Every once in a while I find myself in the middle of something I had never expected. Being in any kind of group or learning space tends to make this happen. Most of my photographs have been part of my art practice: I take photographs of things I want to paint or record in another medium. I also collect pictures as documentation for things I am writing. I have never seen myself as an art photographer. I adore great black and white portraiture, for instance, but have never thought of it as something I could master. It’s enough to have photographs as another stimulus for writing stories and painting places. The high-end technical properties of photography are not where I want to go, much as I admire those who do.
Just recently though as a member of a local Photography Group I have found myself exploring new technical and conceptual experiments in photography. I first tried this while doing the Photography course at TAFE, experimenting with black and white closeups and blurring and the visual qualities of architectural spaces.
Now that I can more or less use Photoshop I can see what happens when you take photography away from the Real and see the result as a creative act in its own right. But that is still very much a learning process. I have been trying to find a good local Photoshop course but although they are often promised through the Community College they somehow never materialise. The one I did start at TAFE spent several hours going on about fonts, which I certainly didn’t want to know about, fascinating though they are.
I thought I could load the full Powerpoint here on my WordPress site. But although I am paying for a Premium Plan you need a special plug-in to load a Powerpoint and that means you have to have a Business site which costs $299 per year. What? Since I have no business intentions for this photography site, there’s really no point.
My first production is The Secret Life of Kitchens, opening with “The Strainer: a Secret Life”. In the group we were asked to create a meditation on the visual and narrative properties of a common everyday item. I began with a simple silver strainer, the kind you use to catch tea-leaves if you still make tea as we do, in a pot, with real leaves. The initial photograph, which tried to highlight its reflective and shiny qualities against the glitter of a granite benchtop quickly led into a narrative romance. Here is the link
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Annette Hamilton's Image Field 