This picture was made on a recent early morning autumn poodlewalk with Kayla along the Heysen Trail in Waitpinga. The location is just around the corner from where we live in Encounter Bay--just a few minutes drive in the Forester, then a short walk. The location is ideally situated for the light just after sunrise.
The subject matter and location are quite different to the recent trend of porch portraits in local suburbs, which has been one key response to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. Some hold that "porch portraits" are rather risky, given the confinement and special distancing requirements.
This digital picture was scoping for a future film session during stage 3 "lockdown" of the Covid-19 virus. I started this a few days latter with the Rolleiflex SL66 medium format camera, followed by some large format photography with a Linhof 5x4 Technika IV. I wanted to keep this slow photography ticking over within the limitations of the stay-at-home lockdown.
It does look as if the lockdown will continue for another month, then it will be slowly eased step by step. At the moment we cannot undertake non-essential travel around the state during the stay-at-home lockdown--so there is no work on the Mallee Routes project. Maybe this particular travel rule will be eased within the month, whilst the South Australian border continues to remain closed.
Until this happens I'm hooking my film photography onto my daily walking exercise, given that exercise is considered a necessary activity during the stage 3 "lockdown". The provision is that exercise is contained within one's local area.
These photo sessions, which are in my postcode, are designed to keep my tripod-based, film photography happening, as opposed to sitting at an iMac computer watching videos on photography, scrolling through my archive, or struggling with reading difficult texts online. This landscape work can be linked into the Friends of Photography group who are planning online exhibitions and image viewing replace their field trips and print viewing sessions.
This is another possibility that I can explore over the next few days:
What I suspect is that world we knew before Covid-19 is not returning. It is going to be different world even if there is a vaccine, as it is highly likely that we are going to have zoonotic-virus crises for the foreseeable future. It does look as if one result of the pandemic crisis is that freelance photographers in the industry have had the financial floor pulled from under them. They have no work coming in and their future does look rather bleak.
Work for freelancers in the industry had been drying up prior to 2020, and they were finding it increasingly difficult to financially survive. It was tough and this, understandably, caused them to suffer from high stress levels and anxiety. The pandemic crisis has just put another the nail in the industry's coffin for wedding and portrait photographers. Though I have no idea what a post-Covid-19 world will look like, I suspect that the freelance photographers will probably need to find another job outside photography to supplement their income from photography.
However, countries, such as New Zealand and Australia that are actively working to contain this virus and keep numbers as low as possible are buying themselves time to build a more informed policy response, while also protecting their economies and societies. At this stage it appears that they, unlike the US or the UK, have the outbreak under control and they can in the short term manage the trickle of cases while waiting for a vaccine.