Back from the Kimberley
- Adam Monk
- Sep 5, 2011
- 2 min read
I’m back… Back from the Kimberley, and back in Blog land. I’ve actually been back in Fremantle for a month now, but i’ve been so busy catching up with everything that had been put on hold, that time to write on the Blog never materialised… also, i am a great procrastinator, possibly one of the best, and anything to do with writing is what i’m best at procrastinating aboutThus the lack of Blog entries. I guess i just got out of the habit during the last 3 months of almost no internet access.
No internet, and actually no mobile phones, or any phones… is a wonderful sensation, especially when you’re out in the middle of absolutely nowhere, which is where i was most of the last 3 months. Life really changes focus and becomes much more about the present moment and all the sensations that go with it. I found when i would arrive in a town, or even a roadhouse for fuel that i would have trouble remembering where i had put my wallet, as i hadn’t used it in several weeks.
That sensation of being present in the moment is difficult to hold onto back here in this version of reality, running a business is so much about juggling possibilities about what could happen, what should happen and what you want to happen, that its easy to get lost in all that and forget about what is actually happening. The other side of that is the living in the past while editing and cataloguing literally thousands and thousands of images from a 3 month journey (with no destination). Each image has a whole raft of memories attached to it that are instantly activated simply by looking at it, not just the visuals, but the sounds, the smells and the textures of what was going on at the time.
I think there is an irony there, photography is in many ways the ultimate way of being in the moment, as that’s the only way you can really capture (or perhaps borrow is a better term) that moment with true feeling, but then viewing the images is about constantly reliving those past moments, usually in very vivid intense detail. For me, each image i have instantly reactivates all the dormant memories of what was going on the time, both around me and for me personally, even when i shot those images 30 years ago. Its a way of reliving parts of my life that would have been long forgotten without the magic of photography.
There will be many images from this journey through the Kimberley, and probably many more observations like these, but for now i’ll leave you with this borrowed moment from El Questro Station
Borrowed Moment at The Chamberlain River at dusk
Technically, this is a 68 image, double row HDR stitch, shot on the Canon 5D Mk II, with the 24-105mm f4L lens set to 85mm. The HDR merge was done manually with layers
