Down under, up above Australia with two megapixels.

The great barrier grief: Azure blue waters, translucent and clear with fish of every hue, the gently pulsating corals, there is indeed no other place on earth with such pristine life. Shot with an underwater (toy) film camera bought for under AUD 100 on the boat that took us there. This collage is an attempt to depict the whole feeling but is woefully low resolution.

Bondi beach, skate park: My head was in a whirl just looking at the sheer zest, dexterity and athleticism of the average Australian youngster. I was mesmerized by the spirit of these youth, maneuvering the sharp corners of a skate bowl with a depth of 12 ft shaped into the sidewalk. These guys were tumbling and never losing balance, bouncing so high up into the air and landing into this concrete hole…amazing is all I got to say of what I saw.

The great ocean road: There is a reason why this is possibly the most spectacular coastlines on earth. This is where the cliffs meet the angry blue waters. A land of gorges, shipwrecks and some weird rock formations called the 12 apostles. These were shot, freeze frame from a helicopter on a handy cam after a 4 hour bus ride along the circuitous Ocean road off Melbourne. This collage expresses the tumbled and turned vision of the landscape as seen from the copper ride above.

Melbourne musings: No trip to Melbourne is complete without a visit to the busy streets of St. Kilda’s. The luna park, the circus, the beautiful architecture and a browse around the Victoria museum. From Cairns in the north to the Gold coast & Byron Bay at the easternmost point to Melbourne in the south, the trip made for one of the most memorable holidays of our lifetime.Thank you Australia,we love you.

Sydney sunrise: These pictures were shot at daybreak from the apartment window where we stayed in downtown Sydney. The rapid shift of color in the sky was one of the most fascinating aspects of this sunrise for me. Unlike India where you can almost always spot the sun, here I noticed only changing colors and light. In a matter of 5 minutes the city was bathed in bright light.

Sydney sights: A leisurely Sunday I can’t seem to forget. It may seem hectic in this collage but was actually one of the most relaxed days of my life. The boat ride to the Taronga zoo offers some great sights of the harbor. How blue can blue be?

One of my life’s biggest tragedies was carrying an instamatic camera and a handy cam on a holiday to one the world’s most beautiful coastlines. Though I’m happy I have some great footage from the month-long trip on videotape, I kept lamenting the loss of my old Minolta SLR. I realized I was too much of a still shoot person as soon as the plane landed in Cairns. On my shoestring budget there was no chance I could indulge my passion of acquiring a brand new DSLR in foreign exchange!

These images have lain and then transferred from the various computers I owned and junked over the 8 years of their existence. When I looked at them recently, I was a bit disappointed. But then, I love them so. A tad touristy, but what the heck! What could I possibly do to get away from the hackneyed? I looked at Hockney instead! I turned the images into collages to make sure that the memory of all that I saw was not lost altogether. I worked on these on the assumption that a cubist mindset might help express that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts. Had I had more than 2 mega pixels to play with, I would’ve blown up the parts in sharp contrast to these multitudinous low resolution images. Hope the experiment worked.

<a href=”http://www.bloglovin.com/blog/3821402/shabnamphoto?claim=nqhu373c2m3″>Follow my blog with Bloglovin</a>

About these ads