Panoptikal*: Bob's Bay (January, 2001)

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Bob's Bay (January, 2001)

I am posting this picture as a joyful reminder of what I am looking forward to... in less than three months' time I'll be a lot closer to Bob's Bay, which is at the top of the South Island in Aotearoa-New Zealand, in the Queen Charlotte Sound near Picton. The woodpile was a part of my impromptu camp-site.

I remember the first night, I slept only in my sleeping bag and didn't bother to put up the tent. In what must have been the early morning hours, I was woken by a snuffling and an odd, creaky vocalization somewhere in the bush off to my right. I thought to myself that it must have been some kind of toad croaking. I remember hearing also the sound of the now-high tide washing up not far from where I lay, pushing and pulling at the small stones on the beach. Then I fell asleep again.

In the morning, I shared stories with two other campers on the beach--in fact what I'd heard in the night had been a large, curious possum that had been hanging out around the beach, snuffling at tents and caught by the other campers' flashlight, no doubt startled and stock-still as possums usually are in the moment one catches them in a torch beam shooting out from the darkness.

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More about...

The pictures I post here were taken between 1994 and today. There are some breaks during that period, generally because I had no working camera, or because I processed many negatives and made few prints (generally this is the case for 1994 to 2000 or so). I also have many prints from that time that have not yet been digitised.

The reason I call this a "photojournal" is that I tend to document my life with images, where possible, rather than words. I find it much easier to remember moments, and then events, when I have some kind of picture with which I can associate them. This is probably why I've always taken pictures when I could--even when there was "nothing" to photograph--and why I have such a difficult time keeping up a written diary or journal of any sort.

Technicalities

I've used a number of cameras over the past 15 years or so. The bulk of these were SLR, manual or semi-automatic, and of course non-digital (35mm film) cameras (photos shot from 1994 to 2004, roughly), though for a period I used both (low-quality) digital and film (around 2002-2003).

I first used a fully manual camera when I was 14, which was borrowed; the first SLR that I owned was a Vivitar, which rapidly deteriorated. It was followed by a Pentax, and after that, the Minolta XD-11 that I have used for film ever since. I use it with a 35mm or a 28-70mm lens with telephoto and macro. In addition to these, I also used Mamiya 220 and 330 medium-format (120 film) cameras while at NSCAD in 1997-8, and very occasionally, I used an old Agfa range-finder (from roughly the 1940s) which produced 6x9cm negatives on 120 film.

The first digital camera I used would probably have been in 2002, and I used it periodically over about a year (it was borrowed). In 2004-05 I again used a digital camera (also borrowed; specs not available); I stopped shooting on film beyond 2004 because of the expense. Finally in October 2006 I bought a Sony CyberShot, 7.2 megapixels, a very small camera (not an SLR) that I used for almost 4 years before replacing it with a CyberShot DSC-TX5, in July 2010. This camera now travels with me almost everywhere and is the only camera I use regularly.