It’s impossible not to notice the prevalence of DSLR cameras being lugged around by everyone ranging from 8-year olds up to your old favourite aunt. Now that people are really getting into the swing of digital photography through firstly their iphones, and then taking the next step with buying a DSLR (the market must be really falling out of the compact camera segment) I see the great beasts out and about everywhere. Everything from the smaller Canon Rebels up to the massive IDS Mark 1-3 behemoths it seems the DSLR is the must-have accessory. And the bigger the better.
Well, except for Leica. I have seen a Leica M7 in the flesh and was awe-inspired as to how, well, petite it was compared to how enormous your average DSLR is. After being so obvious with a DSLR it was nice to see how unobtrusive one could be with these rangefinders.
But it was this new release that really caught my eye.
After producing a run of digital rangefinders in the M range which derive their styling from their mechanical counterparts, Leica has gone out on a limb and brought out this little beauty. It only takes black and white images. Yep, you read that correctly. The Monochrom is a digital camera that only takes black and white pics. How poetic. I want one! But at $8000 for the body alone I’m not going to get one. I have read posts on this with people absolutely puzzled why they would do this. Well, I can see why they would. Black and white brings photography back to an art form, and challenges the photographer to really, imaginatively visualise what the scene is going to look like, what lenses and filters to use to realise its full potential. The distractions of colour are dispensed with and the scene is whittled down to the bare elements of tone, light and shade.
So hip, hip hooray for Leica to go against the flow and produce something that seems almost hipster retro man!

The Thomas Crown Affair from 1968 is now a bit of a cult classic but at the time it was an innovative example of the use of multi-split-screen or multi-dynamic image technique. The above is just the title sequence, but they use the affect throughout the film and as such, it greatly contributes to the film’s enduring appeal over time, giving it a designery edge over more popular movies of it’s time. The technique had been around for a while but was given a kick-along with Expo67 when it was used in two influential films, In the Labyrinth and A Place to Stand where Norman Jewison ( TTCA’s director) saw its potential and inserted scenes in the already finished production.
It’s a cool movie on various fronts – here is a still below of the computer Thomas Crown was checking out, a reminder of how long computers have been around…

As part of the 2012 Heritage Festival, “What Still Remains: Ginninderra Blacksmith’s Workshop” was a one evening video installation by a great couple of artists whom it is a pleasure to know: Janice Kuczkowski and Joseph Falsone. With Joseph’s beautiful words and Janice’s fabulous video skills, the work brought into context the history of what could be seen to the commuter driving past at 80km/hr on the highway next to it, just a rusty old, falling-down shack. There was also a talk by an archeologist about the discoveries made in the diggings just outside the shack. It seems the blacksmith kept the actual shack pristine but was wont to throw the unwanted metal bits and pieces out the window, which is where they have discovered a treasure trove of the best artifacts. These images are of the inside on the night which was lit up by red lights to give an eery affect of the Blacksmith’s fire that once existed. Spooky!!

Please support my good friend’s project!

Having a penchant for second-hand books is a dangerous passion. Not only do they irritate nasal passages, they also accumulate to the point where every room has a bookcase and the thought of moving house, or even moving a bookcase to a different room causes a panic attack at the thought of having to unload, carry, and load 100s of dusty tomes. But when you come across a huge shed in the middle of a  sparsely inhabited coast of far north Queensland filled with thousands of old editions such as these, what can one do? Why stuff them in every nook and cranny of the car for the long trip home of course!

Above: Classic 50s design for this “Summer of the Seventeenth Doll” book cover. A printing rep saw this sitting on the ground and exclaimed how he remembered reading this particular version with it’s funky cover at school.

George Orwell’s 1984 in bold, bold, bold.

Well, at the risk of losing current and potential clients I thought I would upload some pics of my current space within which I have inhabited, habituated and produced design for over two years now although it was only meant to be a temporary arrangement and will hopefully be re-arranged and tidied shortly once the renovations have finished…. (a l-o-n-g-term project if ever there was one). I just thought it would be nice to see a studio which doesn’t necessarily prescribe to what you see in the magazines. In fact I have a sneaking suspicion that these other studios must include a hefty chunk of desk-tidying time as part of their per hour fee and that if they were that popular and busy then they wouldn’t have time to tidy and keep it neat… unless they are employing somebody else to tidy and keep it neat in which case I humbly apologise.

The fadstudios engine room where design is all about getting the work done; not re-arranging the desk trinkets.

The fadstudios engine room

Yes, that is an old pedestal imac on top of the cupboard. I swear in the future it will be a design icon of the time; so much cuter and more elegant than the first plasticky imacs which look like lumpy vacuum cleaners. I think this design was the first to really pull macs away from the work-associated computer boxes of pc plastic and really bring it to the life-hub central focus that it is now.

Canberra and Region Heritage Festival 2012 ID "graphic"

Well, a year has gone by and we’re back to designing the Heritage Festival collateral. After last year’s success the decision was whether to go with last year’s look but with a different twist, a la heavy metal below:

Canberra and Region Heritage Festival ID "heavy metal"

…or whether to go with something completely different and save $300 in stock photography but spending more days doing painstaking, eye-bending illustration work with a dying graphics card and a 7-year old mac reluctant on doing work at more than a casually relaxed speed. Utilising Walter Burley Griffin’s design of Canberra, the idea was to recreate it (even going so far as tracing the original map) with gear elements, pulleys and roads representing a behemoth of machination. The pulleys would contain elements pertaining to the theme “innovation”‘; trying to keep it local such as displaying wheat to represent William Farrer’s wheat research project that revolutionised wheat production in Australia, and illustrating a can of Aerogard, created by CSIRO’s Doug Waterhouse.

And the winner was…

Going graphic!

Canberra and Region Heritage Festival 2012 ID

So I’ve used it for work on holidays (with a borrowed laptop for CS4) with the rather amazing Goodreader app (which should be made a standard program anyway for it’s usefulness as a file manager) and now writing blogs with the WordPress app, which is handy but it doesn’t seem like I can upload photos although I’m still getting the hang of it.

It is true that I have yet to compose a song on it with the amazing GarageBand. But it’s not my fault if every time I open the program the kids run in from wherever they are and start demanding they want to “play the pretend guitar” “play drums”, “now the keyboard” etc. Indeed the iPad being open is a drawcard for their little fingers.

So at first I was rather dismissive of them, proudly proclaiming “why would I want one?” when my partner offered to buy one for my birthday. But now I wonder how I could have lived without it!

Affirmation of Negation - Segment

Le Slip

These two works were displayed in the most recent show at Canberra Contemporary Art Space “XXX“. The top is Rob Riley’s Segment from the Affirmation of Negation series; the one above is Cate Riley’s Le Slip (with fur and real underpants!!!). Most happily, Rob’s sold to a local MP. Rob will also have a work in a similar vein to his most recent exhibition in an upcoming show titled “Creative Alchemy” on at Belconnen Art Centre beginning 23 September so be sure to check it out.