Smartphones and Cyanotypes

Cyanotype Still Life © Andrée Lawrey

Everything old is new again:  my latest Different Strokes article looks at a hi-tech, digital incarnation of plastic camera photography and the fun of making cyanotypes.  You can find it here, in the October 2010 edition of Capital Image (page 18).

Polaroid Chairs Diptych

 © Andrée Lawrey

My first cyanotypes!  Special thanks to my photographer friends Lorna, Susan H and Marlene for giving me such a fun and inspiring introduction to cyanotype printing.

The original image is a Polaroid 600 photo which I scanned to make negatives for contact printing.  I often fall in love with negative images, so I tried printing this one both ways.  The positive print works best – the darker background is less distracting – but I also like the pair as a diptych.  (Thanks for the suggestion, Lorna!)

Spring Blossom

© Andrée Lawrey

It's too easy to overlook the photo opportunity just outside the front door.  Quite literally, in this case – every Spring I mean to photograph the blossoming crab apple trees lining the path by my front door, walking by day after day, thinking "I must come down with the macro lens and see what I can make of this", then letting the days slip by until the opportunity is lost for another year.

Then, at a portraiture class on Sunday afternoon, I found myself shamefully out of practice with spot metering and manual exposure settings.  I drove home determined to refresh my manual photography skills at the first opportunity.  And there were the flowering crab apples...

I was thinking of Chinese flower paintings and watercolours on heavy, absorbent paper.  And Spring, of course.

D700, 105 f/2.8 micro

Hang It Yourself at PhotoAccess

© Andrée Lawrey

Some Polaroids from my last visit to a favourite holiday location on the South Coast of New South Wales – more holiday dreaming... The originals are quite soft, so the prints had to be small; I used a textured paper to emphasise their soft, almost painterly quality.

This completes my 2010 group exhibition marathon! Always a fun show, this year's Hang it Yourself at PhotoAccess should be the best yet. It opens on Sunday, 5 September at 12 noon and continues until 19 September. Further details are available here.

Polaroid 600 Spirit

Don't Blame the Equipment!

© Andrée Lawrey

Unsharp photos, the bane of my life – except when I'm playing around with plastic cameras and other 'creative blur' approaches. Soft and moody has its own charm, but I'm trying to remember that even famously unsharp Holga, Diana and Polaroid cameras give better results with a bit of care and application on my part – and the solution for my DSLR is not necessarily a shiny new lens!

My latest Different Strokes article is available here, in the August 2010 edition of Capital Image (page 12).

Polaroid 600 Spirit

Showing Off

Whew! One of my New Year's resolutions was to take up every exhibition opportunity that came my way in 2010. Deadlines are good, I thought, they will force me to start working on some of my project ideas. At that stage it wasn't obvious that several deadlines would come together to give my life that extra edge in May/June. Still, I made it, learning so much from the experience that my latest Different Strokes article practically wrote itself – you can find it here, in the June 2010 edition of Capital Image (page 22).

And the exhibitions? They were: Access All Areas 2010: The PhotoAccess Members' Show (Huw Davies Gallery, 29 April–16 May); Thredbo – A PhotoAccess Group Show (Huw Davies Gallery, 20 May–6 June); and Diversity is a Nine Letter Word (Strathnairn Homestead Gallery, 15–30 May). Finally, Out There 2, the Canberra Photographic Society's annual exhibition opens today at the Watson Arts Centre (1 Aspinall St, Watson; 1–11 July; gallery hours 10am–4pm Thurs-Sun).

The photo? It's Autumn Reflections 5, last of a series I made in 2006, rediscovered when I was preparing work for the Diversity exhibition.

The Postcard Show

I have two sets of photos in Holiday Snaps – A Members' Postcard Show at PhotoAccess. That's not quite what I planned. I set out to produce a 'mini retrospective' of ten favourite travel images I had not shown before, but somehow the project took off at a tangent. This is better, I think, with only a nod to the past and a stronger focus on more recent work. As for the two very different sets of images, both are equally 'me'. I am glad the 10 images limit gave me scope to show both together.

This is the Polaroid 600/Holga set. The beach, the ocean baths, the spotted gum tree, even Canberra's lakeshore in the early morning – holiday dreaming, anyone?

© Andrée Lawrey

And here's the 35mm/DSLR set. Something old, something new – my favourite photo from Canberra's 2006 Balloonfiesta, fishing boats at Essaouira (taken on a 2001 photo tour to Morocco), a battered weathervane snapped in some friends' back yard last December.

© Andrée Lawrey

The show continues until Sunday, 21 February. More information is available here.

In the Mist Garden

© Andrée Lawrey

The February 2010 edition of Capital Image – including my latest Different Strokes article (Refresh, Revive, Re-inspire, page 16) – is now available here, on the Canberra Photographic Society's website.

D700, 180 f/2.8

Grounded Weathervane

© Andrée Lawrey

I'm sorting through my photo collection, looking for candidates for my submission to Holiday Snaps – a Members' Postcard Show (11 to 21 February 2010), the next group exhibition at PhotoAccess. I have promised ten 4x6 inch prints and, as always, I'm cutting it fine on the timing and interpreting the brief widely – anything to bring together a nice variety of 'holiday spirit' (i.e. fun) images.

D700, 28-105 f/3.4-4.5

Hall of Mirrors

© Andrée Lawrey
D700, 50 f/1.8

I'm back! (apologies for the hiatus...)

© Andrée Lawrey
Nikon D700, 85 f/1.8

It's been a long break, due partly to circumstances and partly to sheer confusion about why I wanted to keep this blog going when I also had a Flickr page and a "proper" though much neglected website. Silly, really. I did manage to make some new photos last year, against the odds, as well as doing some writing for the Canberra Photographic Society's Capital Image newsletter, and I like the idea of the photoblog because it feels more personal, somehow. Besides, I enjoy writing as well as imaging, so let's see what happens.

Here's to a fresh start and lots more photography in 2010! I'm full of fine photographic resolutions, with "update and refresh the websites!" high on the list.