where the sun and the chlorophyll has turned the starch into sugar.

 

Another method, which personally I have not tried, is to sandwich a flat object between two sheets of glass and some photographic paper.  After a few days in the sun, the paper can be developed and an image produced.

 

And finally a footnote on the very first cameras.  They were made of wood and had an oiled paper screen.  They were used by artists.  Many famous artists used them, including the French Impressionists, who painted "en plein air" (outside in the fresh air!)  We call them pinhole cameras, and they have a virtually complete depth of field.  The easiest way to make one is to get a can with a removable lid, like an old golden syrup tin.  Paint the inside matt black.  Drill the thinnest hole possible in the centre of the base of the tin.  Place a piece of greaseproof paper over the open end, and move the camera (probably on a tripod) until you can see the desired scene.  Then carefully remove the apparatus, go into a darkroom, and jam a sheet of film between the lid and the can.  Choose a suitable exposure (a couple of hours, perhaps), and then take everything into a darkroom and process as normal.  OK, you have used a camera, but you have taken a photograph in the same way that the very first pictures were taken, and if you are lucky, you may end up with a photo that looks as though it was taken in the 1840s!

Official vandalism in the name of . . . what?

When people around the world think of Sydney, they think of the Harbour, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the Sydney Opera House.  When they arrive in our city, they add the Queen Victoria Building to the list.  The QVB was saved from developers, (who wanted to turn it into a car park), and today it stands as a jewel in central Sydney.

A whole suburb, Woolloomooloo, was saved several years ago by Jack Mundey, a Union boss, who adopted a green ban, which stopped development of this pretty dockland area, by stopping all building work indefinitely until the developers changed their plans.  Even the blue rinse Liberal ladies of Hunters Hill consulted him to block plans to get rid of a park because developers wanted to put up more buildings which would have destroyed their wonderful and expensive views of the Harbour.

Recently, the inner city is being radically changed.  There is a place called Barangaroo.  This was originally berths for ships in what was then a working harbour.  Then it became a terminal for up to two large cruise ships.  At one time, car carriers used to unload their cargo there; and it was there that the Pope, on his sole visit to Australia, held a Mass for International Youth Week and canonised Mary McKillop to be Australia's only Saint - Saint Mary of the Cross.  So you can see that Barangaroo has taken and is taking an important part in Australian history.

A couple of years back, a significant Sydney developer wanted to build a casino on Barangaroo.  He has breached the rule of only having one casino in Sydney, by buying the licence of the one that is already open.  He has breached the building line regulations, and he is building a gargantuan building (it is not for me to judge its architectural merit or otherwise) at Barangaroo, which had been earmarked by the previous State Government as a park.

You can get some of the idea of the scale of the development from the first photograph.  Not very distinct, I'm afraid, but other pics later.

The buildings are of a very unusual style, possibly even unique in Australia.  They are called "Filigree style" houses.  They are old (almost 150 years, which is very old for Australia) and were the homes of ordinary dock workers.  They are also Heritage Listed.

They are located in High Street, Millers Point, which is on the Western side of the Rocks (not the eastern tourist side where there are souvenir shops and expensive restaurants).

The western side is quiet, like a small village.  The roads are not at all busy, there is a preschool, and a couple of pubs, a cafe, a park, and a few local shops.  

Above all, there is a marvellous sense of community which has been developed over about a century.  There are residents who were born here over sixty years ago.

These are not large houses; they are two bedroom flats, but they are NOT high rise.  They are a little bit of the Nineteenth Century in a Twenty-First Century world.

This is a marvellously mixed community.  When I was down there two days ago, I was introduced to several friends and neighbours, and met two of them in the corner cafe.

The thing is that these are what we in Britain are called Council Houses, but in Australia are called Authority Housing.  The State Government has already issued notices to quit, and are ready to rehouse the inhabitants elsewhere.  A long way elsewhere, where you have to go everywhere on a bus, and the buses are infrequent.  There is no effort being made to keep the community together. 

The local council, spurred on by the State government (the same government which has been found guilty of corruption and taking bribes (illegal election payments) from developers), is evicting the inhabitants because of this, which is portrayed in the next photo.  These two bedroom flats have water views, and still will do even after the casino is finished.  

In the Sydney Morning Herald today, a modern flat with harbour views with one bedroom and two bathrooms is up for sale for $ 1 000 000 !  No wonder they want the tenants out!

There is also a preschool in the street.  Goodness knows what will happen to the children if those facilities are destroyed

The residents will be holding a picnic in the local park on Sunday, September 14th, and a petition will be available to sign.  Why not come along to meet the locals?  Bring food and non alcoholic drink.  This is not political.  It is about natural justice!

If you got this far, thanks for reading it, and now back to photography!

Recycling a grotty photo.

 

 

This is a sight you don't see too often, thank goodness!  It's a picture of the Dangar Falls near Armidale NSW during the great drought of 2009.  These falls are a tourist attraction.  Not exactly Niagara, but big enough for no sane person to want to go over in a barrel.  The water normally tumbles almost 400 feet, about the same as the height of St Paul's Cathedral in London.  In 2009, as you can see, the falls were all but dry.  You could see the smooth, almost glass-like texture of the rock where it had been smoothed by millennia of falling water.  It had to be worth a shot.

 

 

Unfortunately, it was late in the afternoon, and the valley was already in dark shadow.  Still, I found the best viewpoint I could, (which wasn't very good, but hey! how often do you see a large dried up waterfall?), and took a record shot.  The best thing in it is the tree, still with sun on it in the foreground.  However no matter what I tried, I couldn't darken down the far wall of the valley.  Too much detail had been lost.

 

 

I wanted to remember that lonely dried up waterfall at the end of kilometres of dried up dusty road.  How did the indigenous people cope in such prolonged droughts in the past.  Quite well, actually.  Their folklore told them what plants they should eat to get the maximum amount of water.  So to commemorate them, and to be honest, save a photo that would otherwise end up in the bin, I conceived "Waterfall Dreaming"

 

 

 

 

And to think that at one time I could not bear to use Photoshop!