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Hypnotised

Posted by
Darkelf Photography (Perth, Australia) on 20 September 2022 in Landscape & Rural and Portfolio.

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We have returned from our two week travels through the Goldfields and Wheatbelt regions of Western Australia. We had a great time as we continue to reach further and further into the outback. It is still not far enough as our 2WD car can only get us so far and hopefully once we switch over one day to 4WD we will be able to explore a lot more.

Today's photo became unintentionally quite well suited to the week's theme of contrast. It comes from Lake Ballard in Western Australia. It is a large salt lake in the middle of Aussie outback and it is home to a massive outdoor sculpture installation by Antony Gormley called "Inside Australia". There are 51 statues and they scattered over an area of around ten square kilometres. The lake itself is very big with dimensions of about 50km in length and 20km in width.

The short story is that British artist Gormley was captivated by the sparse landscape when he visited the lake in the early 2000s. This inspired him to plan an art installation called Inside Australia: “I am trying to unite a notion of the interior of this continent with the notion of an interior of the population." He decided the best way to represent the human form at Lake Ballard was to get the locals involved in a special way. He reached out to the people of nearby town of Menzies, found 51 volunteers, and made a three dimensional, exact-height body scan of each person. To complete his work, Gormley sourced local raw metals to create an alloy to make the sculptures and that made them even more so truly from Inside Australia.

What was going to be a temporary exhibition has remained in place for travellers and locals to enjoy on a more permanent basis. It's the kind of place which could look great on any day and in any conditions. I was very happy, though, to see good cloud cover as my vision for this location was to experiment with some long exposures to create a hypnotic effect combined with the crusty surface of the lake and the sculptures. We could not stay there as long as we wanted to because our scheduled tours had to be switched around due to weather but I was able to take two or three decent photos and this is the first one I wanted to share.

Because the clouds muted the colours of the landscape, black and white was my natural first choice when photographing the sculptures. It allowed me more freedom to play with contrast adjustments to bring the lake surface to life. The natural cracked shapes and patters were mesmerising on their own, especially as they stretched out almost endlessly in front of us. I will post a colour photo from this location as well and I will talk a little bit more about the lake and its changing surface at that time.

I hope that I was able to convey the hypnotic feeling of this place through today's image. As much as I love the grand landscapes of Iceland, Swiss Alps, various coastlines around the world, I am totally fascinated by the much less fashionable but just as wonderful Aussie outback and interior. That is partly because it still holds much of a mystery over me with only limited ability to truly immerse myself in its beauty. It is a tough place to explore and even tougher to photograph and bit by bit we keep reaching out to it just a little but further each time.

Canon EOS R5 239 seconds F/16.0 ISO 100 19 mm

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Landscape & rural by Maryse