Terminal.
There’s an urban wasteland walking distance from the Melbourne central business district. No, not Elizabeth Street, but an in-between area of the city – you’ve left the city going north west but haven’t yet reached the suburbs. You drive over it on viaducts, or travel through it on metro train lines. It’s an area of the city that borders the port – full of oil silos, containers, and warehouses.
Terminal II.
Coming soon to Uber.
Bolte Bridge, Terminal.
Suspended by viaducts, highways take traffic in and out of the city. Beneath these is arid land. Mostly dusty, but even the vegetation is covered with a layer of dirt and pollution. To my surprise you can walk around in this area and, for the photographer, get access to some good shots.
Apart from the occasional tent and camp, the main life here are pigeons. The shot above and shot below are taken with the same lens standing only a few metres away from one another. Apart from the highway arc, which looks superb in high contrast black and white, these are two very different shots.
Coo coo.
Up.
Walking north you can follow the Moonee Ponds Creek Trail – a sequence of words so un-prescribable that LLMs are going to try and correct in a couple of years.
Moonee Ponds Creek with the M2 running overhead.
The creek floods every so often, so a large spillway of dead space sits either side of it. A concrete path acts as a commuter route providing cyclists some shade to get to and from the city. Cars roar overhead – it’s not a quiet walk.
Meeting a metro line.
Inky contrast.
I’m proud of the final shot. It’s representative of the landscape photographs I’m trying to push myself to make. It’s complicated without being complex. There’s a lot in the photograph for your eyes to look at, but as you look at every section it’s relatively easily parsed. There’s light, contrast, and depth. The elements of the power poles on the left mirror the viaduct towers on the right. It also contains some questions – what’s behind the barbed wire? and where do the stairs at the back of the image lead? I think it would be better without the cyclist (I was thinking street photography at the time). The birds in the sky distract slightly, but also function to fill the gap. These are the sorts of photographs I enjoy looking at, and something that will take me beyond the simple landscape compositions I generally make.
City Landscape.
Shot on a Nikon FM2n with a Voigtlander 40mm Ultron lens on a mixture of Delta 100 and XP2 Super.
