I Hate The Bush

Lately I have not been sure how to continue shooting for my project, as I’ve been feeling a bit stuck and kind of sick of working on it. I feel like I’m not sure which direction to take it, or if I should stop shooting and work with what I have already captured and created. After speaking to my supervisor, it was suggested that I try taking a camera with me when I go for my daily dog walk in the bush behind my house. I’ve never really liked the Australian bush landscape, because I feel that it’s messy and dull in colour, not like rich green European forests, and so I find it really un-inspiring. But I decided to give it a try, not really knowing what I would capture.

The first things that caught my eye was the earth (above), which I thought looked like small landscapes. If you don’t know the scale of these, they could be large or small. (By the way, these are not square images- click to see the full image.)

As I walked my dog, I just started shooting clusters of trees that we passed. There are not really any rich colours- everything is subdued with a lot of grey, silver, and pale green. The lines are all messy and un-organised. But as I shot, I thought that these could perhaps create contrast between the uniformity of Japan’s landscape and social workings, and the ‘chaos’ of my current situation. I thought that what I perceive as the ‘messiness’ of the bush could be a metaphor for the messy nature of the situation, and complexity of my relationship. I also tried to make the images ‘personal’ somehow, but because I felt detached from the Australian landscape I found this difficult. Hence the photos of my dog- but I don’t think they are going to make the final cut because they are too ‘snappy’ and nobody really cares about other people’s pet photos. The treatment on the images is just basic contrast correction in RAW editing, with some slight adjustments to the shadows in the green curves channel.

When was shooting I wondered if I should work with colour or black and white, so when I got home I started to experiment with black and white. But instead of choosing a punchy, high-contrast look, I reduced the contrast a lot to give the images a kind of faded softness. They reminded me of old Australian bush photos with this treatment, but I feel like it also gave a kind of dream-like quality to the shots. I have been looking at a lot of Japanese photographers that shoot primarily in black and white too, so this influence could be rubbing off. Perhaps these images could be used as full page shots to break up sections of the book. Or maybe they could be quite small, with a lot of white negative space around them.

One other technique I tried was using a slow shutter speed to add motion to the shots. I seriously didn’t think this would be effective, but when I converted the images to black and white, they had this kind of disquieting feeling- almost like an uncertainty. You can still make out what is being photographed, but there is something a bit unsettling about the images. Some feedback that I received in class 2 weeks ago was to try incorporating something sad to my body of work- but subtly sad, not too obvious, and also just “a little bit sad.” This type of image could perhaps allude to that feeling? I could see these shots as large, full page bleeds. Next I will have to experiment with all of the images I took in the bush to see if they work with my other images. I do feel a bit surprised though- I definitely thought I would just capture awful photos that I would hate looking at, but embracing a very relaxed approach to their capture was beneficial, I think.