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Fun with MF images 2022

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Ed Hurst

Well-known member
Desert Island

Known as Stuart until 1933, after one of the first Englishmen to explore the interior of Australia, Alice Springs is a town in a very remote place. It tends to me known as 'The Alice' or simply 'Alice', and is roughly halfway between Adelaide and Darwin. The surrounding area is an immense expanse of desert and scrub. The town sprung up in association with the exploration of the country's interior following colonisation and especially after the first telegraph line was built north-south to connect the country to the world. The coming of the railway still further promoted its growth.

When you are standing in the town, you can forget for a moment that you're in an ocean of dust and sand. But stray outside the city limits and you soon remember!

For that reason, I wanted these images to express the juxtaposition of urban sprawl and the beautiful wilds all around.

Fuji GFX100S with Pentax 28-45mm lens @ 28mm


GXF100S with Pentax 150mm FA lens

 

gme2815

Well-known member
Thanks mate. It truly is impressive + weird!

If I may be forgiven, here are some earlier shots (the astro ones are not medium format)

Pentax 645D with 55mm DFA lens (pano)
PanoFrom_IGP3419And3425And3428Step9sRGBMODERATE by Ed Hurst, on Flickr

Shots taken using Nikon D800E and 14-24mm
CombinedStarTrailsFromFiles_DSC0577-623And1882-1928Step8SpotSMALL by Ed Hurst, on Flickr
WhatsApp Image 2022-10-21 at 10.21.30 AM by Ed Hurst, on Flickr
These star trails are so awesome! Excellent work!
 

Michiel Schierbeek

Well-known member
Desert Island

Known as Stuart until 1933, after one of the first Englishmen to explore the interior of Australia, Alice Springs is a town in a very remote place. It tends to me known as 'The Alice' or simply 'Alice', and is roughly halfway between Adelaide and Darwin. The surrounding area is an immense expanse of desert and scrub. The town sprung up in association with the exploration of the country's interior following colonisation and especially after the first telegraph line was built north-south to connect the country to the world. The coming of the railway still further promoted its growth.

When you are standing in the town, you can forget for a moment that you're in an ocean of dust and sand. But stray outside the city limits and you soon remember!

For that reason, I wanted these images to express the juxtaposition of urban sprawl and the beautiful wilds all around.

Fuji GFX100S with Pentax 28-45mm lens @ 28mm


GXF100S with Pentax 150mm FA lens

Wonderful series Ed!!!
 

P. Chong

Well-known member
The Hive, at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in the evening. This interesting architecture serves as a learning hub, with tutorial rooms, lecture theatres as well as study rooms for the students at the university. The building was designed by Thomas Heatherwick and completed in 2015 at a cost of some SGD 45 million, and is known as "dim sum basket" building due to its likeness to the steamers for dim sum.

Here is the Architectural Review article on the building. I photographed the series with the Fujifilm GFX 50 S II and the GF 20-35 ultra wide angle zoom lens.


the-hive-1200.jpg

More pictures here.
 

Bill Caulfeild-Browne

Well-known member
From the earliest days of the colonisation of Australia, there was a strong desire to set up lines of communication that spanned the continent, also opening up the place for trade. At first, this consisted merely of 'exploring' to find what was there. Then they built a telegraph line all the way up the country - which connected with an undersea cable and, for the first time, made it possible for news and messages to be shared with the rest of the world in hours or minutes rather than months.

Then, the idea was to build a railway line through this vast and arid country. This was no small undertaking. There was basically nothing out there that constituted a market - but the hope was that such trade would be formed by the building of the line. It had to follow the few places where water could be found for the steam locomotives, which of course meant following the places that would periodically flood - which, in turn, made the line unreliable and prone to washouts. The line was built north towards Alice Springs, a place that grew in the middle of the desert as a result. The railway came to connect Alice with Adelaide in the south, joining up with some existing railways in the south; a line was also built south from Darwin. Take a look at those places on the map, pay attention to the scale of the map, and remember there was nothing approximating to a settlement to speak of between them. It was a ribbon stretching out over huge amounts of... not much!

The two parts of this line never did join up. The line saw modest traffic, with the big gap between the section north from Adelaide and the section south from Darwin being bridged by rudimentary traffic over dirt roads, which could also become impassable in the rain - not to mention the effort of transhipment of good/people off/on/off between rail, road and rail again. When the Second World War came, this route suddenly became strategically vital and there was a huge increase in traffic, including across that painful gap.

If this route was ever to make real sense, something better was needed. It was never going to make money but it was nation-building stuff!

Eventually, a modern line would be built and run the whole distance, without a gap. With the advent of diesels, which had appeared on the old line in the 1950s, there was no need to follow those flooding areas either. Oh, and it was built to standard gauge (not the narrow gauge of the original line). This route finally opened in 1980, leaving the old line to its fate. Some short sections are preserved for posterity, but it's mostly gone, the steel stripped out and the traces mouldering in the outback.

But if you go to Alice Springs and know where to look, you can see some of the equipment used on the old line, including these two old beasts. They are NSU class locomotives, built to replace the steam - using the old line. How fitting that they sit here in the red sand, sidelined by the bigger, completed modern line. Somehow the passage of time in this vast place feels expressed by the wheeling stars in the sky!

Fuji GFX100S with Pentax 645 28-45mm lens @ 45mm


And same lens @ 28mm
Here's how the engine looked in 1988. It's the farther one, with NSU 57 in front.

P0002306.jpg
And here's the steam engine that was there back then.
P0002303.jpg
One of the abandoned stations
P0002308.jpg
And a viaduct which may have rusted away by now. The Oodnadatta Track can be seen in the background.
P0002309.jpgThese were all taken on Fujichrome with a Rollei 6008 (if my memory serves me right!) "Scanned" using the 120 macro on my XF.
 
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