A Ghastly Passion

I have a ghastly passion — cemeteries. I’m fascinated by the way we create monuments to our dead, so can’t resist a stroll past crosses, doves and cherubs in the purest white.

My camera, of course, is always at hand. Taken at the Catholic entrance to the Yass cemetery, I love the visual texture in this image — from the hodge-podge of dead leaves on the ground to the lichen-covered diagonals of the bench, which lead the eye to a background of vertical headstones.

Naturally, this image is the final frame on my roll of film. Have you ever noticed your favourite shots are so often your last? It’s almost as if fate pulls our creativity out just in the nick of time.

Dance on the Wind

Composer, conductor, teacher and performer — Judith Clingan AM is almost too talented for her own good. In 2005, she contributed Dance on the Wind to the Bloom Music Festival, a musical event that runs alongside Floriade, the biggest flower festival in the southern hemisphere, held in Canberra each year.

Dance on the Wind was a family event, in which choirs and orchestras celebrated life through music ranging from mediaeval and Renaissance to African and Australian. The resonant chime of the handbell choir, using hand-cast instruments, was a highlight for me, as were three children in costumes to represent the sun, moon and stars.

Horse Halves

My Olympus Pen EE-2 has fast become a staple in my handbag — it's compact, easy-to-carry and I love the 28mm lens. Being a half-frame camera, the view finder is portrait rather than landscape, a small anomaly that continually inspires me to "think outside the square". I'm presently using the camera to explore two main themes: first, to draw attention to the seemingly banal, yet whimsical aspects of front yards in my neighbourhood; and second, to experiment with images composed of more than one frame.

This image of a race horse at the Yass Picnic Race Club earlier this year is an example of the latter, and shows my current penchant for shooting snippets of information in individual frames and joining them together to show a whole. Essentially, the half-frame format encourages me to compare subjects and sometimes create new meanings by making montages.