It does stand to reason, I suppose. The majority of human interaction with animals is driven by malicious intent… (’mmm turkey, capture, kill, eat mm’). So I think it’s safe to assume that these animals, who understandably seek to avoid predators bearing questionable equipment, are not going to be comfortable with a creepy camera-yielding human crouching in the bushes, (would anyone be comfortable with that?!). They may, however, be thinking, ‘Oh good’o, that hairless over sized marsupial isn’t carrying a gun, I’m safe to continue strutting and posing, on my good side of course. Totally safe, no worries mate, she’s just holding a big black shiny pointy… oh, shit..’

So, I sort of cheated. I went to Noosa National Park, where it is undoubtedly easier to take photos of wild animals in their protected habitat. Okay, I use the term ‘wild’ loosely as koalas can’t actually move fast enough to avoid us and turkeys think they are human anyway.

Correct me if I’m wrong and/or deluded (most likely the latter), but I feel as though these photos really convey the animal’s personalities.

The Brush Turkey (Alectura lathami); is an unsightly species of bird in the megapode family that loiters around human’s waiting for the opportune moment to steal one’s lunch and/or women.

The Koala (Phascolarctos cinereus); is a tree-dwelling marsupial that feeds predominantly on eucalyptus leaves and thus appears to be stoned. All the time.

Click for more photos!

Don’t get me wrong, I love writing and photography, but my engagement in the arts has always been that of an open minded amateur…experimental, at best. ‘Art’ should be a search for truth - whether that be self or societal, but it should never be taken too seriously. Art should entertain. And I don’t mean in the crass commercialised sense, I mean it should be thrilling, inspiring, mind-opening, mind-fucking and worthwhile. Art needs to reach out and grab you by the eye-balls, to captivate your brain for long enough to leave a lasting impression, yet swiftly enough to keep you engaged. I know I’m treading on thin ice here, once you seek to identify what art ’should’ and ’should not’ do, you run the risk of ostracising yourself from the liberated mindset of creativity. Because once you seek to define, you also begin to confine. Furthermore, it is highly probable that one will end up sounding like a pretentious douche.

All I mean to say is that I ‘blog’ hesitantly. I don’t expect anyone to want to read an essay length post about my feelings, and I don’t expect anyone to praise me for taking photos of a tree in  black and white. I’ll take photos of things how I see them, I’ll travel a bit, and I’ll talk some shit. This blog has been, and will continue to be, a public documentation of my personal development. I hope that sometimes I can entertain, and if nothing else, produce some aesthetically pleasing images.

You will be relieved to know however, that I usually I don’t take photos unless I’m doing something. Well this week was something, my friend Lisa from New Zealand decided to move to Melbourne last Tuesday!! We studied in Lyon together, where we spent a large amount of time bonding / destroying braincells over French wine. We also travelled to Italy! Now she’s HERE! So Jo (another ex-Lyonnaise pal) and I, took Lisa to Brunswick street on Bastille day to catch up.

Which brings me to the visual stimulation for today’s post. Jo writes wonderful witticisms for groovy publications, both online and in print, and had always wanted to do a review of ‘Polly’, the lush cocktail bar on Brunswick Street with velvet chesterfields and other pseudo-ornate furnishings flooded in seductive red lighting.. sorta makes one feel like a really high-class hooker.. (I’ve always wondered what that’d feel like…)

Well, I had my camera so I took a few photos of the place for her article. I was a little tipsy, one glass of super-strong dessert wine (bordering on potent cognac) will do that to a small girl, but regardless I teetered around the bar snapping lamps and cigar cabinets alike. I’ll be the first to admit that I looked like a bit of a wanker, (’Guys, can we momentarily pause this delightfully casual conversation about living in France, I’ve just spotted the most fantastic photo-opp. Hang ten whilst I pull out my obscenely large camera and spend an unnecessary amount of time framing the composition of a photo of a chair.’) But I don’t mind, because the pictures turned out quite okay, and now my photos have been viewed somewhere other than my blog (yay!). The article is great too, careful though, it will leave you craving vodka, candy, and a rich man cocktail.. I mean living room.. I mean! Ah shit, just read it here!

Here are some of my photos…

Click for more!

The other week I was watching a television show called ‘Big Ideas’ and the photographer Jason Edwards was talking about his career and the stories behind some of his photos. His job sounds unbelievable, he’s employed and commissioned by National Geographic to travel to remote and often volatile destinations to document various societal and environmental occurrences. Any photographer with his level of professional accomplishment obviously offers something special, not only does he provide a refreshingly honest insight into exceptional situations (see: little wombat bottom), but he is so sensitively engaged with every aspect of the photographic process and subject, and so passionate about what his photos represent.

He was really interesting, I think watching an enthusiastic intelligent person speak with modesty about what they excel at, especially one with compassion and who recognises their role in the broader picture, is one of the most resonant forms of inspiration. Basically, he has an absolute dream job.. well, almost… I might pass on the part where an Amazonian critter once forcibly inhabited his eye socket causing spontaneous blindness and a gelatinous eggy formation to come oozing out.. Considering I start crying when a small spider even enters a room I’m in, my response to that situation would most likely be somewhere between panic and attack…

Anyway, it was a beautiful day, I had a thousand other less interesting things I should have probably been doing, but my new SLR was looking a bit sad and unused because I’m struggling to master the controls (why are there so many buttons and dials and options and gahh!?!)

At the time these little guys were growing in my garden, although later in the week they were brutally murdered, (had we not exterminated them with the lawn mower they may well have taken over the entire house and possibly poisoned us in our sleep). So I thought, what better way to procrastinate university readings than to challenge myself to make the little creeps look pretty in photographs. Cameras provide a useful tool for capturing scenes or subjects in compositions our eyes cannot or do not formulate. You know, with the aperture and depth of field all that technical stuff… Plus, it’s almost guilt free procrastination when the alternative is just as nerdy, riiight? Seriously, who thinks - ‘Ooh I know what will be great fun, spending an hour lying in damp grass taking photos of freaky-weird fungus’… Apparently I do, and yep, I realise I should probably get a life, but I guess it’s sort of practise… Edwards spent hours in freezing cold water to get a shot of a sea lion growling or yawning or singing or something, during which the sea lion is apparently draping its enormous body over his legs. I need to endure discomfort if I am to take any interesting photographs of wild things…Ahh shit, who am i kidding? Sea lions are way more awesome than fungi.

Still, it’s all experience. And fungi can be dangerous too, you know! What struck me as most bizarre when I approached the mushroom patch to photograph them was that they had a real presence… No, I was not simultaneously eating them and therefore hallucinating, I’m serious.. their creepy fungi energy was real! I honestly felt as though I was trespassing on their neck of the woods, I could almost hear them muttering obscenities at me and my stupidly large lens. Plus they smelled funny, like…really funny. Okay, so maybe I’m being a tad sensitive, but I don’t have much experience with up-close fungal consideration (do you?), I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I was disrupting the peace. More than any other plant in my garden, the mushroom patch constituted an eco-system in its entirety. There were big ones, small ones, different shaped ones, all hangin’ out around an old tree stump, extracting nutrients from its rotting roots whilst providing a safe-haven for spiders and insects and other garden-terrorists.

I didn’t trust those shifty shrooms, they were arrogant and pungent. But most unnerving of all was that they represented an ecosystem simultaneously dependent and independent of human activity. They sprung up out of nowhere, and assumed control of a large section of my garden, but at the same time, their continuation as a life form was in the hands of destructive neat-freak domesticated human-beings. And we chose to destroy them.

It’s funny how humans like to visit botanic gardens and green houses, to have the option of sitting in a park on the grass or under a tree, we buy flowers for our houses and nursery grown seedlings for our pots, but it all has to be on our terms because if the plants become even slightly disobedient (read: overgrown) we consider them threatening and proceed to maliciously discipline them with machine powered blades and super sharp shears. We’re a contradictory bunch, are we not? I post about my imaginary beef with the mushroom patch, and the whole of last week I spent walking in a rain forest taking photographs of ‘wild’ plants, (including fungi that looked almost, if not exactly the same as the stuff growing in my garden). So in memory of the shrooms that we later destroyed for no particular reason other than we didn’t plan their presence, here is my attempt at providing an aesthetically pleasing insight into the wonderful world of garden fun-gi.

click for more photos!

Vienna is such a lively city, there was something on every day we were there:

First night we arrived, our wonderful host Phil took us to a demonstration at Parliament house. It was in opposition to conservative right-wing politics and begun as a couple of students on facebook starting a group and suggesting people take collective action in protest to political developments in Austria.

Sure enough, thousands of people joined and the result was a peaceful march around Parliament, where everyone was holding fire sticks and moving to beat of bongo drums.

Second day Pia and I stumbled upon a nudist bike ride… posting pictures of that may get me in trouble.. from the guy who felt it was necessary to flash us his scrotum!

Sorry. Just saying.. It took us by surprise..

And the third day was a trance/electronic music festival along the main street which circles the city centre, which meant dozens of semi trailer trucks hosting scantily clad party goers; oiled up and sporting angel wings, wigs and hot pants..

I don’t know how to post videos, my puter skills aren’t that L337 just yet.. so here’s some stills from a video I took of these groovy guys…

]]> http://www.annadoherty.com/?feed=rss2&p=226 48.2092062 16.3727778 http://www.annadoherty.com/?p=208 http://www.annadoherty.com/?p=208#comments Sun, 13 Sep 2009 05:14:47 +0000 admin http://www.annadoherty.com/?p=208 Berlin to Prague

Germany to the Czech Republic

Prague looked like a fairytale

Cobble stones and castles

Shops dedicated to selling Absinthe

One thing we couldn’t figure out though;

why does everyone crowd around the clock tower on the hour?

It doesn’t do anything….

CLICK FOR MORE PHOTOS!

]]> http://www.annadoherty.com/?feed=rss2&p=208 50.0878114 14.4204598 http://www.annadoherty.com/?p=202 http://www.annadoherty.com/?p=202#comments Sun, 13 Sep 2009 04:57:32 +0000 admin http://www.annadoherty.com/?p=202 *denotes my favourite city.

I’m back in Melbourne, but am missing Europe terribly.

Instead of studying I thought I’d fuel my nostalgia by posting some photos from the end of my trip.

After Morocco we spent one night in London before heading to Germany to begin our (somewhat) Eastern escapade.

Berlin was an absolute favourite; it’s hip, hospitable and the people are hot. (I think they might know it, there are photo booths all over the city).

It’s arguably the city of our generation; in the middle of its post-industrial post-communist phase, it’s experiencing a colourful explosion of innovation and creativity.

Yet while the place is achingly cool, the people remain grounded, and appreciative of life; a characteristic that distinguishes these urban Germans from their Western counterparts.

We only spent 3 nights here, but should have stayed longer; we also couchsurfed for the first time, at an experimental co op called ‘Project Volunteering’ (an adventure all in its own).

We walked the East Side Gallery along the remnants of the Berlin Wall, drank Gin Fizzes (my new favourite drink, besides Pimms and Lemonade) at Yam bar, socialised with squatters in their overgrown garden (unfortunately they were having a yard sale to raise money because they were getting ‘evicted’), and shopped at a Sunday flea market.

Although our stay was short, 3 days was long enough to decide that soon i’ll move there, buy an airy light filled apartment and be the happiest person dans le monde.

Bis Bald Berlin!

CLICK FOR MORE PHOTOS!

CLICK FOR MORE PHOTOS!

CLICK FOR MORE PHOTOS!

CLICK FOR MORE PHOTOS!

CLICK FOR MORE PHOTOS!