Sardonic Sights

This is my first post in 583 days, which is so long I can’t remember why I stopped. However, dwelling on the past is a horrendous pastime, so let’s pick up where we left off.

Sam recently bought a wonderful white flowy dress that she insisted I take photos of. This resulted in a strategically planned brunch at Shenkin Newtown, after which we would walk around and do our fashion cross portraiture shoot. I proceeded to mess up the plan by going to Shenkin Erskinville, after realising the mistake Sam walked one suburb over to me.

The re-location from Newtown to Erskinville was really a blessing in disguise.

On the way back towards Newtown, we found a park with some beautifully mottled light. There was just the right amount of tree cover to take the edge off the midday sun, but not make its own shadows too harsh.

Further on the way back stood a decrepit brown brick building attached to Newtown station. I was convinced at the time that the back would be completely underexposed, so it was a pleasant surprise when this came out nicely in post. Walking along the main drag of Newtown, some graffiti down a narrow laneway caught my eye “Hotties need only apply”. We were very fortunate that the sun had left this side of the lane in shadow but left the whole side of the building opposite in full sun. The light reflected off that gave us some nice soft shadows, it was really quite ideal.

I wasn’t expecting to get in front of the camera today, but at some point Sam suggested that she take some photos of me. Next thing I knew she had the camera and I was staring sultrily at the ground.

The last stop in our photo walk today came from a fortunate coincidence. At the end of this alley I’d seen an old electrical substation which looked kinda cool – but really looked just the same as the brown brick from earlier and the lighting was really harsh there. When we turned around to go back there was this huge white wall cast in shadow, this worked well with the white dress. I had a lot of fun shooting back down towards the main street, it made those shots feel like a getaway from the busyness in the background.

This whole shoot was a lot of fun, huge thanks to my model and sometimes photographer Samantha Low!