longexposure October 8th, 2013
Excitement and fear and second-thinking decisions seem to go hand-in-hand readily in the world of decrepit, corroded metal. Especially in this part of the world, such environments are few and far between, so it’s hard not to be enthusiastic. But, there’s that whole horror of waiting for things to disintegrate and commit one to a nightmare of jagged metal. Haven’t we done this before?

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longexposure October 2nd, 2013
Rendering visible the more abstract properties of a scene still intrigues me, and while my earlier tinkering with mapping temperature to colour was a bit limited, I was inspired to take it a little further. So, exhibit one: a familiar junction, lit in a conventional way to look purdy:

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longexposure September 30th, 2013
“Is this an old one” asked a friend on seeing this, and not intending a Lovecraftian reference to nefarious superbeings. Yeah, yeah, it’s a hazard, at least when finding things near home on which to experiment with lighting. Can’t you see that subtle difference in diffusion in the third light on the left?!

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longexposure September 27th, 2013
It’s hard not to wonder how this structure came to be the way it is. Parts are obvious – it was a creek, it was extended to serve further drainage, and so on. But how did it come to have small children’s footprints in the concrete floor?

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longexposure April 11th, 2013
Few things are as atmospheric as Science made flesh on a grand scale. The technology and tools of research feed awe and tingling excitement, whether it’s near or far from one’s own domains of expertise. Finally coming up on these hulking giants in the darkness, hearing the clicks, whirrs and juddering grind as they shift position in the midnight blackness was the stuff of fantasy.

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longexposure February 18th, 2013
Abandoned theatres pull at emotional strings on a few levels. As architectural glories of a past age, they’re up there with asylums and rusting industrial curiosities. While the likes of the asylums were deliberately created to exist outside Civilisation, though, theatres were built to be at its heart.

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longexposure February 9th, 2013
Sitting on the swings of a playground, watching the sun go down, it occurred to me that this nicely-kept park was the last thing I expected to see at the remnant of this Queensland mining town. Not that I knew at the time, but it’s the pride and joy of the town’s last resident, who did walk by and wave. We waved back, not realising the man was the only reason the town hasn’t yet been swallowed by the open pit mine that borders it.

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longexposure February 5th, 2013
A fragment of a dream from a past age stands crumbling in the remote South Australian desert. It’s a dead and baked plain now, with a few skeletal monoliths in concrete, but for a while there were people here, running Australia’s first uranium mine, in a town called Radium Hill.

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longexposure February 5th, 2013
It’s years ago now, but I remember being really inspired by a long exposure of a street, with a line of light meandering up and down it. It wasn’t that it was visually exciting, but that the height of the line represented the strength of the local wifi signal. More than just a pretty picture, this was a graph of something abstract that related directly to the geography, and it was immediately engaging. I’ve been caught up with the idea of doing something like that myself ever since, and I finally did something about it.

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longexposure January 16th, 2013
When the lake level breaches the threshold of this structure, the sound must be unimaginable. A volume of water the area of the lake surface, dropping a hundred metres vertically before blasting through the massive tunnel beyond the dam wall.

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