Michael Ward | Creative
A young Bennetts wallaby mother lets her Joey take a look at the world. In another couple of months this eager joey will have all its fur and be able to hop along with its mother on the nightly foraging excursion. But the nights in Tasmania are still close to being cold with strong gusts of wind so for now mums pouch is the best place to be…
For some reason I nearly always feel very comfortable using a TLR and the Rollei T in particular. The camera I used through my Art school years was a Minolta Autocord II that focused with a leaver beneath the taking lens which was almost as good as the Rollei left hand focus wheel (knob) The disadvantage was that in cold weather (for me) it was too easy to catch the shutter if the leaver happened to be on the RHS at the start of focusing. Other than that the lenses and the film advance is much the same. Like really the linking of the aperture and shutter speed on the T and peculiarly I think the Rollei T is the only TLR that has that feature. Several TLR’s have 645 adaptor mask and counter wheels but as far as I know only the T in the house of Rollei. I’m going to put some fast 800 colour film in it next something that I have never used in medium before !
Henty House, in a town famed for its Georgian and Victorian architecture, the stark concrete mass of Henty House once built to contain state government offices was recently sold to a private syndicate. The brutalist building built in 1983 and designed by architect Peter Partridge is in sharp contrast to Macquarie House a Georgian building a few short metres to the left (north) of this photo. I had reason to enter this building on numerous occasions and have been impressed with the spatial feel of the building it must be a wonderful building to work in.
A rainy night in Launie with apologies to Brook Benton. With a voice as rich and as smooth as oiled mahogany ‘A rainy night in Georgia’ epitomises the sheer haunting beauty of the black soul voice.
As for my picture the digital camera can do things which become tediously trying with film and these days expensive. Even with practice experience there are only two films I would consider for night work Fuji ACROS and Ilford 3200 rated at 1600. The former because ACROS film is unique in as much as one doesn’t have to account for reciprocity failure and the Ilford film because it can be pushed to 6400 and beyond (12500 anyone!) with acceptable results when developed in Ilfotec DDX, which sadly is perhaps the most expensive developer available in Australia… The above was made on an OM systems EM5 and the reason how I could capture this is the absolutely remarkable image stabilisation that the camera offers. No tripod needed!
A grand home in Invermay has had a once equally grand garden chopped off in pursuit of progress. Our planning regulations seem to be something of a nonsense when this kind of planning is enacted. This is not planning this is an ill thought out wrecking ball of a solution to the housing crisis. This is divide and profit leaving the area with a miss mash of private spaces with no thought given to community or street scape aesthetics for the common good. With good planning this old elegant home could have been incorporated with new buildings, planed private and shared space to form an appreciation of our heritage for now and attractive places for the future. Instead what we have is the realestate equivalent of our mining activities ‘dig it up and ship it out’
Tasmania’s climate and soils are such that they can with a bit of care support plants from the sub polar to the sub tropical so its no surprise that the first migrants brought with them the plants that were part of their diet or part of their cultural heritage. Trees have for many been part and parcel of both, those they need to use, like to look at or eat the fruit from. As a result the Cataract Gorge being a park both botanical and recreational has many of those trees that were familiar to the first settlers from their former homelands and those they passed through on the way to this their new home. Most of the parks and open land in Launceston illustrate this occurrence with the huge variety of species purposely planted. We are still fortunate to have this legacy, however the pressure and the need for more residential homes is threatening so many of these magnificent and in some cases rare species of trees…
The North Esk River flows into the Tamar River via Cataract Gorge. The North Esk is a massive drain for a huge area of land that runs from the Western Tiers (the Great Western Mountains) to the City of Launceston in Tasmania. It is prone to flooding in fact the place where I stood to make this photo is now under three metres of water after only a few days of rain.