Kodak from the eighties

September 1, 2011January 22, 20153 Comments

At the Box Hill camera market earlier this year we picked up a few random films, including a roll of Kodak Gold that expired in March 1989. Standard, run-of-the-mill film back then, but twenty years on it produces something quite different.

The risk of expired or cheap film is that sometimes there’s decent shots messed up by too much grain or strange colours. But then sometimes there’s a few that turn out alright…

This one was taken in South Fremantle in July, and I like the graininess in the colours of the sky:

And there’s this one, looking up the bay towards Melbourne from Brighton. I know, lots of ocean photos… They are hard to resist.

And then for something quite different, no water in sight, there’s this one shot by No Fixed Address on the same roll of film:

Polaroid

April 13, 2011January 22, 2015Leave a comment

I’m on the beach, the sun has gone. I like the silence that the waves make with their pounding on the sand.

Apollo Bay, 2010 (Polaroid Spirit 600)

Another beginning

November 27, 2010January 22, 2015Leave a comment

The idea of a beginning gives a false sense of security. It feels like an artifice of fiction, the tidy division of events into chapters for a novel. But beginnings are only a human construct, useful for bookending a story, a stage, a journey; as though a life or a journey can be neatly marshalled into a tidy shape.

But athough I distrust the notion of beginnings, I hang onto them all the same. I often think about the beginning of a love affair with the ocean. It seems important, to think about how this began.

Ironically, it feels as though the love of the ocean arose because of a love of the land and of horses. This love led to early mornings when racehorses skirted the waves on the beach, day after day. On these mornings the ocean became unexpectedly important, though perhaps you didn’t notice this until later. From there, the rest is inevitable: the first voyage on a tall ship, the movement of the ocean ceaselessly in your thoughts.

Yet before all of this you had sailed on the ocean unaware, lacking conscious memory, part of a different beginning. And before that there was the ocean itself, stretching back to its own distant ‘beginnings’, far far away in geological time.