I mentioned the town of Coober Pedy in a previous post. Going through my file folders tonight, I found some more ruins and the remains of dreams from this famous outback town. I often wonder how these places and things come to be abandoned and decaying.
No driver – Nikon D7100 with 35mm AFS Nikkor 1.8
Who once drove the bus? How did it get there? At some point, I imagine it will be nothing more than a pile of rusted metal, merging with the earth, gears and pistons embedded in thick soil. Perhaps a few blue paint flecks will provide some clue to a future explorer?
Decolonise – Olympus OMD EM5 Mark 2
Old walls become a canvas for political statements, the remains of a broken window framing the tension painted in bright pink. Thinking of photography as a voyeuristic pursuit, as Susan Sontag once wrote, such images can lend themselves to such consideration. Is there some voyeurism at work when photographing places like this? Perhaps. I certainly feel some drive to frame the political statement and focus on the socio-cultural tensions. Do I engage with it by recording it or do I step away from it by framing it as artfully as I can?
Homes not Tails – Olympus OMD EM5 Mark 2
Photography can only frame the world for others to view. Once out in the world, the audience applies their own values and beliefs. By providing the framing, the photographer must step aside for a moment to engage in the act of viewing rather than participating. But in the framing is the delightful devil – a story told by the photographer in cutting out a single view from the whole. What lies beyond the single frame and does it matter?
The Flinders Ranges in South Australia is an incredibly ancient place. Fossil evidence of some of the earth’s earliest life has been found in this area. The Nikon D70 might be old, having been released in 2004, but the rocks in the Flinders could tell impossibly old stories about the formation of life! That’s some perspective!
All that’s left of the Bangor township
The Flinders Ranges is also home to many ruins and old towns that are mostly abandoned. There was once a time when settlers in the area thought that the heavy rains of the time signified that the area would be prime farming land, but they were mistaken. The rains were unusual, and the area soon returned to dryness and low annual rainfall. Disaster befell the towns and the people who had tried to carve out a life. Today, old weathered shop signs are barely readable, dust blows down quiet streets, windows reveal the dark innards of abandoned buildings, and rusty padlocks prevent entry through old doorways.
The Nikon D70
The Nikon D70 was released in 2004 and represented great opposition to the Canon 300D. It has a 6.1 megapixel CCD sensor and features a top LCD, and dedicated buttons for Bracketing, WB, Exposure Compensation, and ISO. As with most Nikon cameras, the D70 has great ergonomics and feels good in the hand.
My D70 is a recent purchase from eBay, and though I don’t know how many shutter activations it’s had, the price I paid doesn’t make it especially crucial. It came with three Compact Flash cards, a charger and battery.
Upon arrival, I noticed that it was showing the dreaded CHA error on the top LCD. After some online research, this could mean a range of things, but most often relates to a communications issue with the Compact Flash card. In my case, I’m pretty sure that the copper pins have lost much of their gold plating. As the copper oxidizes, connectivity between the camera and the Compact Flash card degrades.
I found that wiggling and pressing firmly on the inserted card fixed the error, but it may return at any time. I’ll deal with it if it happens, but the camera worked without a hitch when day-tripping around the Flinders Ranges.
Nikon D70 settings
The D70 can record Raw files, but I decided to set it to the Fine/Large JPG output only. I wanted to see what kind of processing the camera applies and how the out-of-camera JPGs look. The day was cloudy, so I left the Nikon on the Cloudy White Balance setting all day. Old user reports suggest that the AWB setting tends to be a bit inaccurate and the D70 also underexposes to protect highlights. To offset this, I set the camera to +0.3 Exposure Compensation much of the time.
I used a custom picture setting for most of the day: +1 Sharpness, 0 Tone, Adobe colours, and Enhanced Saturation. Even at a sharpening level of +1, I find that the D70 applies it too aggressively. Better to leave it at zero and then sharpen in post with a lot more control. Late in the afternoon, I chose the Vivid setting and this seemed to produce less aggressively sharpened results, but was a bit dull in terms of colour output, apart from over-saturated reds. I’ll chalk that up to the overcast day and even lighting conditions at this point.
Long-forgotten and disused – Yacka, SA
The photo above was made using the Vivid setting with Cloudy White Balance. I sharpened only a little in post, with some added contrast. I think it looks pretty good for a 6.1 megapixel sensor from 2004, and as long as you don’t crop too much, good clear prints up to 8×10 inches, and possibly 11×14, could reasonably be expected at 300 dpi.
I used a Tamron 17-55m 2.8 lens, which is a pretty good match for the old sensor. I’ve often had issues with this lens on higher resolution camera bodies, but on the D70 it does an admirable job. There were no auto-focus misses and sharpness is pretty decent across the frame at most focal lengths.
I took along my trusty little Sony RX100 as a back-up camera, just in case the D70 presented with the CHA error again. I’ll process the Raw files from it and post some examples. Needless to say, there’s a big difference between the 20 megapixel output from the Sony versus the 6.1 megapixel output of the Nikon. That said, having minimal megapixels to work with does encourage better framing and composition, since there’s not much room for cropping.
I find old ruins fascinating. The real treasure is discovering an abandoned home, off the beaten track, weathered and worn and open to the elements. I wonder who lived there and what they did? I wonder how it came to be abandoned? There were once people in such places, living lives and making memories, and all that remains is rubble and broken space.
What was once a life – 35mm Super Takumar 3.5 on Olympus OMD EM5 Mark II
A fascination with ruins isn’t uncommon. Walking through the rubble and detritus of buildings that were once important to someone is a way of connecting to the past and also reminding ourselves that time moves forward relentlessly. All things begin and end. And we must find joy in the experience of living whilst we can, if we can. Not all lives are equal, it’s worth remembering.
The old green room – 35mm Super Takumar on Olympus OMD EM5 Mark II.
Ruins remind us that everything changes, whatever we do. Next to the behemoth of time, we’re vastly small. In some way this is a comforting thought, as even wars and bad governments will fall to the ravages of time in a way that no person, however rich and powerful, can avert. No doubt, this is a terrifying thought to people who can’t bear the reality that their power and influence will fade, and their lives will be forgotten completely.
Nature’s reclamation
Ozymandias, one of my favourite Shelley poems, provides insight into the eventual ruination of once-powerful empires:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
The Rusty Ruin Journal 