From the hard drive archives
Takayna / Tarkine Coast, from the river to the sea
Lutruwita / Tasmania
Australia
So, am finally emerging from a week+ of some lurgy which had me home-bound.. still a cough and fatigue yet feels good to have made it outside to get some pressing errands done yesterday. While I have unfortunately become more behind on some more pressing tasks and study, I have managed to prepare a few images for print (not the ones pictured here). In the process, I have gone back and see that I literally have *hundreds* of unprocessed/unprinted/etc images.. many of which are still in the drafts section. These here were taken while on Art for Takayna field trips to Laymanika, Takayna/Tarkine Coast, ~2021 - 2023. You cannot drive to here - thankfully - the river trips were as stunning in a quieter way. As I stood in each of these spots, I was overcome by awe by the power of presence and wildness, breathing it all in. (The music attached to this post on my socials is a tangent of thought of how I’d love to create a collaborative soundscape project experience in a planetarium or so, much like Pink Floyd’s recent one which blew my mind away.. music + stills images, an emersive experience.. the idea has been floating around my head for a number of years now..)..
I am one for mood..and flow.. when nature presents to me moody landscapes and conditions, if I am not too overwhelmed at the time from the sheer beauty, energy, magnificence, light that makes one’s jaw drop, maybe, just maybe, I will capture a composition my eyes sees and soul feels, and maybe the shutter will click. Maybe if I am lucky, timing all lines up.. spontaneously, magically, there. Most of the time while I might know I want to visit a specific spot or place, these moments happen spontaneously. Intuitively I am guided by what I feel moves me inside. Sometimes I need to remember to breathe. Or, I am hyperfocusing so much that after I press the shutter button, I am out of breath from holding it! Does that ever happen to you, my reader?
There will be more from the archives that are still sitting in the hard drives. Last week in Melbourne I misplaced/lost one of my good expensive hard drives, *thankfully* have a duplicate one. So ever thankful to have received the wisdom and guidance from Tim and our photography circle of friends to ALWAYS HAVE a SECOND BACKUP harddrive. So now I have three for some images. Overkill? Maybe. But I have suffered the pain of losing a camera (my “baby” - Fujifilm X100V, in a threatened forest coupe where a few of us were documenting ancient native tree ferns (Dicksonia antarctica) being ripped out, land cleared, for their selling off to garden stores and export, prior to the land - native forest habitat- being clearfelled — sadly three hits in one). I still carry that pain, and am unable to afford to replace it, due to the cost inflating and now worth double of what I paid for it prior to the market & popularity exploding. So, to lose images is a tough one too. And, knowing the lifespan of hard drives don’t last forever, nudges me to go back to ones from the last handful of years — Tassie, Hawai’i, Yosemite, Bali.. and while many shot in Tasmania are very familiar places by Tassie & Australian photographers, even familiar compositions unknowingly to me at the time, yet well-known “been there/that’s been done before” photographers words/opinions that I see on socials sometimes dampen my excited newbie “fresh eyes” spirit..(a blog post coming soon regarding this!). However, while these are places visited previously, we all have different perspectives, weather conditions, and carry different stories, meaning and emotion behind our sharings.
To my readers, many of you back home in the States and elsewhere who may not know these places, these are for you .. Sometimes I just want to go and study and do Photography full-time.. it’s my favorite hyperfocus..
