Perfection in Miniature

I’ve featured art treasures on occasion, and here’s one that truly took away my breath. This is carved wood, and just a small detail from a tremendous altarpiece, carved nearly five hundred years ago in Lombardy. I photographed it on November 1^st, 2010, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, during my third trip. Besides the jaw-dropping skill of the artist, what makes it interesting as a photograph? The piece is of course behind glass, and artificially illuminated, and gave all kinds of difficulty in maintaining focus, keeping the camera still (low ISO in those days) and finding an angle to exclude the reflection of lights in the glass. That small blue blob at the top is the only reflection. I took many frames but the inherent difficulty meant few came out really well. Minor adjustments to contrast and sharpness in Irfanview; Fuji FinePix S5600. Image by Mike.

 

Still Life?

This is a most interesting piece—Dale Chihuly’s chandelier for the rotunda of the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, London. It was created in 2001 and I photographed it on November 1^st, 2010, during my third UK trip. It’s a confection of blown glass, drawing on the Murano techniques of Venice, according to the V&A’s website. It creates a flowing sense of motion in a still object and its towering, extended, pseudo-organic form puts one in the mind of life, though not of any recognisable form. This was a straight forward snapshot, one of several of this subject, using the background architecture to frame the glass confection. It makes a most futuristic picture, oddly juxtaposing the classical architecture of the building with the surreality of the art. The only adjustments were a touch of contrast and sharpness. Fuji FinePix S5600, automatic. Image by Mike.

Steel Bike

 The Kenny Blake Memorial Sculpture on the High Street of Strathalbyn, South Australia is an internationally recognised sporting monument. Kenny Blake was a South Australian motorcycle racing icon until his untimely passing at Britain's Isle of Mann in 1981. This sculpture took three months to build and contains over 4000 mechanical components and items of scrap. The imposing, life-size monument stands on a stone pedestal on a street corner, and perfectly captures the power and grace of the sport. The intricate detail is endlessly fascinating, and it would be interesting to reshoot at different times of day to catch the changing light across the monument. I captured this image when passing through Strathalbyn on January 19^th, 2023. Fuji FinePix S5600, automatic. Image by Mike.

Silk Flowers

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I took this shot in September 2009, when evening light through red and gold bottleglass caught a spray of artificial flowers and generated these deep, rich colours. This is pure opportunistic shooting, in a few minutes the image would have been gone, the idea is to see the shot and take it without hesitation: a took five frames of which this was the best, the horizontal light catching the fine-scale structure of the flowers in visually pleasing ways. Sharpened only; Fuji FinePix S5600, automatic. Image by Mike.

Globes in the Sun

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Art decor can range from the irritating to the engaging, and the classically simple purity of these spherical light shrouds, echoing organic bubbles against the natural sky, is a strangely pleasing image. Art imitates nature, steel and glass become an organism, a linear one but no less a reminder of stems and branches, or of the floatation bladders of sea wrack. These lights were photographed on the Festival Plaza, Adelaide, in January, 2008, and were a simple composition exercise. Sharpened only. Fuji FinePix S5600, automatic. Image by Mike.

True Antiquity

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It's not often you get to focus on a manmade object that is some 14000 years old. This is a carved antler artifact from late Palaeolithic times which I had the privilege of actually touching at a touch-and-tell exhibit at the British Museum in December, 2006. It i's humbling to think that human hands shaped this piece of organic material and carved in the decoration long before the world as we know it began to take form. The photograph was taken in available light on macrofocus setting, and was simply a case of framing the composition and releasing the shutter: photographically it was a no-brainer, but to see the object is to feel the gulf of time between the maker and the beholder, and it demanded to be recorded. Sharpened and colour-enhanced for publication; Fuji FinePix S5600, automatic exposure, macro range. Image by Mike.

Not Exactly Olmec

Public artwork is often surreal, it's meant to provoke thought and discussion as to its meaning, and the city of Sunderland, UK, is fond of its public art. Close to the sea one finds these great stone balls... There are balls on the waterline of the beach within the famous twin breakwaters, some of them hollowed-out and halved, lying like great coconut shells in the icy North Sea. These are part of a circle of six surrounding a picnic table on the riverside walk directly behind the University of Sunderland's St. Peters campus. What they mean is surely up to the beholder, silently evoking the mystery of the great stone balls that lie in the jungles of Central America, in the lands of the ancient Olmec civilization. But to us they make a surreal image, part of the aesthetic vocabulary of culture as surely as the great colourful trapezoids of Adelaide's Festival Plaza. The photograph was a simple one, frame and shoot, on a bitingly cold day in mid-November 2007. Fuji FinePix S5600, automatic. Image by Mike.

Futurism Yesterday

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What is futuristic in one decade is familiar in the next and downright passe as time goes by, but no less a part of the landscape. This is the Festival Plaza, behind Parliament House, Adelaide, South Australia, looking toward the smaller of the two auditoria of the Festival Theatre Complex, built in the mid-1970s. The architectural style was definitely futuristic at the time, Adelaide competing on a smaller scale with the Sydney Opera House which at that time had become an Australian landmark and icon. The Plaza with its modern art public sculptures dates from a little later in time I think, but is definitely the primary colours and abstract angles of generations gone by. Has it aged well? That's a question for art critics, but it certainly makes for an almost-surreal photograph: the unchanging nature of the primal sky above yesterday's ambition to project today into tomorrow. Fuji FinePix S5600, automatic; February, 2009. Image by Mike.