APS Behind the Lens: Adjacent

This is something of an “historic” shot for me, dating from May 2016. My wife Jane and I had only recently discovered the amateur photographic scene (in 2011) when we visited the Warragul National Exhibition and were blown away by the standard of the images.

As part of our bootstrapping exercise in getting ourselves up to speed, the first photographic workshop we booked ourselves into was a PhaseOne workshop in Kununurra. As our guide said, we were really starting at the top!

As something of a tech-head, I really enjoyed the challenge of shooting with the PhaseOne XF. However, it was somewhat daunting to be holding a $50,000 camera in a banking helicopter with the doors off!

Shooting from the air was totally new to us, as were the astonishing landscapes of the Ord River flats in winter. It opened a new world to us both photographically and aesthetically.

You don’t really appreciate it looking straight down from a plane as you fly along. You need to have a photograph that freezes the instant to truly appreciate the beauty of what is below you.

We do not often have a chance to take our cameras up in a light aircraft but avail ourselves of any opportunity we can. Shark Bay last year was amazing.

As to the image “Adjacent”, I chose this image first because of the sheer incongruity of the serpentine twists of the river that challenge our conceptions of natural phenomena, the extraordinary asymmetry of the vegetation on the opposite sides of the river and the tantalising absurdity of the five small connections between the adjacent loops.

As with many aerials, significant cropping was required. The image received minimal processing (some perspective correction, clarity, levels) in CaptureOne that is still my image processing system of choice.

This image has received a number of international awards including gold and silver before it was “retired” in 2019.