My father-in-law used to tell me how, when he was in his teens, he used to catch the steam train down the North Shore Line towards the City. At Wollstonecraft, the line diverged downhill to the right of the present day line and went round the shores of Lavender Bay until it reached Milson's Point. From there two huge ferries used to ply back and forth to and from Dawes Point from where it was possible to get a penny tram ride up George Street to the City. About 1928, a large area of the harbour was reclaimed with landfill. This was to be the construction site for the future Sydney Harbour Bridge, Sydney's Depression Project.
Strange to say, this story starts and ends in a very obscure manner with that wonderful old Sydney Icon. After 1932, when the Harbour Bridge was opened, the Lavender Bay construction site was turned into an amusement park, and in the American style of the day was christened "Luna Park". It also sported one of the very first jocund fat face entrances that subsequently became the trademark of many funfairs.
I attended a photographic exhibition at Luna Park a few weeks ago, and when I came out of the hall, I took a picture of one of the avenues of attractions. You can see that there is a fair amount of lens distortion, and as I was at home about to correct the image, I thought of "Fat Face" at the entrance.
It was then that I had my moment of enlightenment. Instead of using the camera lens distortion reduction lens to give me a more accurate idea of reality, why not distort it even more, particularly with barrel distortion to give a jolly effect at a fairground. (Which I have to say they desperately need.) Have you ever been round an empty fairground at ten o'clock in the morning? You can feel suicidal.
And so here it is, my jolly, barrel-shaped, jolly old barrel-shaped, Luna Park.
When you usually perform a lens correctionSometime ago, our Sydney Monorail was taken out of service. This I think, and thought at the time, was a pity. The tourists liked it; it wasn't doing anyone any harm; indeed it didn't go anywhere where it could cause any real harm. It was a fairground ride which could masquerade as real 22nd Century Transport. Sydney could be seen as being sooo modern without actually being so in the least. Off I went to the centre of Sydney to take my last pics of the system.
In itself, I think it's quite an interesting photo. Perhaps it's not Gold Medal territory, exactly, but it shows Sydney as it was at the end of 2013, and in only a very few years, it's the sort of photograph which will be found in the Museum of Sydney. Quite fortuitously (I took an Honours degree in Serendipity by accident), monorails are longish objects and length needs emphasising.
So if you distort it and stretch the image lengthwise to fit nicely onto a piece of A3 paper, it changes tracks and comes much closer to you, and the whole image has far more impact. You don't seem to notice the extreme distortions around the edge of the image. Indeed they seem to have become the frames.
This was becoming addictive. Although I had more than enough images to experiment with, I decided to see what happened if I tried the technique on a building that looked distorted to the naked eye. So I went down to Ultimo, to the Frank Gehry building.
Barrel distortion did not work. In the end, it was extreme cushion distortion that gave the most interesting result.
Sometime ago, perhaps as far back as 2009, I went to Sydney's magnificent zoo, Taronga. As a former Brit who is used to zoos showcasing lions and tigers and not hedgehogs and badgers, it comes as a shock to find that although Taronga does have a few tigers, a very old bear, chimps, a few gorillas, etc., most of its collection is Australian. Australia is so big and our population is so sparse, that we Australians have never seen the majority of our fauna. So I looked in the pen containing the Big Saltie (the Australian Salt Water Crocodile) and couldn't see it. And then . . . I gradually made out the head, mainly the jaw, and particularly the teeth. Nothing moved. It was not necessary for anything to move. It was the perfectly evolved animal. If it was necessary to move it would move. With deadly effect. And then it would stop moving again.
Call that a Big Saltie? THIS is a Big Saltie!
To be honest, I don't want to meet either of them, especially on a dark night.
And so at last we obscurely come full circle. On its maiden World Cruise, the Queen Mary 2 moored at the RAN Garden Island Naval Base, as the Royal Australian Navy was on holiday at the time. It moored there because it was too long to moor at the International Passenger Terminal in the middle of the city, and with less than a metre clearance under the Bridge at low tide, it was a Risk Too Far to take her to any of the upstream berths. Three years later the IPT has been renovated and the QM2 can now be berthed there, and of course, so can the other super-cruisers. My last distortion makes this beautiful ship look even more beautiful.
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