Monochrome Monday (Spray)

Monochrome Monday (birthday)

Extremely large shout out to my best mate who has a certain birthday today.
So many good times together over the decades.

Let's keep surfing until we can't remember each other's names!
Your bithday card looks something like this Leunig Cartoon:

Monochrome Monday (the great curve)

The intersection of one curved surface and another curved surface as it rolls across yet another curved surface - board, wave, Earth.

Monochrome Monday (a wall is not a door)

"Dont spend time beating on a wall

hoping to transform it into a door"

Coco Chanel

Palm Sunday Squall

If Ansel Adams surfed

When I was a lot younger and starting to learn the discipline of shooting, processing and printing film on big 5x4" cameras, most of my fellow students at Art College were inspired by documentary style street photographers.
But I was not.
By then I had seen enough of the street and was more interested in the brine and the bush.

Instead the two monochrome magicians that still inspire me years and a digital revolution later are the Czech Josef Sudek and the American landscape legend Ansel Adams.
Who knows why some aRt resonates with one viewer and not another. Maybe all that time swimming around with a Nikonos or waiting to catch a wave at Granite or Tea Tree nurtured a love of place and the way light skims off country at different times of the day and different seasons of the year.

“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”
Ansel Adams

“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
Ansel Adams

“To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.” 
Ansel Adams

But if you are devotee of gritty monochrome street photography, then check out one of my old Art College teachers, Charles Page 's page. His imagery takes a lot more guts then duck diving a few close out sets with a DSLR.

Monochrome Monday (down to the sea again)

 Some salty snippets of memories and verse

 for my siblings of the sea and assorted lurkers.

"I must down to the seas again, 

for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call 

that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day 

with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, 

and the sea-gulls crying."

John Masefield, Sea Fever: Selected Poems

Monochrome Monday (when the music's over)

Quote - Week 3

"Life goes on"

Robert Frost

Quote Week - 4

"we make ourselves real

by telling the truth"

Thomas Merton

Snaked twice

How times have changed. 

Snake story one: I'm jogging along the concrete track beside the creek at dusk when I see another jogger coming my way with a crazy uncoordinated gait, arms flapping and shining one of those blue-white LED torches at me. (I got a half busted red bicycle light flashing n my hand, so the lycra Caddell-Evans-wannabes don't mow me down).

He's a bit freaked out apparently because he just saw a snake on the concrete bike/walk track. I'm surprised by his reaction. This is a bushy section with dense stands of mature eucalyptus (gum) trees,  a creek and the nearest habitation is a good 300 meters away. I tell him "yeah, I see them around here all the time. Thanks for the warning" and keep going. All of asudden, all I can think about is snakes and I'm on hyper-alert, gingerly navigating every large crack and every small gnarly branch on the darkening track lest it be a snake.

Snake Story Two - I'm visiting Nana Brine at her beachside abode. We've seen lots of big fat red bellied black snakes on the concrete track she talked the council into building - the one that curls from the esplanade to the beach, between two multi-million dollar houses. 

She's nearly 90 and tells me about when she was a young girl living near a mangrove shrouded creek, there used to be a lot of snakes, so her father would kill them with an axe and then hang them on the fence. I'd love to know why, but she doesn't remember that part. 

Maybe next visit.

Quote

" The salt in our blood

matches the ocean's salinity."

JFK

Monochrome Monday