The Marks of Man

Kids from Tutira Hall playing with the pet bullock and sharing messages and music.

Even though I was brought up in cramped English housing estates, and have a horror of seeing the neigbours eating dinner through the bedroom window. I would live here. A little bit of native planting and landscape design makes all the difference.

We got a nice cup of coffee here for our troubles, not like the last place on our road trip, we visited. I don't like being referred to, "As the Photographer". There are a lot of non creative, cash oriented people out there, who think the notion of operator as photographer, gives them the right, to treat photographers as mere collectors of images that are fixed with Photoshop.

Yes I had a fun time dodging in and out of motorists as I photographed an intersection, as if it was as interesting as Lauren Bacall. No time to set up the tripod before a school bus flattens you to the blacktop. Some times its very hard to be creative, but I enjoyed the shapes and forms here.

More images for the book. To tell the truth, the native planting was a bit dull. The view from the Batch was stunning. It is easy to get used to the beauty in this country, until you are reminded of it by a stranger, or a traveller.

Go to zone zero the original digital photographic site Ezine, Portfolio, before all others. Thanks to Pedro Meyer . http://www.zonezero.com/zz/ Camila by Verónika Márquez | Gallery ...

I was sorting through the boxes that never get opened in the garage. These are boxes from the last house, that really I wanted to chuck, but couldn't. I am glad now, nine shots left. With the idea that this could be the end, I started looking at Polaroid on the net. To my horror saw a three pack of 600 for $745.00 on Amazon, then found " the impossible project ", and B and W film at 8 shots for $20.00, they did charge $50.00 for postage, curses being near the south pole. So I might get a fuji 5x4 back and some film, looks like I can even make negatives, by applying regents to the film. I await my " Silver Shade ", from impossible "Oliver", John Maillard.

http://new55project.blogspot.com/ and the Impossible project with a fine B and W type 600 film. http://www.the-impossible-project.com/ "lot" by: Rinse Staal

This was interesting, when you clear around Totara they grow very fast in their native environment. The problem is cutting them down, difficult as they are natives. This is a great solution to protect native plants. The plan is to grow small plots of native trees with sheep cropping around them.

Here are a few Images from kaiapoi Domain for the book. For a small town, this place was truly amazing.

I have another 900 images to process, that's a lot of ginger nuts and green tea.

I started my post production on the other new book, "Landscaping with Natives". Even with all my actions and raw presets, its a sole-less factory job. Dan Carlin cheers me up, he and green tea and Ginger Nuts, makes the day bearable. In the film era I would have given the film to the processor and that would be that. There is a payment for digital technology. Here are a few test images. The book is a series of essays by well known and not so well known New Zealand Landscape Architects, discussing the use of New Zealand Natives in their designs.

Emily Allchurch & Nigel Warburton "Beyond the real, historical prisons of too much tidiness and those where anarchy engenders the hell of physical and moral chaos there lie yet other prisons, no less terrible for being fantastic and unembodied---the metaphysical prisons, whose seat is within the mind, whose walls are made of nightmare and incomprehension, whose chains are anxiety and their racks a sense of personal and even generic guilt." Aldous Huxley on Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons . Emily Allchurch's new series, Urban Chiaroscuro , is a photographic homage to Giovanni Battista Piranesi's (1729-78) darkest work; but it is also an exploration of her own imagination. The starting point for each picture is a specific plate from the eighteenth century architect's sinister Carceri d'Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons) , first published 1749-50, an enigmatic series of etchings that has been admired b

Emily Allchurch, Xavier Bray and Minna Moore Ede When the eighteenth-century vedute painter, Canaletto, employed his camera obscura to paint the Grand Canal in Venice it was not only topographical accuracy he was seeking but also an aid to framing and editing his compositions. The camera obscura, a small box which rendered the three-dimensional world into two dimensions, had been used by artists since the sixteenth-century. According to the contemporary painter David Hockney, its use was far more widespread than is admitted by art historians today, employed by countless artists over the centuries as their ‘secret weapon’. Whether or not Hockney is correct, the way in which artists construct their images has always been a point of interest for their audience. It is this that is so compelling about the work of Emily Allchurch, for in an innovative reversal of this way of rationalising the world, she uses the Old Masters as her own camera obscura. Exploiting celebrated compos

By Zoe Kleinman Technology reporter, BBC News Image manipulation expert Ric Bradley airbrushes Zoe Kleinman Whether it's Obama on the beach or the impossibly flawless skin of this month's glossy cover girl, any picture can now be digitally altered to tell an entirely different story. In the age of the airbrush, can we ever really believe our eyes? One man who can is Professor Hany Farid, a computer scientist and digital forensics expert who is a professional spotter of faked images - although he does not like the term. Technology and culture Continue reading the main story This is the first of a five part series exploring the intersection between technology and culture "Fakery is a loaded word - I prefer alteration or manipulation," he said. "It's not always in