Trying to shoot art with kids around.
This week we packed the family into the car and drove nine hours into central New South Wales for a weekend of film photography, astronomy and exploring one of the most spectacular landscapes in regional Australia. Our destination was Coonabarabran for StarFest — but I decided to make things slightly more difficult for myself by bringing just one roll of Kodak Ektar 100.
The plan was pretty simple: photograph the rugged Australian landscapes of Warrumbungle National Park, take the kids along for the ride, visit Siding Spring Observatory and hopefully come home with a handful of photographs that captured what this part of Australia actually feels like. As usual, the trip became about much more than the photographs. There were long drives, roadside stops, magpie attacks, motel rooms, too many flies, hiking through the Warrumbungles, kids fighting in the back of the car, Science in the Pub, holding a real meteorite, enormous telescopes and plenty of moments where travelling with children tested everybody’s patience.
We spent part of the weekend exploring Warrumbungle National Park before heading up to Siding Spring Observatory for the StarFest open day, where we were able to get incredibly close to some of Australia’s most impressive astronomical equipment. For someone who spends most of his time looking through cameras, standing underneath a telescope of that scale was pretty special. But photographically, some of my favourite moments came when we weren’t really looking for them.
On the drive home I stopped at a couple of places I’d noticed on the way down, including an old building surrounded by dry grass under a huge blue Australian sky. The combination of the dead yellow grass, bright red building, faded roadside signage and deep blue sky ended up producing some of my favourite photographs from the entire roll. That’s probably what I enjoy most about these trips.
You can travel somewhere expecting mountains, dramatic landscapes and grand photographs, only to discover that the photograph you remember most was sitting beside the road the whole time. This Field Journal is a road trip through Coonabarabran, the Warrumbungles and regional New South Wales — photographed on film, experienced with the family and documented without trying to make the trip too perfect.
Just one roll of film and whatever we happened to find along the way.
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