New photography Images by Photographer Adam Monk

Just a quick one tonight, my bed is calling me and i’m keen to answer!  This one is the beach below the town of Nas on the Greek Island of Ikaria, it is also the opening to the sea of the Chalares Canyon from a previous post.  On the opposite bank of the river is the site of an ancient temple of Artemis, the Greek Goddess of the wilderness, the hunt, wild animals and fertility; there’s not much left of it now but the sea wall and the foundations, but it is a beautiful site.  I just found out the other day that this temple was originally built from stone quarried from Petrokopio beach on the neighbouring island of Fourni which featured in this post

Temple of Artemis, Nas Ikaria

For those interested… Canon 5D Mk2 with 16-35mm f2.8L lens at 16mm.  This image is a 14 image stitch shot after sunset…

The Greek Island of Ikaria is a haven for bushwalkers and nature lovers.  Unlike many Greek Islands that tend to be dry and windswept (though still beautiful), Ikaria is thickly forested and covered in gorges, rivers and waterfalls… i’m starting to sound like a travel agent or a travel documentary!  Way too formal.

Well, as much as i love beaches, freshwater rivers and waterfalls amongst shady forests are really my favourites, there is something more surreal and almost imaginary about them.  Its probably something left over from my childhood when i would ride off on my bicycle into the bush  and spend the day wading around in creeks and rivers catching little freshwater crayfish and turtles (then letting them go again), only to turn up at home again hours later wet and smelling of the swamp!

Whatever the reason, for me Ikaria was a paradise of rivers, waterfalls and freshwater crayfish (i tend to eat those now…), with lots of long lovely walking trails through shady forests and rocky gorges, that would take you down to places like this one…Chalares Canyon, Ikaria.

Are there any Hobbits living here? Chalares Canyon, Ikaria

I didn’t find any freshwater crayfish, but i did find some very cute little freshwater crabs and some very small shrimp…  I didn’t eat any of them, and i did spend many hours here just sitting.  Bliss.

Again, for those who are interested, this is an 18 image (actually 18 pairs of bracketed exposure) stitch shot on the Canon 5D Mk2 with the 16-35mm f2.8L lens set to 35mm, using the Really Right Stuff pano head.  they were all stitched in PT Gui, then manually blended to hold the detail in the brighter rocks and the darker shadows.  At 300dpi the image comes in natively at 2m long and takes up 3 Gb of space…

Just for fun, here are a couple more images from Fourni Island in Greece.  Its been a quiet day here at the gallery, so i’ve had some time to play around.  More to come!

Netmending, with hands used to hard work

This is one of the very Friendly locals of Fourni, it’s amazing how much communicating can be done, even without a common language if you are both open to it.  I sat with this fellow for hours, had a coffee and watched him quietly mending nets.

And of course, the Churches, little chapels everywhere, some of them smaller than my bedroom.  Gorgeous!

These images were shot with the Canon 5D Mk II and the 24-105mm f4L lens

Churches are one of the many things Greece is famous for

The Greek Island of  Fourni is one of the most eastern of the group of Greek Islands known as the Cyclades (kick-laad-es), or the “white Islands” as they are often called, due to the classic little white houses that are always associated with Greek Islands.

The main local transport of Fourni Island

It is also one of the smallest and least visited by tourists, mainly due to its distance from Athens and the limited number of Ferries that visit it.  As a result life in Fourni goes on pretty much as it always would have with very little concern for the outside world.  The locals are friendly and relaxed, always up for a chat, a coffee or something stronger, more people on the island have a boat than have a car, and it’s not unusual to see 4 people perched precariously on the same scooter putting up the main street.

A short scooter ride (with only 2 people on it) from the township of Fourni, the main town on the Island of Fourni, is this amazing beach called Petrokopio.  What makes this beach unique for me is that rather than sand, the beach is covered with rounded worn pieces of marble, from the ancient marble quarry right behind the beach.  If you look carefully on the right hand side of this image (click on the image to enlarge) you can see the discarded half finished pieces from the stone masons, huge square blocks, segments of pillars over a metre across, a stone basin and a huge alter table, complete with scrolled ends, all carved and chipped out of the natural marble dug from the quarry many hundreds of years ago.

Petrokopio beach Quarry, Fourni Island at Twilight

I was unable to find out exactly how long ago this quarry was in use, but i did find out it was the source of stone for a large Athenian temple on a neighbouring island that was built many hundreds of years back, and the discarded half finished pieces were from that project.  In any other place this would be the roped off  site of  an archaeological dig or a museum, but In a country like Greece, where any where you dig you unearth ancient ruins, this is nothing of significance, just another old quarry on a pretty beach… The biggest problem the Greeks had when building the underground in Athens was not the engineering required, it was that they kept running into archaeologically priceless ancient ruins!  in a brilliant solution, each underground station is now an ancient history museum, with the artefacts still half buried in the walls.

For those who are interested, this Image shot on the Canon 5d with the 16-35mm f2.8L lens at 16mm.  Its 13 double exposure pairs aligned in PT Gui Pro, then manually blended.

Last year in June/July i had the opportunity to go to Greece with my girlfriend Electra, who is Greek.  Greece is one of the places i’d always wanted to go but had never made it to… it’s a long list!  We stayed only 4 weeks, which is not long enough to really explore Greece, but seeing all of it wasn’t the objective, but to experience the life and culture of Greece a little, hear the language and eat the food…  and eat more of the food… Greek food is great, usually quite simple, but really good!

One of the places we visited was the Island of Ikaria, not one of the main tourist islands, and right over near the coast of Turkey. Ikaria was quite different to what i expected Greece to look like, and very different to the other Greek Island we visited on that journey, more on the other island later.

Trapalou Bay, on the Greek Island of Ikaria. Greece

I had always thought Greek Islands would be more like Rottnest Island,  off the coast of Fremantle, and many of them are, very rocky, dry and windswept with low scrubby vegetation and small white painted houses.  In contrast to this Ikaria is green, forested and has beautiful gorges with rivers and waterfalls, and the houses are not painted white!

One thing that was as i expected it to be was the crystal clear water of the Aegean Sea with it’s amazing deep aquamarine blue colour that just invites you to jump in, which i did on many occasions, including just after making this image here, which is the bay of a tiny fishing village at the end of a long rough dusty dirt road (it was a hire car…).  I cant remember the name of the place, but when we finally arrived it was around midday and the whole town (all 15 houses) was asleep for the afternoon, so it was quite eerie, like a ghost town, we had the whole place to ourselves.  So, we went down to the bay and swam around naked! It was lovely.

By the way, this shot was taken on the Canon 5D Mk II with the 16-35mm f2.8L lens and the awesome Really Right Stuff pano head.  It’s composed of 13 portrait format shots stitched with PT Gui Pro and the finished file comes in at 1.9Gb…  It makes nice big sharp prints.

Stay tuned for more on the Greek Island of Ikaria and Greece in general.

Finally i got some time to work up that image from Redgate Beach, Margaret River, though actually its not the same image that i posted a few months back, its a differant series a few minutes earlier, the other one i may work on some more tomorrow.

Clearing Rain, Redgate Beach, Margaret River

I  love the water movement across the foreground of this image, as the water from the previous wave rushes back out from the left to the right.

This image is 6 pairs of vertical exposures stitched and then manually HDR blended to get the light in the foreground, its shot on the Canon 5DMk II with the 17mm f4L tilt shift lens.   Its still a work in progress, but i think its coming up nicely, i may put this one up in the gallery to see what the response is.

Happy New Year by the way, they seem to come up more and more often the older i get!

Well i’ve been a bit slack lately, its been over a week since my last post,  Christmas is always a busy time though, everything seems to happen at once.  I managed to get away camping for a couple of days again, this time to a magic little spot on the Murray River just out of Dwellingup, a small town South East of Perth in the middle of the Jarrah Forest.

As a young kid we used to go camping on the Murray river at Dwellingup, its really the place where i first developed a love of the Australian bush and nature.  The forest around Dwellingup and the Murray River have a particular smell, one i have not smelled in quite a few years, yet as we drove through the town and out into the bush the smell of the forest brought back a host of childhood memories, good memories of what this place represents for me.  Its amazing how a smell can connect with so many other things in our lives, it is the key to many memories and experiences and all we have to do is catch a faint sniff to be brought back to other times past…

Wandered off the point a bit there for a while, back now.  Had a great weekend, wandering through the bush, canoeing up the river, swimming and reading books.  I gave the new F Stop camera bag a thorough field test, filling it full of camera gear tripod and water and went for a nice long walk, it passed with flying colours, great bag, highly recommend it.  I only took one photo all weekend, and this is it…

Ah... beautiful. Explain to me again why i can't just stay here?

It is an 8 shot pano stitch shot on the 5D Mk II (of course) with the 16-35mm f2.8L  lens at 16mm, of the Murray River at Sunset.  actually its a 24 shot, cause it was bracketed and then manually HDR blended.

The Redgate beach pano is still coming, i’ve been a little distracted… there is also several hundred shots from Greece, Chile, Brasil, Argentina and Central America still to come, Stay Tuned!

This time last year i was in Southern Chilé for the wedding of a couple of good friends, one of whom is Chiléan, hence the location.  I had never been to Chilé before, so it was a new adventure for me,  I’ve seen plenty of images from there, so i had a bit of an idea, but they was nothing compared to the reality.

The view down the street... any street... of Pucón.

What an amazingly beautiful place, totally different to anywhere i have been before.  The South of Chilé is all mountains forests, fast flowing crystal clear rivers… and volcanoes…

Awe inspiring!  Nothing quite like waking up in the morning and looking out the window  to find an enormous smoking volcano taking up most of the horizon, especially when the day before – the day of arrival – had been so overcast and rainy there was no horizon and the presence of the volcano was hidden. Something i never really got used to, i think the locals were wondering what i was staring at all the time. Read the rest of this entry »

I just had a few days camping around Margaret River, something i haven’t done for ages.  It really is a beautiful place and a very odd site to try and build a coal mine…

The first couple of days were a bit rainy and grey, which is the perfect weather for stuff like this…

Weathered Wood

Shot on the 5D Mk II with that really cool 17mm f4L tilt shift lens i keep writing about.  Seems its almost permanently glued to the camera these days, in fact most times i seem to leave the rest of my camera gear at home or in the car (heavily locked and secured of course).  I just love the texture of the weathered wood in this shot, it was really  an experiment to see just how much depth i could get with the lens tilt and an extremely close subject, and this old gnarly tree was a great subject.  By tilting the lens so the focal plane was parallel with the tree trunk i was able to keep all of it pin sharp while dropping out the background very nicely, its almost like having a field camera again, but not as big or clumsy.

By Friday afternoon the weather started to clear and i found myself down at Redgate beach again, where the sunset was just amazing!

Clearing sky at sunset, Redgate Beach

I had brought a very heavy bag with all my Canon gear and the 6×17 down with me (and mostly left it in the car), and although my brain told me i should take out the 6×17 and use that… stitching not being so great for beaches and moving waves… i just couldn’t bring myself to do it.  Really i needed 2 tripods set up next to each other so i could shoot with both at once, oh yeah, and an assistant to carry all this gear, and a second assistant to set it all up…  Working on these lovely clean digital files has really spoiled me, its hard to go back to spending hours dusting huge scans, removing fingerprints and chemical smears that turn into whole continents when enlarged to 100%… maybe i need an assistant for that too…

This image is of course shot with the canon 5D Mk II and the  17mm f4L tilt shift lens… its actually one image of a 7 or 8 image stitch, which i haven’t done yet.  i’ll play around in the coming days and see if i can get it to work, stay tuned.

Back in 2003/2004 i spent a year travelling around Brasil, a country of amazing diversity.  Why i was there is another story for another day, but i took a vast number of images in that year (the majority of them on the Hasselblad XPan), most of which have never seen the light of day.  I put the first one up last week, and gradually i will be putting more and more of them here as i think the Blog is a great place to finally show them and eventually create a category on the website for that and other adventures.

During my stay in Brasil i lived in a city called Santos for several months, which is on the coast of Sao Paulo state. Santos has the dubious honour of being the largest port in South America, with all the pleasures that brings… Santos also has a very long open beach, and on any given day there are always loads of Soccer games running, of all ages, from 3 or 4 year olds playing with 2 sticks for goals, to semi professional clubs having play offs.
Being Brasilians, most of them are great soccer players, so the games are exciting to watch and the sheer number happening at once  is a fantastic thing to witness.

This particular day was a Sunday, a big day for beach Soccer, and about 10am a dense fog rolled in off the sea.  Now fog is great for photography, especially Black and White Photography, and fog in Santos was totally unheard of.  So i grabbed the XPan and ran off to the beach.

These teams playing here are in fact one team split into 2 sides for the day.  One side wearing white shorts the other black. You’ll notice all the team shirts are the same and this is in fact the seniors division of Santos Football club, the team made famous by the magical Pelé. He’s not in this shot…

The official name for this image is “Futbol na Paraia, Santos” Soccer player on Santos beach-Brasil, but the unofficial name is “Caralho!” because thats what the goalie was heard to shout just as this image was taken.  I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what it means…

It was shot on Kodak Tri-X 400 on the Hasselblad XPan with the 45mm lens, which due to the extended field of view, makes it the equivalent of about a 24mm in standard 35mm speak.

The fog gives it a beautiful soft look with the background fading away nicely.  The white disk visible in the sky is in fact the sun, and if you look closely (click on the image), you can see the edge of the water on the far left of the image.

Can you guess which player kicked the goal?