Thursday 1 December 2011

Man Cold - The End of the World as We Know It

Andrew has a Man Cold. The world is ending. He thinks he's going to die. Nothing will ever manage to make him well again. Sadness. (At least he has me around to document his final hours ;) He's going to love it. Sneaky sneaky!)

Wednesday 23 November 2011

Study Time

I snapped this quick, but super cute photo of Alfred helping Andrew "study" for his Thermodynamics (don't ask... I have no idea other than that it involves sciency stuff and numbers) exam earlier this week. I'm not sure how much "studying" Andrew got done as football was on TV!  He he he.

Monday 7 November 2011

Sem B Folio - Abstract Representations of Personality

Greetings from OZ-land everyone!

I know I have a few posts to catch up on, but seeing as how I've spent the past month working away intensely on images for our 2nd semester of year 2 folio I thought I'd quickly post them before we spend 2 full days in presentations.

The short version of what this folio is about is basically trying to abstractly represent individuals (family and friends) using movement and colour. A lot of research went into this folio and I also used quotes from some individuals to try and give me a bit of deeper insight into their personality.

I am really happy with all of the final images and while it was really arty and conceptual, I loved having the chance to explore this before the heat gets turned up next year for our final year at PSC. The prints are big and the colour just pops off the BFK Rieves watercolour paper... they look like paintings which is what I had been going for since the beginning.

When I showed the images throughout the semester in class for feedback, it was actually really creepy how our tutor was able to pin-point the personality of pretty much every image without knowing any of the people they are about or which image represented each person. He even got so close with Drew's (A2) image to know he was an engineer, he even specified bridges! What?!?! He knew that mom's was a fierce, passionate and feisty person who was always doing a number of different things at once, he called me out on being a happy romantic (awww, I so am!), he knew Laura's was all about imagination and child-like creativity, Andrew he knew was all about technology (the boy has every gadget known to man)... he hasn't seen all of the finished ones but he was pretty spot on!

The images were created from photographing numerous different things, sunsets, trees, puddle reflections, grafiti, clouds, blinds, flowers etc. Some movement was done in camera, some in editing. Some colour is true to life and some is changed in editing... it was so much fun to play around with these to get them to look right.

Anyway, here they are... I won't tell you whose is whose yet but see if you can guess. The people involved were Madre and Padre, myself and Andrew, Twinnie and Drew, Meg, Kaela, Anna, Ron, Laura, Ian, Shanny, Lexo and Sarah Hartman.
















Good luck to all 2nd years with presenting tomorrow and Thursday! I can't believe we are almost done with 2nd year... where the heck has the time gone?

Sunday 25 September 2011

Fiona & Sam

A couple of weeks ago I went down to Geelong to photograph Fiona and Sam's wedding. The ceremony was at the Carousel along the waterfront and in between rain storms we managed to sneak outside for a few wedding party photos. Here's a little sneak peek. Thanks Fiona and Sam!

























Chandala Mine Tiwest

For the first time since we moved to Melbourne almost 3.5 years ago, I finally made it back to Perth! Andrew is there for 3 weeks for school and work and more school so I decided to make my way over to him for my semester break. We got pretty ordinary weather while I was there (I must have brought it with me from Melbourne... sigh) but it was really nice to spend some time with Andrew and to be back in Perth. While we were there we caught up with some friends who I hadn't seen in years which was really nice. We had a lovely, uber delicious Mexican feast with Claire in Freo, had drinks with Brian at the pub and caught up with Christine and Naomi and their families at King's Park. It was so nice to see everyone again!

Andrew and I also went back to our old stomping grounds in Tuart Hill to see the little unit we still own but now rent out over there. It was really weird but wonderful at the same time to go check out and inspect the old place. Walking in the front door, I was hit with a rush of memories from my early days in Australia and it was really cool to be back in our first little house together. The current tenant has kept up the place really well but we heard a pretty funny story about our previous tenants. Apparently, the 2 students that used to live there after we moved out weren't all that fond of gardening. They were asked to pull out the weeds to make sure the garden stayed looking nice and when the agent came back to check the request had been met, she found that all the weeds were lovingly cared for while all the plants had been pulled out! What? To make it even funnier... when asked to still pull the weeds and replace the plants and flowers the tenants planted plastic flowers. Who does that? Needless to say we're glad we've got a new tenant who has taken good care of the garden.

While we were in Tuart Hill we also got to go back to Cafe Bellini, a delicious, quaint little Italian place down the street from the unit where we had our first date almost 6 years ago. Awww so romantical. Love it.

One of the highlights from the trip, although rainy and grey, was going to an Open Day at Chandala Mine in Muchea. I think this is probably the closest I'll ever get to seeing what Andrew does and what work is like for him when he's out on a mine site. This site was only about an hour out of Perth so is much closer to civilisation than most of the mines he's at, but it was pretty cool to be there! Of course I didn't understand half of what they were saying... talking all science lingo on me... brought me back to year 10 Chemistry with Ms. O'Reilly which was NOT my strongest subject by any means (who are we kidding... I was the one who was in early before class and had to stay late after class for extra help just to pass the class!) but I plugged along with Andrew for a few hours trying to learn what I could. Anyway, all the talk about Ilmenite and Zircon (I think they was the main minerals?!?!... don't ask me what they do/are used for because I couldn't tell you) got to be a bit much for me so I grabbed my camera and snapped a few photos.



We had to wear high res safety gear when we went on the walking tour of the plant. Don't we look sexy? Love it. I totally get why all these site workers wear boots and high res gear because well for one thing, it's a safety issue but by the end of the 40 minute tour my sneakers (mesh sneakers I might add... not the best selection for a rainy day) were soaked and muddy as were my jeans!






Inside the plant it's just how I would have imagined it... lots of pipes and other technical stuff I don't know the name of. It was loud and I will blame my lack of knowledge not on lack of understanding sciency stuff but on the fact that we had to wear ear plugs and I couldn't hear what the tour guys were yelling over the noise of the machinery. That's a good excuse right? It looks kind of cool though with all the pipes and yellow glow of the lights!





I did take note that in the picture above the steam stack there is a long, large rusty kiln which gets heated up to 1100 degrees and is on a 2 degree slope from left to right. When the minerals are put in at one end it takes 9 hours for them to travel to the other end and inside the fiery kiln, which one guy described as hell on earth, it's basically just coals that heat up the minerals. There are 10 pumps around the outside of the kiln that just constantly pump in hot air to keep the temperature stable. The tour guys said that if the kiln stops rotating for more than 30 minutes it would just implode on itself because it's so hot. Yikes!

I probably butchered some of that information but whatever, we all know I'm not a science expert. I think I'll stick to photography and leave the mining and metallurgy to Andrew. :)